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Did some Olympic sleeping Sunday. In the morning I went hiking on Lookout Mountain in North Phoenix with a friend. I got home around 3:30 and I was passed out by about 4:30. I slept until 2:30 Monday morning. I woke up, read for about an hour, and went to bed again until it was time to wake up. It was everything I thought it could be.
The past week has brought on physical activity for me, and I think that's a good thing. I've started climbing nearby Camelback mountain with some friends from work. The trail has plenty of steep parts and evil trip-hazard rocks to step over, but when I'm done I feel pretty good about things. So I'm going to keep doing it. Already I can tell that I'm recovering from the physical activity faster.
Slashdot saved me today; I saw the story on the defective Sony CCD sensors, and as it turned out, my Minolta Dimage X20 is one of the affected cameras. I hope I can get it fixed. It bugged me that it crapped out. That stupid camera was the subject of the last big fight I think Lisa and I ever had. I thought we got it all resolved, but who knows. But it bugged me that it didn't work because I sort of considered part of the price of that camera to be my marraige in some way.
Speaking of pictures, I don't think that Lisa is ever going to return any of the photos from that seven year period, which means that I've lost a lot of images for documentation of my naval period that I was doing in web pages. So, if I knew you and you have pictures of me or our circle of friends, please send them my way....
I've been doing some computer reorginization at home. I'm going to retire the old Athlon / Duron machine that I built in 2002; it's actually going up to reside with my friend Susie's neighbor, who has cancer, and a crappy computer. So I guess I'm going to have to load Winblows on it. Replacing it will be the Athlon 64 machine running CentOS. The downstairs workstation will be the PowerMac G4 I picked up a few months ago. I've installed Yellow Dog 4 on it but it doesn't seem to want to install the bootloader, resulting in a situation where I can't boot without the kernel on the install CD. Which is ridiculous. Can this OS install correctly on anything?
Yellow Dog 4 is still pissing me off in a big way on the PowerBook as well. Man, I really took the reliability of the Linux on my old iBook for granted. If I had known that it was going to be this much of a pain in the ass to get a sleep that would wake back up correctly on the PowerBook I would have just dealt with the 800x600 res on the iBook and been happy. In the meantime, I've been using MacOS 9 on PowerBook, but I still have instability nightmares from the old days of that stuff. I guess Mac OS X is an option, but what I really want is a Linux for PPC that worked as well as YDL 3 did.
Before I end this I guess I should mention that my new band, TrashMagnet, is doing our first show at Last Exit in Tempe (it's on the SW corner of Southern and Priest) on Thursday, October 20. I think we're the second band up; we'll be hitting the stage around 11-ish (I'm told.)
Currently playing on my iPod....The Dixie Dregs. Before I completely lost touch with him, Ron Smith got me into them.
Fun with OSes (OSs?)
Nice to see you're able to leave the house again without catching fire.
I'd refrain from slapping OSX on your PowerBook. I run it on my Pismo, and it gets stressed out pretty good sometimes. I'm not saying your PB won't handle it, just that it's really going to get tapped out. X is seriously a memory and processor intensive system. I still want to get the G4 upgrade for the Pismo so it'll run smoother. I'd like to be able to play some games on it, or have it not take a week to swap between heavy progs sometimes.
Now I don't feel quite so bad about the YDL4 issues. Maybe it's best for me to hold off for a more finely tuned PPC build for that other HD.
Thanks
I think I should have held out for a Pismo. At the time, I thought the only real difference was the Firewire, but now I wish I had a Airport slot, and the CPU cooling was much improved in the Pismo. This machine, while not as bad as my HP space heater laptop, runs quite a bit hotter than my iBook did (which generally ran pretty cool). I wish Apple had made a clamshell style iBook with a 1024x768 screen. I liked everything about that laptop better than this PowerBook except for the undersized screen.
Hot Stuff
ADmittedly, the AirPort card is nice to have. Effectively built-in WiFi has been great for me around campus.
Can't really do anything about the FireWire, but after looking at pictures and popping my Pismo open, there is the possibility that you could cannibalize a Pismo heat sink (shown in the second picture here). From the looks of things, you may not be able to actually screw it in over the processor, but you should be able to on the other daughter card (I forget what it is off the top of my head). You're a smart guy, I'm sure you can come up with an ingenious mounting method.
It looks like the heat sink will run you about $10 from PBFixIt, should you decide to give it a shot.
pismo
I may hold out for a pismo logic board and case and make a frankenbook. I wouldn't mind having Firewire, Airport, and updateable Open Firmware.