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February 20, 2005
Birth of Baby
I’m selling rascal and spanky. rascal is my venerable, whisper quiet Pismo Powerbook G3. I love this machine and wish Apple’s laptops were still fanless. I also am a bit sick of the über-chic brushed aluminum. The black molded plastic on the end-of-series Powerbook is, simply, beautiful.
They will be revered by future Mac collectors in a way that the boxy and Scandinavian-esque squareness current G4 Powerbooks will never be.
Ever.
Alas, I need to be able to synchronize my work across machines and ever since my department requisitioned a Final Cut Pro- and DVD Studio Pro-capable 15-inch aluminum Powerbook—which I named varmint—for me, work synchronization has been an issue. I also am considering trying out Apple’s iWork suite, for Pages in particular as I’m tired of quasi-professional wordprocessors like Mariner Write and Nisus Writer. I loathe Word. I’m disturbed that Corel doesn’t see the Macintosh as a viable platform. I guess they’re married to the lawyers and that’s enough for them.
Anyway, I didn’t intend for this to be a long rambling post. I only wanted to acknowledge that these machines—which have served me so well for the better part of a decade (I’ve had spanky since 1998 and rascal since 2000) and which have quite a bit of life in them yet—are soon to find new homes.
rascal’s eBay listing has a link back to this organ. Yesterday (Saturday, 19 February), I backed rascal up using Bombich’s Carbon Copy Cloner over the Internet. (I ran the session using Chicken of the VNC.) When fygar, the main hard drive partition on rascal, was backed up, I took varmint to the office and copied the contents of rascal’s several hard drive partitions: fygar, pooka, siggie, wire, and writers.
When I returned to Vanilla Falls (my rented home), I used Apple’s Disk Utility to restore fygar to the used 1.04 GHz Mirror Drive Door G4 I recently won on eBay. I booted that machine and hooked it up to my LAN. It faithfully behaved just like rascal, up to and including running DNSUpdate and commandeering desiringmachine.net! The result was that dyndns.org started routing requests to my home LAN which requests were handled spanky’s doppleganger (a dual 1.25 GHz G4 MDD G4, which I also recently acquired on eBay). I didn’t realize what I had done until I pulled up this page.
So, this morning I drove back to the office to wake rascal up and get him talking to dyndns.org. Things appear to be back to normal. On the cloverleaf from 682 South to 50 East, I thought about how these networked objects require so much care, that bringing a machine onto the network even from backups or already working hard drives requires quite a bit of attention, a lot of face-to-face, a lot like babies. (Of course, when I reflect more concretely on the analogy, I am not for a second fooled into thinking a machine is anything like a real live baby. I suppose being single and without children makes me think of the ways I fill my life with non-humans that require my care.)
baby will take her place just after rascal’s winning bidder pays.
Posted by donor at February 20, 2005 12:05 PM
Comments
well after reading your post im now the current high bidder on rascal's auction. would be nice to get a comp from someone who knows how to take care of one, rather than someone who doesnt care that much. so i just thought it would be cool to make a comment. good luck to you (if i win it will be quite a deal) and good luck w/ the newer stuff you get
Posted by: jonchillin at February 20, 2005 11:03 PM
OK. This has been a long 3 weeks trying to salvage the damage that was done to my data files by a bad motherboard on a dual 1.25 GHz G4 machine I won (and returned) on eBay.
jonchillin’s comment above was actually posted on 20 February at 11:03 PM and Movabletype does not allow me to edit the post date of comments. But I did recover his comment and damn if that was not the last missing piece of data after my 20 GB external hard drive was corrupted.
I'm very happy with my new dual 2.5 GHz G5 machine, lefty.
Posted by: donor at March 18, 2005 12:19 AM
I've been surfing Apple's Powermac G5 Usage discussion boards pretty intensely since setting up lefty, my new dual 2.5 GHz G5.
This last piece of information--the original date on which jonchillin posted his comment--has been niggling at me because it involved, to be complete, a simple act of reconstruction.
FatherTime, a user on the Apple discussion boards, has been asking a number of questions which point to his growing curiosity about UNIXland. He finally took the plunge and went to Apple's UNIX discussion board.
He posted a question about UNIX for beginners to which someone replied citing a great page with links.
In my response to FatherTime, whose curiosity really makes me glad for I don't know what reason, I posted some tips about how to undertake a MovableType installation in order to learn more about UNIX.
After the post, I got to thinking why I couldn't simply use my installation of phpMyAdmin to edit jonchillin's reconstructed comment's date. And then I stopped wondering.
My next thought was, “I’ll bet I can get an IP address from the email we exchanged about the eBay sale to reconstruct the IP address from which the post was made.”
I bet.
Posted by: donor at March 27, 2005 01:08 PM