Kindle

A Christmas gift from Mrs. Major and Sweet Dau Major and birthday gift from Old Dad, my Kindle finally shipped today.

In case you don’t know what a Kindle is, it’s an electronic book. Kindle users can download books from Amazon.com or upload files to be read from their own computers.

Sweet Dau gave me an appropriately decorated Visa debit gift card with “KINDLE FUND O’ DADNESS” emblazoned on it. I couldn’t figure out how to apply that card as a partial payment for the Kindle so I pre bought a bunch of books. Here’s the list:

• Rusty Nail — J.A. Konrath
• Night Fire — Catherine Coulter
• The Motive — John Lescroart
• Valdez Is Coming — Elmore Leonard
• The Millionaires — Brad Meltzer
• Farewell, My Lovely — Raymond Chandler
• The Big Sleep — Raymond Chandler
• Black and Blue — Ian Rankin
• The Prince of Beverly Hills — Stuart Woods
• Third Person Singular — Kj Erickson
• Death of a Charming Man — M. C. Beaton
• Thr3e — Ted Dekker
• Shakespeare’s Landlord — Charlaine Harris
• Killing Floor — Lee Child
• Total Recall — Sara Paretsky
• Tunnel Vision — Sara Paretsky
• Hard Time — Sara Paretsky

Thanks Mrs. Major, Sweet Dau, and Old Dad.

© 2009, J. M. Erickson. All rights reserved.

Da da da.

I changed the disk drive, loaded the original operating system, booted it up and it worked.

I decided to upgrade the operating system and in the process, the upgrade failed because the DVD quit reading the OS 10.4 DVD. After that I couldn’t boot the iBook. I tried everything, which I won’t go into here. I even booted the iBook in target mode, booted using the iBook’s drive on my very old iMac and it worked. 

Looks like the iBook is dead. It’s old enough that it would not be worth it to take to Apple dudes for them to fix.

Da da da. Oh, well.

© 2009, J. M. Erickson. All rights reserved.

Ready For A New Drive

Monday I disassembled by iBook G4 in anticipation of a new larger disk drive arriving. Here’s a photo of the disassembled pieces minus the screws. 

I originally came with a 60 gigabyte drive which was getting too small and also starting to make strange noises. Thinking the drive was about to head south on me, I ordered a new 250 gigabyte hard drive to replace the old one.

Unfortunately, replacing an iBook drive requires the almost total disassembly of the computer. It’s certainly not as easy as replacing a drive in a desktop computer where the most you have to do is remove the cover, remove a few screws, unplug the old drive, plug in the new one, replace the screws and reinstall the cover.

My Mac Mini has a small drive, too. It’s 90 gigabytes. Maybe I’ll put the 250 in the Mini and the 90 in the iBook.

I think I’ll start searching for a repair manual for the Mini.

© 2009, J. M. Erickson. All rights reserved.

Charlene, Mike, Pam Bill

Last week we spent a wonderful time with our good friends Bill and Pam Bache. They were in Orlando to see their grandson, Zack Leech play three-on-three soccer at Disney’s Wide World of Sports. We picked them up Sunday and they stayed until Friday. 

Besides being very comfortable around each other, we’ve shared lots of life with them. Our kids are contemporaries, went to school together and grew up together in the youth group at Chapel Rock Christian Church. So we parented together, coached youth together, went on youth mission trips together, and hung out together a lot.

Last week besides hanging out, we made some day trips. We visited Tarpon Springs, a small Greek community started by sponge divers. We ate a great Greek lunch and spent the afternoon shopping in the village. 

We also went to Mt. Dora, a quaint little town of the Golden Triangle (Mt. Dora, Eustis, and Tavares). We took a ride on the Inland Lakes Railway to Tavares and back. We were lucky in that they changed the train from three open cars to one closed car or we probably would have passed on the ride as the temperature was about 40 degrees. We shopped in Mt. Dora, too.

