When oil prices are going down (around $34 a barrel Friday) how come gas prices keep going up ($.35 since Jan 1)? Turns out that the $34 per barrel is for West Texas crude and they’re not making much gas from it. Instead, we’re getting gas from inferior oil imported from Canada, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, and others. That oil is much more expensive, about $7 more per barrel not counting transportation cast, than West Texas crude. Why are we using foreign oil instead of West Texas crude? We don’t have pipelines in place to transport the oil out of the Southwest.
Is there any money in the massive bailout bill to build pipelines?
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.
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.
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.
