Author Archives: Peter

Back Together

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Good news everyone! I received the replacement AC/Sound board from ***Pre-Owned Electronics|http://www.preowned.com/*** yesterday. Last night I installed it in the PowerBook and put everything back together. And guess what – it works! 🙂

However, I did have a small plastic piece left over when all was said and done. I have absolutely no idea where it goes, and I remember thinking that I couldn’t figure out what its purpose was when I had originally disassembled things. Anyway, it seems to be working fine without it… but just in case anyone can identify it, here it is, next to a US penny for size comparison:

Little Plastic Piece

It’s nice to be able to use the laptop plugged into an AC outlet again. And to be able to charge the batteries fully from inside the laptop – they never seemed to charge quite right when they were in the external charger.

The Pismo just passed its third birthday, so hopefully with this repair, it will prove useful for many more years. And now that I know how to take the computer apart and reassemble it, I’m confident that I can make any other necessary repairs in the future.

Tearing Down

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Some time in June 2003, the AC power connector in my PowerBook Pismo stopped working. Around that time, I decided not to repair the connector. Instead, I purchased an extra battery and an external charger, and put off the actual repair until ‘later’. Well, I’ve finally rounded up enough money to buy the part I need, and tonight I started the disassembly of the PowerBook. This is not for the faint of heart, and tearing down a laptop is much more difficult than tearing down your basic tower-style PC. The part I need to replace was located at the deepest regions of the machine, so I had to literally take everything else out to get at it. You can see photos of the process ***here|http://gallery.prwdot.org/pismo_teardown***.

The next step is to send my old part in to ***Pre-Owned Electronics|http://www.preowned.com/***. Once they receive it and verify that it’s repairable, they will send me out an already-repaired, refurbished, and tested part. Hopefully it should come in at around this time next week. Until then, we’ll be without the PowerBook. We’ll deal… we have two other computers. 🙂

Well Traveled

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Taking the lead from ***Michelle|http://mikao.blogspot.com/***, Becky and I have constructed maps of the States in the US that we’ve visited, and maps of the countries of the world that we’ve visited. Note that some of the places may have been visited by only one of us.

First, the United States:


create your own visited states map
or write about it on the open travel guide

Next, The World:


create your own visited country map
or write about it on the open travel guide

That’s a lot of ground that we’ve covered… and yet, still much, much more to see! If we had the time and the money, we’d see it all. But we’ll take what we can get. 🙂

Sports

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I’m not a sports fan.

If you know me, you would know this to be a true statement. I do not currently, nor have I ever “followed” sports. But I cannot entirely say I have never hesistated from using some pointsbet promotions and codes. If you asked me, on any given night of the year, if I would be watching “the game,” my answer would probably be no. I don’t follow baseball, football, basketball, hockey, soccer, or any other type of event for which there is a league, numerous organized teams, and a set of rules. Other than knowing the names of some of the players or teams that I hear on the radio or television, I don’t know who’s who in sports. I don’t pretend to have any kind of lasting interest, and I don’t even feel it necessary to have the socially-acceptable male appearance to be “into” sports. If that makes it hard for me to have something in common with my fellow males, so be it – I’m sure the sports fans have plenty of other people to talk to.

My reasons for not following sports are not the subject of this post, but as an aside, I would like to note that my like or dislike of a given sport does not necessarily indicate a reason for not following that sport.

With all of this being said, however, I do on occasion “get into” the local sports crazes. Being surrounded by sports fans, and living in a region with several very successful professional athletic teams, I can’t help but pick up on the “big events” so to speak. In the past year, there have been two of those: The Boston Red Sox valiant but failed attempt to make it to the World Series, and the New England Patriots smashing last-minute victory over the Carolina Panthers at last night’s Super Bowl.

Honestly, I’m rarely aware of what’s going on in the world of sports. I did’t have any clue what was going on in baseball, until I heard that the Red Sox had made the wild card spot in the American League Eastern divison. From that point on, I developed what was for all intents and purposes a mild case of fanaticism. I watched many of the playoff games, up to and including the unfortunate Game 7 of the ALCS playoffs. As Becky would attest, I really did seem like I cared about baseball for a while… and I did. However, the interest wore off soon after the Red Sox were out, and I doubt that I’ll pick back up on it unless the Red Sox do something incredible next season.

The same thing happened for the Super Bowl. I really had no idea what was going on with the Patriots, except that I had heard about a phenomenal 13-game winning streak they were on, and that they would be playing in the Super Bowl. Now, the Super Bowl is a bit different in the fact that I have traditionally watched it year after year, mainly because there are usually some good food-centric parties to attend, and because some impressive new television commercials are debuted. But this year I actually did have an emotional investment in the game itself, and I actually paid attention to every last nail-biting turn of events. Will I keep watching when the next season starts? Not likely.

You see, I’ve already got enough to be interested in without allowing sports fandom to take up another whole segment of my life. So apart from a few annual events (if my local team is involved), I’ll let the real sports fans handle the memorization of stats, the recitation of the rule books, and the veneration of the sports figures.

