Bad news! My Powerbook G3 went kaput yesterday. After a day or so of
troubleshooting, I’m blaming it on a dead Power Management Unit. I
bought it used in 1999 and have been using it heavily since. It’s
lived in 7 apartments with me (yup, 7!) from Boston to Green Bay to
Minneapolis to Boston (again!) and now to NYC. I still think that 4-5
years is way too short a lifespan for a computer, especially since it
was meeting my needs in every other way. But, alas, that’s life in
these days of planned obsolescence.
Anyway, the really bad news is that I stored everything on that
computer. I’m hoping that my diagnosis above is correct and that the
hard drive is unharmed, but we’ll find out soon. If not, I’ll have
lost lots and lots of stuff…
I’m replacing it with an eMac. It has a
700 Mhz G4, a combo drive (CDRW,DVDROM) and a 17" screen. I came
this close to making an impulse purchase at the Apple Store in Soho
when I saw the 17" iMac, but my brother was able to talk me down :-)
The iMac is real pretty, but the eMac has everything that I need at
almost half the price ($1049 vs $1999). I did end up making one
impulse buy though - an iPod. But, I blame that on
MarkD since he slyly let me use his
while he was visiting last weekend. I have no question that he’s
getting a kickback somehow :-)
Manu sent me the pics that he took during our Grand Canyon trip. Thanks Manu!
I’m on the Bork Team - no relation to Bork Log or Borkware, of course… :-)
I found some more pictures from the Phoenix trip, so check ‘em out again! And please don’t touch or sit on the Indians.
Geoff organized a
mini-residency-reunion
back in June and somehow scammed Joyce and Howard into hosting it :-)
Manu, Girish, Deepu and I hiked the Grand Canyon in mid-June. I’m
still not clear who decided it was a great idea to hike down to the
Colorado River and back in 115 degree weather, but that may be due to the fact that
I fried a good number of my brain cells that day. You may notice that
there are not too many pictures of the hike up…
OK, OK… it’s been way too long since I’ve updated this page. I just
moved to Manhattan to take a job as an internist at Metropolitan
Hospital. I’ve got pics from a mini-residency-reunion as well as an
awesome trip to the Grand Canyon that I need to put up.
My allegiance to Apple is wavering. I came home to find my home
wireless network down. I walked over to my Apple Airport Basestation
and saw that instead of emitting reassuring green lights, it was
alternating between lighting the left red light and then all three
amber lights. I searched on apple’s website for troubleshooting
information without any luck. Finally, (thanks again to Google) I
found these 3 reports of Basestations that had bit the dust shortly
after warranty expiration:
Mine failed 15 months after it’s arrival on my doorstep. Conspiracy?
Anyway, it served me well for 15 months, but I decided to go with the
SMC Barricade Wireless Broadband Router for my next
basestation. It has 3 wired ports, acts as a print server and has a
greater range (although that’s not really too important in my shoebox
here). It’ll be here sometime next week.
So I’ve gone from having rock-solid wireless access to a lightning
fast cable internet connection 2 months ago to a wired connection to a
56K dialup modem today. I can see the internet gods up there laughing
at me :-)
Gerry and Kim got married on Saturday!!!! Video at 11.
I fixed some security issues in
the OpenACS photodb module.
My cousin Girish was interviewed for an article about hormone
replacement in heart disease on Rx.com. Unfortunately Rx.com has gone
kaput and the author doesn’t want me to publish the article here, so
it’s no longer available. Take my word that it was interesting and
Girish sounded really smart!