On the way to the airport  on Friday we stopped at the Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art. The have the most comprehensive collection of the works of Louis Comfort Tiffany. They also have late 19th century and early 20th century pottery, furniture, and art. Quite a place for the $3.00 admission fee. After the museum we relaxed at Panera for a cup of coffee and roll.

What a great visit.

© 2009, J. M. Erickson. All rights reserved.

After a two-week cruise and a week of visitors for Christmas and New Years, I’m finally getting caught up with all the stuff I let go during the interim. Today, I’m finally reading all the RSS feeds on the blogs I read. Whew.

By the way, Bonnie, on of Major Mike’s readers, commented that she couldn’t find the next–previous links when single articles were displayed. After having used the current theme for about a year and not even noticed it myself, I was surprised. So I added links to the next and previous articles above the title to the current article using the next and previous article titles. Thanks, Bonnie, for noticing the discrepancy.

© 2009, J. M. Erickson. All rights reserved.

Mother's Taffy Cremes

Chowing Down

One of Old Dad’s favorite (and mine, too) cookies is Mother’s Taffy Cremes. Unfortunately, earlier this year, Mothers went out of business and the Taffy Cremes are not to be found in any store. A few months ago, Old Dad sent out a photo of the very last Taffy Crème he had lamenting their demise before he scarfed it down.

However, my brilliant, talented, and sweet Daughter, found some in the Internet and bought me a package for Christmas.

They didn’t last long. Here we are (Sweet Dau, Dau’s Man Friend, and Mrs. Major) stuffing our faces with them. I don’t think they lasted more than two hours. They were so yummy!

Sorry, Old Dad, I didn’t save you any. They sure were good, though.

© 2009, J. M. Erickson. All rights reserved.

After a great night’s sleep when we got home from the cruise, I took a shower. I was so excited to be in my own shower, I washed my feet three times. You cruisers will relate.¹

© 2008, J. M. Erickson. All rights reserved.

1. For you non-cruisers, it’s because the shower is so small, you can’t reach your lower extremities unless you step outside the shower. [↩]

Wallenius Wilhelmsen

We’re home. We got home Christmas Eve at 3:30 am, the flights delayed about two hours because of the weather in the Midwest and Northeast. We had a great time. Sweet Dau Major and her boyfriend, Todd are visiting until the 1st, so I don’t get much time on the computer.

The photo to the left is the ship that went through the Gatun Locks with us. It’s an auto carrier. Coincidentally, it was the same ship that carried my MINI from England to the US back in 2002. Small world.

© 2008, J. M. Erickson. All rights reserved.

Thanksgiving Centerpiece by Mrs. Major

This is the centerpiece that Mrs. Major designed for the Thanksgiving 2008 table. Pretty creative, huh?

Tomorrow we leave for our cruise. I marked all the books I intend to read as “currently reading” but only five of them showed up in the sidebar. You can see them all by clicking on any of the books then clicking on the “back to library” link on the resulting page.

We’re almost all packed. We’ve got a couple of bags of pecan bark to deliver to the neighbors, and Mrs. Major is finishing up a batch of buckeyes for Son Major who will stop by tomorrow to wish us well on our trip. We’ll load him down with all of the food that would go bad during our trip.

I’ve just finished reviewing our itinerary, making sure all the flights are supposed to go when we thought they would, checking with the hotel we’ll be staying at tomorrow night. We’re spending the night at a hotel near the Orlando airport where we will leave the car during our cruise. It’s a pretty neat deal. 

I’m really not going to post tomorrow, so I’ll “see” you after Christmas.

© 2008, J. M. Erickson. All rights reserved.

I received this as an email from one of my nieces. The deal was to fill it out on yourself and send it back and send it to a bunch of other folks.

I usually don’t forward emails, and I usually don’t spend much time filling out surveys like this, but this seemed like fun. I emailed a copy back to my niece and am posting it here…in case you’re interested. Read the rest of this entry »

© 2008, J. M. Erickson. All rights reserved.