Rants/Raves

Robert Gates! Finally a man with cojones and a sense of principle in our government!

I am very interested to see where this guy leads us. I just hope we get a similar decent administration in the next election.

I have to say - I am extremely impressed with Warren Buffett's latest move. He is practically giving away 85% of his fortune for a good cause.

I cannot fathom 37 billion! Imagine, Mr. Buffett could have made everyone in USA who wasn't already a millionaire a millionaire and still have a few billion $$ left over.

Anyway, Buffett and Gates have my sincere respect through their philanthropic efforts. This is definitely going to have some positive effects for the less fortunate.

Gates Foundation

Well I got my laptop back today with a spankin brand new hard drive. Plus they re-installed 10.3.3 on it with their disks.

I spent about 4 hours configuring it when I realized that I didn't have iphoto, probably due to their install. (the version 4 that I used for all my digital camera photos.) Which means I've only got 2.01 which comes with their install and I can just forget about trying to load any of my photos back on the machine. ARRGGG!

So I found I could restore apps, but turns out its all of ilife package but iphoto. Whats a deaf dude like me gonna do with garageband anyway??

Sweating the alternatives: purchase ilife for a whopping $99 just so I can use iPhoto? I think not. Or, restoring with my original DVDs and start the painstaking process of reconfiguring all over again.

All worked out ok because a friend of mine pointed me to this page:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=42995

Which explains how to install individual packages - So I got iPhoto working again at version 4.0.3.

Boy that was a close one, I was just about to toss Apple and Steve Jobs in the basket where Windblows and Bill Gates has been collecting dust for some time.

APPLE ROCKS!

You know how painful... well torturous it is to sit for 4 hours troubleshooting a stinkin windows 98 machine on dial-up. God this machine was about 5 or 6 years old!

I kept telling her - you have got to get a new machine, embrace the future and get broadband too. I just don't have the time to tinker over a registry bloated, virus infested machine for few hours and still not be able to improve it some.

Last straw - she's about to go out of her mind trying to do something as simple as download and read her email.

My sis and I got her a Mac Mini, so this morning I took it over and set it up for her and started showing her the basics. Her comment was "It's so easy, it's almost scary." I rest my case!

She is getting broadband next week - Hallelujah! Gonna need to get her in a hyperbaric chamber after couple of days of broadband. ;)

One of the things I really enjoy is sitting at a cafe with laptop in front of me, Americano to the left and watching people hang around the shop. Little do they know that I can read lips very well from a distance. I try not to make it a habit to stare at people but its an advantage that I have.

Discipline pulls my focus away and to the computer. But its fun to see a lot of people, different faces, different backgrounds - its a comfort that allows me to sit at the computer for hours on end, working.

I used to work at kinko's photolab on the University Avenue in Seattle. This little one hour photo mat was at the front of the store so you can stand and watch all the interesting, and different kinds of people walk by.