Further Assimilations

I bought Starr an iPod nano for Christmas 2007, in the hopes that she could use it to listen to her music library and crochet podcasts on her work commute (nearly as long as mine). As well, she received a device that played her iPod through her car stereo. This caused a problem: the device plugged into her cigarette lighter, which hadn't worked in years.

Today, I finally found the round tuit for correcting that problem. After some Googling, and removing her car's engine air filter, I found the likely electrical fuse, and learned it was indeed blown. Starr admitted to spilling some liquid in the lighter socket once upon a time, and I had hopes for an easy repair. One trip to Auto Zone later, and the little iPod broadcaster works great.

This just makes me terribly happy. I finally got around to fixing the issue I'd promised to, and fixed it properly with a little skull sweat and some digging under her PT Cruiser's hood. Getting something done is such a good thing.

EDIT: Short version of the rant that was in this spot:

Many commenters on Slashdot are fools.

Now I will go and try to write something else that's actually interesting.

The other day, I found the serial port dongle for the Newton, which I figured I'd keep around just in case one of the special keyboards popped up cheap on eBay. Then today, while unpacking... I discovered that I already HAD one of those keyboards, and somehow never even knew it.

trenn and I used to joke that the federal government had hidden the Ark of the Covenant in a cardboard box in his living room, it being less likely to be found there than in Warehouse 23. But now I'm actually finding undiscovered technology in my stuff. Any chance that there's a brand-new desktop Mac stashed anywhere in there?

(Oh, and of course after I discovered the keyboard, it took me another 45 minutes to re-find the serial port dongle. Working great, though!)

I can think of several things for which I'm thankful today:

Everything is out of the apartment now except for some random cleaning supplies, and a couple of lamps and a vacuum cleaner that wouldn't fit in the car last night. This will be taken care of this weekend when I drop off the keys. For this I am very thankful to Starr and, well, me. We've both put no small effort into all these boxes.

I am thankful to Starr for many things, in fact; but they're all mushy and I'll save that for some other time.

I am thankful to Starr's parents for allowing us to use their house for the next year or two. We'll be very comfortable here, and we'll be able to save up some money which we'll need to get our own place. (Midori is thankful to them for the gas fireplace, which is one of the best things the furless monkeys have invented since domesticated catnip and the chewy kitty treat.)

I'm thankful to NASA for giving me the opportunity to show me what I could do for them, and to rattrap for encouraging my developing Macintosh skills in the first place. I'm also thankful to the designers of the Apple Newton, whose long-cancelled product inadvertently provided me with some "hardcore Mac expert" cred in the most recent planning meeting.

I am thankful to the grocery store owners and workers who allowed their stores to be open this morning, so I could acquire the remaining bits of a quiet Thanksgiving surprise dinner to serve Starr, who once again works a holiday.

I'm thankful to the creators and operators of LiveJournal, without whom I'd never be able to keep track of what's going on with all my friends. My peeps are a complicated, intelligent, opinionated, goofy bunch - which is exactly how I like it, and my life would be horribly diminished without them.

I'm thankful to all the people that I like and love that my emo side is awfully disappointed this holiday. I'm supposed to be, and fully expected to be, horribly dissatisfied with my life at this age. Problem with that is, there's so much good in my life right now... how can I let the few speed bumps slow me down?

Someday I will learn to keep a stash of ibuprofen at my desk.

Saturday I wanted to do anything but sit on the couch and stare at the DVR. Handily, there was plenty going on in the area, and we ended up catching a free blues festival at the 17th Street oceanfront. Less handily, we ended up parking at the 23rd Street oceanfront and I got my exercise for the weekend in 95-degree weather. I can't believe I'm not sunburned. But, the music was excellent.

Add in that walking to yesterday's five-hour cleaning spree in the apartment (2.5 rooms done, yay!) and I am an achy Borg today. Still, I'm pleased with the reasons I got that way, so I'm calling it a win.

Saturday night we ended up as guests of Starr's parents at a mildly pricey Italian restaurant. The kitchen messed up my order once, and delayed the second attempt; the manager finally comped me the dinner and I think overdid my dessert as apology. With two large cannoli on a plate before me that evening, I'm pretty thankful for all the unplanned exercise.

Today is my mom's birthday, At first, I was fretting over whether she'd even want to talk to me, but that's not the right attitude. I want to talk to her, and I'm still commmitted to getting this whole situation worked out in a way that gets her as much of what she wants as is sane.

