18 January 1998: Happy Birthday To Me!

Sunday, 18 January 1998:

Happy Birthday To Me!

Okay, okay, so my birthday was actually Friday; but I haven't been able to write since Wednesday!

The best news to report is that I've installed my new hard drive in my Mac, and it seems to be working fine. This one is a "Quantum" drive, as opposed to the old one which was a "Seagate" drive; I don't know what the difference is, other than a $50 price difference from APS. The new drive cost me $230 (including shipping) for 2 GB, which seems reasonable. It turned out to be easy to install (a friend helped, but it was still pretty simple), and it's working pretty reliably so far (over the last 2 hours).

It's going to take me at least another evening to get everything fully set up; although I didn't lose much actual data in the crash, I did lose a bunch of setup stuff, such as part of my Web browser bookmarks file, and my mirror config info for my Web pages. So tonight I'm writing this actual entry on the server, and I'll download it to my Mac tomorrow.

Although I was fortunate not to lose much data, I think I am going to start backing up my Mac's Documents folder every Sunday from now on.

I'm also going to keep trying to get through to my Mac's warranty folks to see if they'll do anything about the original drive.

I had another problem pop up last week: I'm having trouble with the Pobox.com relayer I've been using; it was losing some of my mail, and delaying others for hours, sometimes days. Obviously this is Not Good. Truthfully, I might dump Pobox anyway, since it turns out that it's a cheap and effective solution to a problem I don't really have. So sometime soon you may see all my links go back to msn.fullfeed.com - but not for a few days, anyway.

This hasn't been my year. The lost mail problem resulted in broken dinner plans with a friend of mine on Thursday, which sucked - especially for her, since she went to the restaurant and I didn't (because I didn't know which one had been decided on). I think she was upset - and rightly so - and I wasn't too happy either. Sigh.

Well, this weekend has been a step forward, anyway. Friday I turned 29, and I had a nice birthday. Work was fairly mellow and productive (all at once!), and in the evening my friend Karen took me out to dinner for my birthday, which was fun. It was a nice, restful time.

I got some gifts from my family the night before, and I've been enjoying some new CDs (by James Taylor, Jackson Browne, and the soundtrack to The Shawshank Redemption), and I have more books to read - of course.

Yesterday I took advantage of Pegasus Games' 20% discount on your birthday or the day after to pick up a number of games. I bought Serenissima, British Rails, Colorado Rails (a different game system from Brit Rails), Pass The Bomb, and a charming game from "Cheap Ass Games" called Give Me The Brain (only $5.00!). Today I had folks over to play games, and we played Brain, as well as Rail Baron and The Great Dalmuti, and had a good time. I'll tackle the others in the future, I'm sure.

Unfortunately, Colorado Rails turned out to be missing some pieces, so I'll try to exchange it tomorrow...

Oh, yeah; and I stopped off in a used bookstore yesterday and had the misfortune to find several hardcover books I wanted, including Fahrenheit 451 and the complete set of C. J. Cherryh's Faded Sun trilogy.

So, I guess things are getting back to normal, or something like that. My next project is to take the cats to the vet to get weighed, and see if the vet thinks they're losing weight (which they're supposed to), and if they're losing too much weight (Newton looks pretty thin, but he doesn't act unhealthy in any way).

After that, I don't know. Which is a good thing, not to have any "must-do" projects on tap. It will let me take stock of where I am, and try to get myself together. Phew!

Michael Rawdon (Contact)