And congratulations to the New England Patriots!

Good Plans and Bad Plans

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Good Plan:

Our web hosting provider, ***Site5|http://www.site5.com/***, just upped disk capacity and bandwidth across all of their plans. We now have 1.5 gigabytes of storage space instead of 550 megabytes. Woo-hoo! It’s a good thing, too, because our photo albums were taking up just about 500 megabytes of that space. This should keep us happy for quite a while. And they were able to offer this upgrade without any price increases! Yay Site5!

Bad Plan:

Our recently-new HMO, ***Tufts Health Plan|http://www.tuftshealthplan.com/***, on the other hand, has changed their prescription drug plans. One of the allergy medicines I take, ***Rhinocort Aqua|http://www.rhinocortaqua.com/c/index_nf.asp***, was just moved from Tier 1 (least expensive) to Tier 2 (second most expensive). This means it now costs $25 instead of $15. Unfortunately, there are no Tier 1 options that are equivalent to Rhinocort Aqua, so I am kind of stuck in that respect. Add to this the fact that ***Allegra-D|http://www.allegra.com/***, which I used to take, was raised to a Tier 3, which means $40. When that happened, I switched to ***Alavert-D|http://www.alavert.com/***, a generic brand of ***Claritin|http://www.claritin.com/***, which works just as well as Allegra and only costs $15 for 24 tablets. (Both Claritin and Alavert are available without a prescription, as well, so I never have to worry about getting the prescription renewed, at least for that half of my drugs.)

Boo to Tufts Health Plan! And, I suppose, boo to allergies for making me have to take this stuff!

Belated Birthday Wish

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I can’t believe I passed this day by without marking it, nor can I believe that it was Mom who reminded me of it… but I want to wish a Happy 20th Birthday to the Macintosh computer!

On January 24, 1984, Apple introduced the Macintosh computer in an advertisement during the SuperBowl. You can see the original ad ***here|http://www.apple.com/hardware/ads/1984/*** if you didn’t catch it back then. Well, it’s more or less the original – you’ll notice the star of the commercial wearing a nifty piece of electronics that definitely did not exist back in 1984, though it may have been a twinkle in Steve Jobs’ eye.

In 1984, our family did not own a Macintosh, or any computer for that matter. I was just over five years old and hadn’t even started Kindergarten when the Mac was announced.

I don’t believe that I even used a Mac until perhaps 1988 or 1989. It may have been an ***SE|http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/mac_classic/stats/mac_se.html*** or an ***SE/30|http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/mac_classic/stats/mac_se30.html***.

Our family bought its first Mac, an ***LC|http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/mac_lc/stats/mac_lc.html***, in the summer of 1991, seven years after the first Mac was introduced, just before I started seventh grade.

Six years later, in 1997, my parents got me a ***SuperMac J700/180|http://www.everymac.com/systems/umax/j700/supermac_j700_180.html*** Mac clone, as a high school graduation gift. Though this wasn’t an Apple Macintosh per se, it was licensed by Apple to run the Mac OS…. for a very short time.

Four years later, in 2001, in my last semester at college, I bought a ***Apple PowerBook FW/400 (Pismo)|http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/powerbook_g3/stats/powerbook_g3_400_fw.html***, just after Apple had introduced its brand new ***PowerBook G4|http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/powerbook_g4/stats/powerbook_g4_400.html*** product line.

Two years later, in 2003, I purchased a used ***PowerMac G4 (AGP)|http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/powermac_g4/stats/powermac_g4_450.html*** to replace the aged and ailing J700 (which had actually been upgraded to a S900 with a G3 processor by that time).

I can’t remember the exact date, but somewhere along the way my parents replaced their aged Mac LC with one of the older iMac series… but that LC lasted QUITE a long time – it was their primary computer for around 10 years.

Through all the years, I’ve done my best to convince the people around me that purchasing a Macintosh computer is the best way to go. It is always a difficult task; most people are quite willing to go with a Windows-based computer, which is admittedly an inexpensive solution and may indeed be “good enough” for most people. But I firmly believe that like many excellent things, it is worth your time and effort to save the money needed to take that step up to a truly remarkable personal computer – something that is more than just “good enough.”

An operating system and computer hardware platform that work hand-in-hand – a winning combination. Here’s to you, Macintosh.

Passed!

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Mass Inspection Sticker

Thanks to mechanic Samir Al-ghazi of the Peabody Sunoco, and a timely tip from ***Bob Golding|http://bobgolding.blogspot.com/***, my car has passed the ***Massachusetts Enhanced Emissions and Safety Test|http://vehicletest.state.ma.us/***! I’m safe and clean for at least another year! 🙂

Since I have an even numbered year car, and this year is an even number year, I had to have an emissions test in addition to the safety test. If you’re interested in my car’s emissions levels:

Hydrocarbons GPM: 00.17 (Limit 01.20)
Carbon Monoxide GPM: 006.25 (Limit 020.00)
Oxides of Nitrogen GPM: 00.50 (Limit 02.50)
Carbon Dioxide GPM: 252.15 (No limit specified)

I’m not sure what GPM means – grams per meter? In any case, I guess it’s acceptable to the state of Massachusetts.

