3/24/07

Hello, another posting after seven days of nothing. Not a whole lot to catch you up on. I will just cover the key points I guess. I talked to miss d. She called me a hacker for using the neighbor's wireless Internet. Which I do not consider private if they do not secure it. It is just like public wi-fi if they do not secure it. But I got a wireless g router at circuit city Friday night. And I DID secure it. I brought it home and began the setup process which lasted about an hour and a half. Because the main computer I was setting it up for was My MacBook. And airport recognized the wireless connection, but when I entered the long series of letters and numbers I was given as a password, it would not let me in, so I called Linksys and was on hold with some lady that spoke in monotone, (maybe she was Asian) and she finally let me in on the little secret that they do not put in the instructions for whatever reason. You need to put the dollar sign before your password when you are using a mac. But after that, My wireless Internet is working wonderfully. The same as the Ethernet before it did. I do not have it on my gateway yet. I am not sure if I have it. I opened up the slot were the wireless chip should have been, and it was there, but I can not seem to get a connection. And If I could, I probably would not be able to very far. The gateway is like 4 years old, so It would have 802.11b built in if anything, and the range for that is like 20 feet. So I am going to get the PC card adapter anyway for Easter. Then I will be able to brows myspace and gadget blogs and look at the blue screen of death other places in my house. I need a MacBook Pro really bad, but I think I am stuck with this gateway for a little while. At most, I will get a new vista laptop :( because they are more in my price range. As much as I put Windows and Microsoft down, they will always hold a special place in my heart. My first computer ever was a Toshiba Satellite laptop running Windows 95. My next computer was an old, old Packer Bell running Windows 3.1. I still admire and think about that one every day. My next computer, which is the worst one and the best one I have ever had, was a Fujitsu LifeBook. That originally had Windows 98, but I upgraded to Windows 2000 Professional. I designed websites, edited photos, I pretty much became a Power User on my lifebook. But then one day it crashed never to restart again. Then I sought out a new computer, apparently someone my mother worked with found out and mentioned that they had a very old mac @ home. So i had that. It was one of those old Macintosh Performa 6200 desktops from the early 90's. I liked that computer allot. I never had a problem. It was my first mac. But it did not do allot. I could not do word processing in MS office or anything compatible with office, and I could only print half of the time, but that was the HP printers fault. It had a TV tuner, so I could watch, and record TV, like a tivo. It had a CD-ROM drive, and could play Cd's, the perfect Media Center computer of the day. I had it in my room, but I did not use it all that often. I used my mother's Gateway to do everything because it had windows XP. And the Internet. I used that for a very long time. All the while there was a 500MHZ G3 iMac 15" CRT Blue with 64 megs of RAM in the basement that was becoming harder and harder for kyle and Lauren to do their homework on. So we replaced that a couple months ago with a 17" Intel 1.83GHZ iMac. And I got the G3. I used the Intel Mac allot, and still do, and my mothers Gateway at this point was almost a lost cause. It could not print, and when it did, I did it wrong, it chose when it wanted to go on the Internet, and when it didn't. We saw the BSOD almost every 10 minutes. I told her that I would be able to take it and overhaul everything and make it work reasonably well again but she would loose everything. She didn't want that. So we went to the apple store one day and came home with a 13" 1.83GHZ Intel MacBook with 512MB of RAM. It is slow and not all that powerful, but it was better than her gateway, and was from apple, the most reliable computer manufacture. And all apples have OSX, the most secure operating system that is worth using for everyday computing. So she was set. I had to get everything from the gateway transferred over, so I had to do a lot of rebooting in safe mode, but I finally got all that done, then I put a fresh install of XP Home on the gateway. And now it is my old, very slow to boot, 1.3GHZ 14" screen, 256MB of ram short battery life laptop. But it works, most of the time. And that is good enough for me, at least I will always know that I have a MacBook, and an iMac in the house, wireless, and a museum of ancient computers in my storage room, and a G3 iMac that I have all of my music in and it plays as I sleep @ night. I have ituneson it. Yes, iTunes did exist back then, there just wasn't an iTunes store. So did Quicktime, and there was iMovie, a movie editor. You could plug your digital video camera into one of the 2 firewire ports and edit your movies, add intros, change scene order, and so on. Then you can burn it to a CD, or a DVD if you had the super drive. Which I do not. But yea, it runs OS 10.0.4, which is not what it came with, It came with 9.2.1, and I upgraded to to 10.0.0, the BETA of OSX, and eventually got to 10.0.4. It is still new enough to run Tiger (10.4.9), but that would cost me $129.99. So yea, I got off of school yesterday, and it is spring break, I am not sure what I am going to do, I would like to go to Chicago. I want to see the two story apple store there. I saw Wild Hogs today, and it was a terrible movie. But the trailer looked good. Oh well, I am going to go think about a way to pay for a Toshiba laptop i may get sometime this year. It is expensive, because I can not do anything I would want to do n Vista Basic, and if I upgrade to Vista Premium, I have all this shit pre-installed that slows me down big time so then I have to upgrade the RAM, and that costs quite a bit too. PC is just way too complicated. And by the time I get to what I really need on the PC, I a at the same price as a MacBook, but what I need in a macbook, costs $380 more, and I would just wait till I could get the 15" MacBook Pro then. So as you can see, it is a very good thing that my birthday and Christmas are far away, because I have a shit load of thinking to do. Hopefully I will come to blog more and more often. I know, seven days is pathetic. Sorry, I am lazy. If I am ever going to get a job reviewing things and different technologies, I will have to overcome this laziness I have.

-Ryan