Good news for today? I just found a bottle of ibuprofen in my glove compartment; and these 90-minute OS X Leopard installs give me lots of time to tap away at the Newton.

Cell phone is absolutely D-E-D. Dammit.

I need to either go to the Sprint store tomorrow and get a new Motorola RAZR, or succumb to technolust, and go to the AT&T store and get an iPhone. Which would cost more. But I do want one.

Arrgh, the eternal balance of thrift and desire.

I have driven to Orlando. I have driven to upstate New York. In neither of those cases was I responsible for the steering wheel the whole time, if at all; so, yes, a five-hour drive can absolutely wear me out!

Since NASA Langley is practically sitting on I-64, I packed the car on Wednesday night and headed right to Blacksburg from work Thursday. 64 and I-81 aren't too unpleasant on a Thursday evening; my CD player may be broken, but the iPod plays through it nicely except for the pauses when it tries to eject nonexistent CDs.

Unfortunately, my transmission started throwing fits around Afton Mountain (who could blame it?) slipping and locking into third gear three times on the trip down. Pulling over for 10 minutes each time seemed to reset things, but that's no way to run a railroad.

I made it safely to the Microtel, where I was informed that the wireless access was a bit spotty on my floor :( Nevertheless, in an effort to adjust my sleep rhythms for the weekend, I stayed up for a couple hours unsuccessfully farming Primals in Zangarmarsh, only getting kicked off the server three times.

Friday I headed down to see my Mom (one of the main reasons for my Thursday travel), which was lovely. We traded Xmas presents and had good conversation over a mildly disappointing lunch. Interestingly, I'm still on a hot-rodded Mac G4 tower, and she's got the latest and greatest iMac Intel Core 2 Duo, which she took great glee in showing me.

Went to the lube place, got the transmission flushed, and had them look at my rear tires, which were making unhappy growly noises. Yep, they needed replacing. Technicon was getting expensive already...

Questions from jazzfish ( hidden from the casual reader )

Today, as I drove to work, I plugged the iPod into the car stereo and listened to an episode of Astronomy Cast. (iTunes link)

Astronomy Cast bills itself as "your facts-based journey through the cosmos". There are few surprises in the podcast for a hard-core space geek, but the presentation is good and the content accessible to almost anyone listening. The science expert for the show, Dr. Pamela Gay, becomes excited and passionate when talking about her fields of expertise, but seems ever so slightly impatient any other time. Overall, it's entertaining and informative, and it's usually one of my first listening picks.

Today I heard pretty useful advice about purchasing binoculars and telescopes for casual amateur astronomy - useful because I think there's a telescope in my near future. (Suffolk is a short drive away and has nicely dark skies.) The previous episode, however, made *me* impatient; 30 minutes pointing out that higher dimensions, alternate universes, black holes, and FTL travel really do none of the fun things that science-fiction writers come up with. Hey, kids, human exploration will be over as soon as we land on the remaining solar planets - after that, it's all data analysis! Check out this set of spectra!

I admit, based on what we know right now, all that's probably true. But scientists have thought before that little remained to know, then been forced to change their minds when something new poked though the statistics. I'll acknowledge the validity of thier statements for now, but I'm not yet ready to give up the dream of yearly trips to Alpha Centauri! In the meantime, the "serious scientists" need to stop being such bummers. Carl knew better.

Around 2 weeks ago, something bad happened to the password storage on my 667 MHz PowerBook, and I couldn't even log into my own account. I tried various Mac/Unix fixes for this that I found Googling, but it was a wash. (One of them claimed that a second admin account would have made it easy. raininva made sure to tease me about that, since her account is a simple user.)

Luckily, any FireWire-equipped Mac can be made to pretend it's nothing more than an expensive external drive, and all files were easily backed up to the desktop Mac. Last week, I found time to wipe and re-install, and this morning I got around to running Software update for all the OS patches. (Busy much? You don't know the half of it.) Hopefully, I'll find the time soon to copy all my documents back over and re-install any vital apps. (Nice thing about a wipe - you get rid of a lot of apps you weren't really using.)

Interestingly enough, and saving me a lot of download time to boot, the wired Ethernet port on the machine has suddenly started working again. I had suspected software issues, not hardware ones, when it failed a few months ago.

The house is freezing. We switched to electric space heaters from the hot water radiators, since the oil costs for the latter were killing our bank account. Electric heat is much cheaper, but very very localized - especially when it hit 31 Farenheit outdoors the night before.