Author Archives: Peter

Night of the Panther

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***Mac OS X 10.3|http://www.apple.com/macosx/***, aka “Panther”, is officially being released on Friday, October 24, 2003: ***The Night of the Panther|http://www.apple.com/retail/panther/***. ***Apple Retail Stores|http://www.apple.com/retail/*** everywhere will be holding parties from 8 p.m. to 12 a.m. that night to celebrate its release. Woohoo!

Becky and I will be there, just like we were for the ***Jaguar Party|http://gallery.prwdot.org/jaguar_party*** last year. Only this time, we’ll be attending the party at one of the fine Apple Stores in the Mecca of Apple-dom, San Francisco.

Oh yeah… did I forget to mention? We’re going to San Francisco!!!!!!

🙂

We’ll be there October 18-25, and it’s sort of a combination vacation + anniversary gift (October 26 – 1 year!). I’ve taken barely more than 7 days off work this year, and seeing as I still have over four weeks of paid vacation time saved up, I figured it might be good to use it. We are flying direct from Boston to San Francisco on an American Airlines, staying at the Holiday Inn on Fisherman’s Wharf, and we’ll have a rental car for the last couple of days so that we can go on some excursions. We’re wicked excited! Becky has been to San Francisco before, but my only trip there was when I was in the womb – my parents tell me that I did get to take a cable car ride on their last trip to San Francisco before I was born! 🙂

Only one week and three days left til we leave!!

Lowe Reunion

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Becky and I were at the Lowe family reunion today in Chelmsford. Had a nice time there seeing assorted family and friends. For those who are interested, the ***pictures are online|http://gallery.prwdot.org/lowe_reunion*** for all to see.

Also, congratulations to the Red Sox for winning tonight’s ALDS game against the Oakland A’s!!! Becky and I watched the whole game. It was tied up at 1-1 until the bottom of the 11th inning, when Trot Nixon belted a two-run homer to win the game. Game four of the series will be tomorrow at Boston, and if the Sox win tomorrow, the sixth and final game will be in Oakland. If Boston wins the next two, and the Yankees win tomorrow against the Twins, there could be a Sox-Yankees faceoff in the ALCS.

Cut-ah, cut-ah, cut-ahh!!!

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In no particular order, here are some of the things we did this weekend:

Saw a fantastic movie, ***Lost in Translation|http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0335266/***. Bill Murray stars as an American movie star who has traveled, away from his wife and kids, to Tokyo, Japan to shoot a $2 million dollar commerical for whiskey. He finds himself alienated by Japanese culture and language. While at his hotel, he meets a young newlywed, played by Scarlet Johansson. She is in Tokyo with her husband, who is doing some photography work. The two bond and form a close friendship. It’s a wonderful movie, with lots of great shots of Japan, accurate insights into the Japanese culture, and enough weirdness to keep you interested. Two thumbs up!

Took a trip on the ***Thomas E. Lannon Schooner|http://www.schooner.org/***. It was a free 1.5 hour trip, courtesy of the Essex National Heritage district’s “Trails & Sails” weekend. The weather was very foggy, so the views from the boat were not spectacular, but it was a lot of fun to be on board a sailing vessel. Becky got to help hoist the sails, and I took ***some pictures|http://gallery.prwdot.org/schooner_lannon***.

Went to the ***40th wedding anniversary party|http://gallery.prwdot.org/joan_errol*** for my aunt and uncle Joan and Errol Ethier. We got to see some relatives we haven’t seen since our wedding, and even one (***Scott|http://www.scottethier.com/default.shtml***) who Becky had never met. The party was great and it looked like everyone was having a great time.

Did a large-scale apartment rearranging. We switched around furniture from our living room and our bedroom, cleaned up lots of stuff, and generally made things much more cozy. Becky is a die-hard TLC junkie (Trading Spaces, While You Were Out, Clean Sweep, etc), and I’m not hard behind, so I think some of those shows were starting to rub off. If you happen to be in the Beverly area, feel free to drop by and check it out!

Got the computer back up to full operating status. Well, almost. One of the RAM chips I had ordered was bad, and so I sent it back to ***OWC|http://www.macsales.com/***. I should be receiving a replacement some time this week, but for now I only have 384 megs of RAM in the machine. Other than that, it’s running great. The new GeForce 4 MX video card is fantastic, especially since it enables ***Quartz Extreme|http://www.apple.com/macosx/jaguar/quartzextreme.html***, Apple’s technology which sends 2-D graphics processing off to the graphics card, rather than the system’s main CPU.

That’s all the news that is fit to blog!

It’s Here!

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The Sawtooth is here!

It arrived today via UPS and I finally got to see it this evening when I got home from work. It’s a very nice machine. Tomorrow, another shipment is supposed to be arriving, which will contain some more RAM and a better video card for the machine. For now, though, the machine is set up and running Mac OS X 9.2.2. I’ll upgrade it to Mac OS X 10.2.8 some time within the next few days.

For those interested, you can check out some ***pictures|http://gallery.prwdot.org/sawtooth_arrival*** pictures of the unpacking, setting up, and booting up of the new machine.

The official time of first boot-up was 6:15 p.m., September 24, 2003.

Hooray!

New Mac Coming!

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Well, new to us, that is. 🙂

Today I purchased a ***PowerMac Sawtooth G4/450|http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/powermac_g4/stats/powermac_g4_450.html***. This is essentially to replace our SuperMac S900 FrankenMac, which died recently. I bought it from a used Mac dealer, ***Mac Of All Trades|http://www.macofalltrades.com/*** for $499 + shipping and handling. It’s a great deal on a great machine. It has a 450 MHz G4 processor, 256 megs of ram, a 10 GB hard drive, ATI Rage 128 Pro video, Zip drive, DVD-ROM, mouse and keyboard.

