Month: May 2006

Time for a rant

I’ve been having a particularly bad morning today, and the rant that I wrote here was so mean that I couldn’t even post it, which is saying a lot. Suffice to say, if you have a residential DSL account, please don’t complain to technical support that you’re losing thousands of dollars an hour because you can’t connect to the Internet.
If you want to run an internet-based business from your home, purchase commercial (i.e., business) accounts from not one, but at least two different ISPs, and have the connections on separate inbound lines, be they DSL lines, cable modem, or T1s. If you want to be especially paranoid, work with the telephone company to get a separate NIU installed on the opposite side of your house from the first one.

Whee, clean apartment!

So a couple weeks ago, Heather convinced me that I needed to clean my apartment. And last weekend, I finally did it. Well, we cleaned, that is. There were multiple good reasons, chief among them being the constant cough I’ve had for the last year or more. And although I’m jumping the gun to say it, but the cough seems to be gone for the most part.

in any case, my apartment is now clean. Heather volunteered to take all of the tiled rooms: the bathrooms and the kitchen, and I got the carpeted rooms: the living room, the short hallway, and both of the bedrooms (one of which I use as an office). Well, that’s how it started out, at least. She ended up helping me with the office, which was by far the worst room of the bunch.

I’ve never been so glad that I own a carpet steamer; it’s so very satisfying to walk on freshly-steamed carpets. Yeah, it’s also great to be able to actually walk around my apartment, and to get to my bookshelves, and crap like that, but the carpets are the best part by far.

Link Roundup

no pun intended on the first one…

Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess – Lava Boss Video: Holy crap, I’m so getting a Wii when it comes out. Zelda is a launch title, too…
The Robservatory » It’s so … black!: Another good review of the new Apple MacBook… I think I may fall prey to the color tax when I get mine as well…
Benefits of Removing ‘www’ From Your URL » Wisdump: Hmmm… Tempting. I think I already have some of these rules in place, but it’d certainly make life a lot easier to go “whole hog”.
Daring Fireball: Using .htaccess Redirection to Standardize Web Server Addresses: More of the same
Main Page – Discworld & Pratchett Wiki: I needed this a few minutes ago, to look up the Discworld books that I don’t already own. Turns out there’s not a lot of ’em.

And that’s the link roundup for this morning.

Dead CD-ROM drive, redux

Well, I got paid today, so welovemacs.com got 200 bucks, and I’ll get a new superdrive some time this week. So hopefully by next weekend, I’ll once again have a working CD/DVD drive in my iBook. Luckily, this new drive is a SuperDrive, not a Combo Drive. So I get a DVD burner in with the mix. Which is nice; 6x as much space on a single disc, and my copy of DVD Studio Pro will be useful for something besides making ISO images.

So it’s time to dry out the ice cube trays again. Yes, I said ice cube trays; the Apple service manual actually recommends ’em for holding all of the tiny components (screws, springs, etc) when disassembling an iBook. Now if only I had a “black stick”. Meh, the chassis is already scratched up pretty mad, a few more nicks won’t hurt anything.