Entries from December 2005 ↓

My wife and I have been planning on driving down to Atlanta to buy some more of our bedroom furniture from IKEA. Luckily we picked a good time to go. We both received nice sums of cash for Christmas from our respective families, and my wife lucked out in our first ever trip to the Bingo Hall in Blue Ridge, GA. She wasn’t the big winner for the night ($500), but she was the only Bingo for the game she won. Now we have a little extra fundage for our upstairs. That makes this an even better holiday season.

Tags: Bingo, Christmas, IKEA, Luck

I am now the proud owner of a PowerBook. It may be an old, long in the tooth PowerBook G3, but it’s still a PowerBook dammit. There are some people who consider this model to be one of Apple’s best in terms of industrial design and usability.

The reason I’m now part of the PowerBook in-crowd is because my aunt just purchased a new iBook after she ran into some problems with this machine. The so called “Mac Genius” who waited on her at the Apple Store in Nashville told her she would need to buy a new hard drive and reinstall OS 9 to get the PowerBook running again. She didn’t feel like going through that process. I told her I could help her out with the upgrades and reinstall—she offered it to me instead.

After picking up this machine from her house last week, I powered this sucker on to see if I could diagnose the problem. It seemed to boot up fine, which led me to believe that the hard drive was intact. It was only after the Finder tried to load that this PowerBook locked up. I promptly looked the error message up in Google to see if there were any answers out on the Interweb. Lucky for me the first result that popped up offered a solution. So after about 15 minutes of work I had this laptop back up and running. Who’s the “Mac Genius” now?

After getting the PB running again, I decided to do a little research on installing Tiger and setting up wireless networking with it. It seems that these Powerbook G3’s run Tiger just fine. I did go out and buy a new 512MB ram stick from MacAuthority here in town. I knew 64MB just wasn’t going to cut it. I also found this article on “Pismos” at LowEndMac which mentioned this Belkin 802.11g wireless card as being compatible with AirPort. The only thing left is to upgrade the hard drive once I buy a new one for my Mac mini.

I’m pretty excited about this new PowerBook (well, new to me at least). I’ve never owned a laptop, let alone one that had wireless Internet access. I think this will allow me to post more to my blog now that I don’t have to tied down to my desktop. It’s also going to come in handy for traveling and to use as a portable workstation. It may not be super powerful, but it’ll be enough for what I want to get out of a portable machine.

Tags: Apple, Mac, PowerBook

I’ve been a bit consumed lately by the succubus that is Azeroth. I downloaded the demo for WoW back about a week before Thanksgiving. I haven’t stopped playing it since. I was so addicted during the demo, I made my mom go out on Thanksgiving weekend to pick up the retail copy of WoW at Best Buy. If that’s not sick, I don’t know what is. I do have two pretty decent characters to show for my absence around here. I have a level 16 Troll Hunter and a level 8 Tauren Druid. Hopefully I’ll get back to posting on a more regular basis (regular for me anyway). Until then, For the Horde!

Tags: Blizzard, MMORPG, World of Warcraft, WoW

Well, it looks like the annual Pro Bowl teams have been announced. I never really expected the Titans to get more than one player selected this year. Unfortunately, it seems the Titans most deserving player, Kyle Vanden Bosch, was snubbed by both the players and coaches. The fans, on the other hand, actually cared enough to take a look at his stats and performance this season. They didn’t just blindly pick the same names that are always in the Pro Bowl year in and year out.

Keith Bulluck remained very polite and congratulatory during his interviews yesterday. Keith more than likely wanted to call “bullshit” on the whole process, but he thought better of it since I’m sure he would like to go back to Hawaii one day.

“Those guys that went, I’m sure they deserved to go because of how they’ve been playing and the fact that their teams are winning.”

Yeah Keith, I’m sure Jason Taylor deserves to go to his umpteenth Pro Bowl since the Dolphins are so stellar this year. The Pro Bowl voting is such crap. Every year it’s the same guys. It’s sort of like the local elections—the coaches and players keep voting for the same names no matter what. It’s a great system.

Tags: NFL, Titans

I finally opened the wallet and grabbed one of the Dell 2005FPW flat-panel displays while they were on special this week. My wife and I have been talking about purchasing a new display ever since we bought our Mac mini in August. We’d been thinking about “rollin’ deep” with 20“ Apple Cinema Display (ACD), but we were also considering the Dell as an option. The major plus about the ACD is that it would have totally kept the Apple look and feel consistent. The only bad thing about it is the dreaded ”Apple Premium“. Was it really worth $350 more to get a display that completely matched my system?

As you can tell, I’m not so blinded by the allure of Apple. The 2005FPW is, for all intent and purposes, the same display as the ACD. I just didn’t feel like getting road hard and put up wet over it. This display rocks so far. It makes my creaky 19” CRT seem like a pile of sludge. I hadn’t realized how bad that monitor was getting. I have a feeling my wife will think the same thing once she puts some time in on the computer this weekend.

Rating so far: 8.5/10

Tags: Dell 2005FPW, Displays, Macintosh, Apple Cinema Display