Now, the Sawtooth is not the latest machine, and certainly doesn’t compete with the new ***PowerMac G5|http://www.apple.com/powermac/***. In fact, it’s almost three years old. But it is a very capable and expandable machine, and for our budget right now, the price was right. It can be expanded to 2 GB of RAM, up to a Dual 1.4 GHz G4 processor, and can use AGP video cards. All in all, it leaves plenty of room to grow if necessary. I will definitely be upgrading the RAM and Video card without delay. I already have an 80 GB hard drive which can go into the machine, and our Firewire CD-RW can easily hook up to it.

The system will run Mac OS X 10.2 (Jaguar) like a champ, and from what I’ve heard, should have no trouble running the upcoming Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther).

It’s supposed to ship out by tomorrow, and should arrive some time next week.

Hooray!

Need a PDA?

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Need a PDA? I’m selling my old ***Visor Deluxe|http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=38331&item=3047345208*** on eBay.

The bundle comes with the Visor Deluxe, a Stowaway folding keyboard (full-size keys, but folds up to just about the size of the Visor), docking cradle and portable docking cable, carrying case, and one-touch backup module.

It’s a great deal if you are looking to get started with a PDA, and the extras are very nice. And the proceeds will go to a good cause. 🙂

The Weekend Update

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Becky is down on the Vineyard this weekend with her parents and brother, working on the house. I’m up in Beverly, as I am playing on the worship team in church this Sunday. So what did I do with all my free time today?

I woke up at 6:30 to get to Filene’s at 7:30 so I could be one of the first 300 people there, and receive a $15 gift card. I was, and I did. I also brought along a 15%-off coupon. I bought some new shirts and slacks. (Yesterday morning before work, Becky and I had also been to Filene’s to each get a $15 gift card – on that occasion, I bought a new pair of jeans for $9.99) I went home.

I put away the new clothes. I started cleaning the house. I got rid of all the computer junk boxes that have been sitting around. I collected everything trash-like and took it outside. I collected everything recyclable and put it in the recycling bin. I put things away where possible, and put things in neat piles where putting away was not possible. I went out.

I took four large bags of clothes and two large bags of shoes to the Salvation Army in Salem. I had lunch at Taco Bell. I checked out the new Target in Salem, and bought a pack of CD-RW’s. I went home.

I cleaned up all the cobwebs. I vacuumed all the floors. I washed all of the dishes. I went out.

I went to the gym and did 40 minutes on the elliptical trainer. I went home.

I got a shower, cleaned up, replied to a few emails, and started this blog entry.

Whew.

I’m taking the rest of the night off. Ciao!

Made some changes

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I’ve made a few changes to the site. If the page looks weird, please let me know. I’ve tested my changes out on quite a few browsers, thanks to ***BrowserCam|http://www.browsercam.com/***, but it doesn’t cover absolutely everything.

In summary, here are the changes:

qqq|* Eliminated “tables” as a method of laying out the page. Tables are still useful for displaying tabular data, but for too long they have also been used as a layout tool. They were never intended as such, and so now I am using “div” tags to lay out and style all of the data on the site. This is probably the biggest change, and is the one likely to cause the most problems if you’re using a weird (or old) browser.

* Condensed the site’s stylesheet, removing redundant tags, collapsing some tags together, and adding some new tags for clarity.

* Made sure the code of at least the homepage was compliant with the ***XHTML 1.0 Strict|http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/*** specification for structured documents, and the ***CSS 2.0|http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/*** specification for document style sheets. This won’t be a visible change for most, but it should ensure that our site will work in the browsers of the future. You can check the compliance of individual pages using the links you will now find if you scroll to the bottom of the page.

*Re-separated the photo gallery from the flow of the site. Hopefully this will be faster and less confusing to people who come to the site just to see the photo gallery. As the gallery continues to grow and grow (it now holds 2,734 photos!), I believe it’s important to keep it more separate. Some day it may even need its own server!|qqq

That’s about it. These changes should make it easier for us to alter the style of the site, as well as (hopefully!) make it look better to everyone.

Replacement Mac Fund-Raiser

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This Sunday, while Becky and I were housecleaning, my venerable Mac clone machine suffered a brain hemmorhage. Despite my many attempts to revive it, including completely disassembling and reassembling all of the parts, and replacing the power supply with a fresh, new one, the machine will now no longer boot up.

So now I am faced with the task of acquiring a computer to replace my dear old desktop machine. We do of course still have the Pismo Powerbook and Becky’s HP Pavillion, so we’re not without computers. But I do like having a desktop Mac which can also act as a server – home.prwdot.org was hosted on the now-deceased PowerMac.

With that in mind, I’ve revamped my ‘clearance sale’ that has been on the ***Project K|http://projectk.mine.nu:90*** website for a while now. It now includes items from the ex-computer that can be salvaged and used in other computers. The sale also includes other random items such as CD players, SCSI CD-ROM drives, cell phones, Anime DVD’s, and other electronic gadgets.

So visit ***The Sale|http://projectk.mine.nu:90/viewtopic.php?t=83*** and see if there’s anything you’d be interested in buying to help out a good cause. Many thanks to my friend Dylan from the ***All Things Macintosh|http://www.broadbandreports.com/forum/macdsl*** forum at Broadbandreports.com for running the Project K forum and for putting up the big announcement on his site.