the girly who shall end all girls

it took three person-hours to determine that my intractable formatting problem was CRLF.* not because any of us were using Windows, but because our text editor was defaulting to Windows encoding. *facepalm*




* Windows uses CRLF as the hidden end of line format, and Unix uses LF. the terminal shell assumes Unix endings and so produces mystery new lines in output when it encounters CRLF. woe betide the team that mixes the two.

i have a laser printer that shouldn't run at all on a Mac merrily churning out pages.

once i found the instructions, it was easy - the folks at Open Printing are rockstars.

lightsaber duel between Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.

tonight i learned that i've been doing everything right, but old lady Danube's model is physically incapable of booting from an external drive or firewire target disk mode. i wish i had found the article that ended with the all-important "note:" a couple days ago. no disaster, just no upgrade. bummer.

C's iBook has a short in the hinge (or the equivalent.) it means that Parsifal runs fine, but his display is fickle. (oh, there's also a missing key on the keyboard and power adapter #3 is bent so that you have to put it in Just Right...)

i had access to various discounts over the holidays and suggested that it was time for a new friend. C was convinced that a trip to the vet was all that his ailing boy needed, so we did not consume. of course, the trip to the vet didn't happen until this Sunday, when C was using my work lappy for RealArcade and i asked to borrow Parsifal so that we could sit together on the couch. the screen failed catastrophically, so i couldn't read eljay and cuddle at the same time! RAWR! we must take Parsifal to the vet NOW! (i am thankful that this is the sort of petty trial that i have to live through. wah! i will have to use the desktop instead. it's like discovering that Cupcake Royale is out of MoFro, so i'm going to have to eat a chocolate-chocolate. woe! not.)

appointment made at the genius bar, we had lunch at the Ram and got some books at Barnes and Noble. i curled up to read in the semi-comfy chairs at the back of the apple store with American Born Chinese, and C had a consult. the tech listened to C, fussed with Parsifal a little, witnessed the problem, described the repair, and typed the code into the system. but the code didn't work. turns out that Parsifal is "vintage." they don't make parts for him anymore. C followed up yesterday at the Mac Store, who do a refurbishing business. they don't have the bits either. they told C if he eBayed up the parts they could do the labor.

which led to me saying "you want the black one, don't you?" silent nodding, hugs, and near-tears. i have the only boy on the planet who isn't thrilled at the opportunity to buy shiny new technology.

some people have a weakness for animals, or children, or bad boys. i like elderly tech.

so, eljay brain trust, where do you like to shop for RAM? or do you have some PC100 SDRAM laying around?

and i am posting from Isolde, thanks to the intervention of thegreymouser and sinthrex (who dared to use logic, as well as tools). since The Current Plan is to get a pro-grade machine to replace her (because i will use it until it falls apart, it might as well start out higher on the food chain), Isolde sports a new 19" monitor. it turns out that the keyboard had been slowly dying as well...i thought that i was fumbling my password on a regular basis when actually a whole row of the keyboard was going dead. i have a loaner from work, and lo, the old girl carries on.

not that i'm not archiving everything i might want off of the hard drive tonight.