My Kindle Shipped Today

February 22, 2009 by Mike 4 Comments

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.

Taps for the iBook

February 1, 2009 by Mike 5 Comments

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.

iBook is Full

January 29, 2009 by Mike 2 Comments

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.

Miss Them Already

January 28, 2009 by Mike 2 Comments

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.

Getting Caught Up

January 12, 2009 by Mike 1 Comment

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.