The Time Sink

Snow day went well yesterday... We got out of town at a reasonable hour and ended up at around 7500 feet at our favorite snow park. Traffic was light on the way up, and when we got to the trailhead, we found hardly anyone there!

I cut steps in the snowbank so Shelley could get to the top of the pile and oversee the show. There were a couple of decent runs already in place from previous visitors; but Brad and I decided we needed a "Dead Man's Hill", so we built one. He and I ended up being the only ones to go on it; both Daniel and his friend declined the honor <g>...

The entire afternoon was taken up with going down the runs and dragging back up to the top, snacking and just generally kicking back at times. All in all a good day for the family...

Note to self: blading the day after the snow trip is not a great idea; walking around the block a few times might be better...

In other news, I'm adding another machine into the mix here: I found a used iMac the other day for a song (yeah, and the first born and a player to be named later; but still an excellent deal). I'm not even close to being able to find my way around yet, but so far I've managed to connect to the net through the network and confirm things work okay. I think the next project will be to figure out how to do file sharing so I can pull the program files off and reset the system for a fresh start...

A little research on the net (and some help and feed back from Ken and Cecil!) and from within the system shows that Mac to be a 233 G3 with 96 meg of memory running OS 9.0. ...and that's right at the point where the memory upgrade may become an issue: almost every site I've seen that mentions that vintage has the same info: Sometimes things work and sometimes they don't! I really liked the site that had two machines from the same manufacturing run with the same firmware; one they could add memory to with the chips they had, the other they couldn't <g>. Now that's my kind of toy!

...and it's a little more than an academic exercise. I wasn't expecting the machine to be as capable as it is and the thought of maybe being able to run OS X on it is a bit of a draw. Having a Unix-based OS would cut some learning curve...

Ha! That blasted iMac came in handy as is! I had a cast off printer (reported 'banding' not solvable with the usual tweaks) that I wanted to evaluate. ...and I didn't want to deal with it on the network or even on the Win2k box... Yep, the iMac!

I gave it the ol' plug and play attempt; and since I had the CD, everything just went fine. I was able to play with the printer and give it a bit of a workout. ...and run the fixit software and clean and realign and all that cool stuff. ...and pretty much determine that there was no way the printer could be used for high end color photos.

But... Yeah, I think it could work okay as a homework printer. ...and as a draft printer for photos for Brad. Cool! Now what is it I'm supposed to say?

Whew! Well, we all made it through that week! Daniel was well enough to go to school today and Shelley made it through her sub job... (Brad and I made it too <g>!)

Okay! Maybe a day off? Well, with any luck... Yesterday ended up being a bit more of a busy day than I'd thought: we started the day with the seminar shown above at church (cool deal, well worth the price of admission; I'll hunt up the guy's web site for anyone interested) and came back home to all sorts of busy stuff happening and then got into the homework routine...

...at least Daniel's homework; Brad has an off weekend from what we can tell. The cool thing was that Daniel and I were able to relate his Literature work in with his English assignment and that could have a huge payoff as the semester progresses. The only issue was that the those assignments more or less killed a major chunk of time.

Today we're going to be starting on the second part of his castle project; it will be a little time consuming, but frankly he's going to be the consumer for much of the early stuff. ...and I'm hoping to blade again; I did manage get get out yesterday late in the evening, and I had a very nice run for being a bit tired. Then again, a latte at 1700 can help <g>!

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"Any sufficiently advanced technology is
indistinguishable from magic."
Arthur C. Clarke, "Technology and the Future"

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