9 January 2001
The PowerBook has landed! While I was watching anxiously for the FedEx truck yesterday morning, it snuck around the back road, and I got a phone call just as I was wondering if it would ever come, telling me it had arrived. I walked as fast as my healing foot would carry me down to the warehouse and collected it. Then I went back to the office long enough to gloat a little, and then I headed home (taking a bit of ribbing from the managers who were meeting at the lobby conference table: "You've been here three hours and you're going home already? Must be nice!")
I spent the rest of the morning, and a great deal of the afternoon, playing with it. The AirPort (wireless internet) card installed quite easily, though I had a little trouble locating the antenna plug. (It had been plugged into a sort of holder, which made me worry that I was unplugging something important. But it was the only thing that looked even vaguely like the picture in the instruction book, so I took the chance, and it turned out all right.) I sent some iCards before lunch.
Matt had put together a web page of links to software he thought would be useful, so I started downloading things, playing with settings, and generally getting the whole thing set up to my liking. (I'm still working on that part, actually. I figure it'll be a week or two before I really feel "at home" on it.)
I named it Atalanta. Atalanta was an athletic Greek princess who swore she would only marry the man who could beat her in a footrace - those who tried and failed were killed for their trouble. She was finally defeated by a man with three golden apples that he threw to the sides of the track to distract her and slow her down. It works on a lot of levels for me: Obviously, Atalanta was a big pomonaphile, which ties into the fact that this is an Apple computer. Also, Matt names all his Macs with names beginning with the letter "M" - "M" for Macintosh; I figure my theme could be "A" for Apple. And finally, I remember reading somewhere (though I can't remember where) a theory that the "golden apples" - which crop up pretty frequently in Greek mythology, actually - were actually oranges, which are of course pretty rare in Greece. Given that my aesthetics were crying out for a tangerine iBook, the orange connection works, too. I'm pretty pleased.
(Heck, if I still like the theme when I get my next Mac - hopefully some years from now! - I can name it Aphrodite, after the goddess who won a golden apple in the beauty contest which sparked the Trojan War!)
Anyway, I packed Atalanta away long enough to go to my foot doctor appointment - he says I'm healing very fast and doing extremely well, thank you - and then so we could meet Braz, Kris, Jeremy, and Elizabeth for Kris' birthday dinner. We went to Outback, then back over to the Brandts for some cake.
We were a bit late meeting everyone at Outback, not because I was lollygagging around on the computer, but because we got halfway down the road and suddenly remembered we'd left Kris' birthday present at home. Not only at home, but still unwrapped. So we had to dash back home, find it, and wrap it before heading back toward the restaurant. Oops!
When we got home, the Hall was still going. I was still busily downloading things, so I didn't try to actually play on the Hall, but I sat on the side-channel and chatted while playing with the settings of the IRC client and running installation programs. (By the way, Macs have the coolest installs in the universe. I must have installed about ten different programs yesterday. I only had to reboot twice.)
This morning, I slid Matt's Zip drive into my expansion bay and somewhat nervously inserted a disk. Hey! It worked! (I wasn't sure the Zip drivers had been installed.) The idea was that since I can't connect the Mac to the internet at work (oh, all right, technically I could, but our IT people are a little uptight and I don't want to deal with the hassle) then the only way it would do me any good to bring it to work would be if I had access to a Zip drive so I could copy files from my work machine to the PowerBook. Since the Zip drive works, ta-da! I brought the PowerBook to work.
But I really do mean to get some actual work done.
Stop looking at me like that! Really! I mean it!
(If nothing else, I've got five hours from yesterday to make up by the end of the week.)
So yeah, I'm sorry, I know it'll be astonishingly boring to you all, but I'm going to be sortof obsessed with the PowerBook for a little while. I'll try not to talk about it too much more, but it's going to be sucking up a pretty substantial portion of my time, so there may not be much else worth mentioning. So if I have short entries for a few days, that's why.
Word of the Day:
pomonaphile - lover of apples
Currently Reading:
- between books
Current Projects:
- playing with my PowerBook
- various crochet projects that haven't actually been started yet