Hooray!

Double Dose of Good News

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Two pieces of good news today!

One: ***NAC|http://www.nac.net/*** and ***Site5|http://www.site5.com/*** have been removed from the ***SPEWS|http://www.spews.org/*** blacklist. Hooray! Many thanks go to the excellent ***Broadbandreports.com|http://www.broadbandreports.com/*** user community for bringing about this change. BBR is also a customer of NAC, and all of the BBR IP addresses were added to the list. BBR used their considerable clout to encourage NAC to terminate the known spammers. As it turns out, the NAC CEO was very much in the dark as to the spammer situation, and he has vowed to be much more involved and vigilant in detecting and banning the spammers from his network. So it looks like our email is back to normal! Thanks also to everyone who responded to my requests for help with email testing.

Two: The brake light situation on my car has been solved! Thanks to a timely suggestion from ***Bob Golding|http://bobgolding.blogspot.com/***, I made a simple check of the brake fluid level in my car. It turns out that the level was very low. So I picked up a bottle of brake fluid for $1.69 at ***AutoZone|http://www.autozone.com/***, poured it in, and tested out the car. Surprise surprise, the brake light turned off after I released the emergency brake! And it stayed off as I drove back to work, too! I’m quite happy that I’ve been able to make this simple fix, and I’d like express my thanks to Bob for the advice. I’ve given Bob and honorary spot on our Friends blog list. Thanks again, Bob!

Now I just have to take the car back to get re-inspected, and I should be home free! I also replaced the wiper blades with some nice new winter blades, so there should not be any more barriers to passing the inspection. Phew!

Hyannis and SPEWS

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On Saturday, Becky and I drove down to Hyannis to visit our friends Jeremy and Angela. They are getting married on March 6, so we helped them out with some wedding preparations while we were down there. We also had a very good dinner of pepperoni pasta and caesar salad. As usual, I had the camera with me, so there were ***some photos|http://gallery.prwdot.org/hyannis*** taken as well, including a couple nice photos of Jeremy’s cat Georgia, and some ***really cool shots of sunset|http://gallery.prwdot.org/hyannis_sunset*** over the Cape (Jeremy and I went on a little photography expedition while the girls were working on some crafty things).

As for the Wood family, life continues mostly as normal with one notable glitch in recent days. Because of a problem with ***NAC|http://www.nac.net/***, which is ***Site5|http://www.site5.com/***’s network provider, Site5’s mail servers were among a list of other servers added to the ***SPEWS|http://www.spews.org/*** database. This database is used by some (but not many) ISP’s to determine if incoming mail is from a known spammer. Apparently, some of NAC’s customers were marked as spammers, and as a result, SPEWS added most, if not all, of NAC’s customers to its blacklist — whether or not they actually sent spam.

Because of this, we may have trouble sending email to some of our friends, family, colleagues, and others… some of you may have already received a test message, and we appreciate your replies as we try to determine the extent of the effects of this blacklisting. If you have received a test message from us, and have not yet replied, please do so.

The only solution for this problem is for NAC to terminate the accounts of its customers who are guilty of sending spam. That does seem to be working, so hopefully our email will be healthy again. In the meantime, if you receive email from either of us from an unusual address, don’t be alarmed. And if you’ve been expecting an email from us, but haven’t received it yet, it might be good to check with us to see whether it’s been sent.

Rejected.

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I got a couple new tires for my car a couple days ago, hoping that would be enough to get me through the ***Mass State Inspections|http://vehicletest.state.ma.us/*** and that I wouldn’t have to spend too much more money for a while.

Well, today I got a big fat “R” sticker on the car, because apparently there’s a problem with my brakes. They couldn’t actually find a problem with the brakes, and as far as I can tell, my emergency brake and my regular brakes are working fine. But the “brake” indicator light on my dashboard has been going on and off intermittently for the past couple of months… and they said because the brake light stayed on, there must be some problem with the brake system. I had hoped they would be able to overlook that light and just pass the car… but apparently not. Now I have 60 days to fix the problem and get the car re-inspected. Well, I suppose safe is better than sorry, and that’s the whole reason they do these tests every year.

This is one of the things I miss about having my car registered in Knox County, Ohio – no vehicle inspection required to register your car, and no yearly inspection. In Ohio, you’re only required to get an emissions test if you live in one of ***these three metropolitan areas|http://www.epa.state.oh.us/dapc/echeck/station_loc.html***.

In Massachusetts, every car must receive a safety inspection every year, and an emissions test every other year (unless it’s older than a certain age). In addition, your car must pass an inspection before you can register it.

This is the third year that my car has been subject to the state inspection. The first year I had to buy two new tires before I could pass. The second year I passed with no problem. This year I had to get two more new tires and apparently also get some brake work done.

Bah.