| Tuesday,
July 20, 2004
SPACE DAY
Going home, leaving shortly. Mail when I get home. In case you are
wondering, BYTE.COM has been the victim of a cat: the managing editor's cat
knocked over a glass of water into her laptop and that fried up the copy
edited issue just before it was sent in, and the usual happened. There are
backups and all will be well shortly. And if you are thinking "She ought to
have been making backups at every stage," we all know that, and we never
ever wait to get the job finished before making backups do we?
Didn't bring the Mac this time, but I will try that newest Macromedia
FrontPage substitute and see how that works; the Mac is a good laptop. Down
here I have a good keyboard and monitor and mouse so any laptop has good
peripherals. I don't keep a computer down here. I carry the TabletPC on
walks and it does work for taking notes and such like. I
suppose I could train the Mac to be Roberta's laptop. She has used Macs for
a long time. But we need to get her a machine of her own, even though all
it's really used for is mail and web browsing. Since I use the Mac sometimes
when she's down here and I am not, I'd have to get her another one, and the
15" is pretty expensive for a simple mail/web machine. Besides, I don't
think it plays FreeCell... ========== Home I
am. Tons of stuff to catch up with.
====== Resurrection: There
is nothing wrong with King Armadillo, the somewhat ancient Armada laptop,
and thus no reason to buy a new one. When I got home I put the machine into
the docking station. A charging light went on, so I turned him on and he
came up immediately. The Windows power meter said the internal battery was
at 0% charge, but it was happily running on mains power.
Inspection followed. Nothing I could see about the computer was unusual.
However, I did find that the line on the low voltage side of the power
supply is frayed, and may even have been shorted. I have done a repair on
that line and taped everything and my voltage meters tell me that the power
supply is delivering power, but I suspect I need to buy a new power supply,
and while I am at it, a spare battery. Both will be a lot cheaper than a new
laptop. The computer is fine. It was entirely discharged, yet
it didn't warn us about impending shutdown: my guess is that just enough
power was getting through to make the machine believe it was running on
mains power, but not enough actually to charge the battery or run the
machine: the result was that it got down to the last of the power and "Pop!"
turned itself off; and since the power supply was not delivering power that
was that. It's a guess. In any event I'll do a more thorough
repair on the power supply deliver line and see if that fixes things, but it
won't hurt to order a new power supply as well. I used to recommend the
Compaq Armada laptops as the kind of machine I liked to set up in the hotel
room and use to write on: a bit heavy to carry about to meetings, but a
solid keyboard, good screen, and while the graphics weren't fast enough for
Everquest it would do almost anything else you wanted on line. It's still
good enough for Roberta's needs, so I guess she doesn't get a new laptop
after all... Hollywood Bowl tonight.
The new structure is I am sure better, but I miss the old kludgey one with
the spheres and such. I also miss having the orchestra on risers at the back
so that we can see some of the woodwind and horn players. And
there are now enormous TV screens on each side of the stage with a demented
director changing views every five seconds in an effort to see just how much
distraction he can add. Why?
Tuesday TOP
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