The Mac Goes Home

The Mac Saga has finally come to an end of sorts.

Readers¹ may remember that I foolishly got involved in the process of determining why Mrs Stevie's elder brother, Bil the Elder, couldn't use his G4 Power Mac (Gigabit Ethernet)² to access his Yahoo mail or download any interesting images that took his fancy. What can I say? Take a man's e-mail and you take away his voice. Take away his BarelyLegalTeens³ and you assault the very bastions of democracy and undermine the foundations of what makes this nation great IMHO etc.

I won't recap the various hardships that have been par for the course as I attempted to trick what I came to call the iBrik into booting up and staying that way for more than a few minutes at a time. You can do that yourself by selecting The Great Mac G4 Debacle from the "themes" list and reading from the bottom up⁴. I will recount only the events that came to pass over Monday evening, when I set the computer up on our coffee table and researched almost all the help documents stored on it, and Tuesday, when I got it to connect to the internet and I made a posting to a site using it.

After closing out the "help" facility on Monday night and finding nothing illuminating, I launched Norton Utilities and let it have a bash at analysing the system. Couldn't hurt, I thought. The first thing it called out was that the date on the machine was currently set to the first of January, 1901. "Wow", I said (to no-one in particular). "The bios battery must be dead."

"What does that mean?" asked Mrs Stevie, as always, hanging on every involuntary outburst in the hope of discovering some reason for violence. Since about the third month of our marriage, the woman has developed an addiction to lethally strong coffee which fuels homicidal rages in her that can explode for little or no reason. The recent forgotten anniversary has had her on a hair trigger, for example, even though it was the first time in twenty years I have done that. I tried to defuse the situation at the time with a witty remark that after twenty years one of us should be getting the Medal of Honor, but that only seemed to make her even more unreasonable. I digress.

"The battery keeps the computer from forgetting what day it is" I replied. "No battery, no memory. The computer thinks it is New Year's Day 1901 every time it wakes up."

There then came the internal clanking and grinding that means Mr Brain has spotted something relevant and is trying to connect the dots. This time it didn't get the chance, as Mrs Stevie decided to use a tactic I often come across in my work environment - wait until all the real work has been done, then jump in at the last minute to claim all the credit.

"Maybe that's why it won't talk to the internet then" she said with a tone of smug finality, well aware she had just ruined what little fun was to be salvaged from this whole sorry business.

I sat there gnashing my teeth. It was obvious that the TCP/IP chit-chat between the modem and the Mac wouldn't work if each time the modem asked if they could talk the computer responded by answering 106 years ago. The time-out built into most TCP/IP exchanges is on the order of microseconds or less. Mrs Stevie couldn’t wait and let Mr Brain figure it out. Oh no. She had to butt in with her conclusions based entirely on some spurious experience with some web-based bank software she uses at work that had absolutely no relevance to this case but by chance happened to have the same answer. It was like using a cheat book to solve one puzzle in a "Myst" game. It completely deflated the sense of achievement.

On Tuesday I had the day off to vote⁵ so I went down to Radio Shack with the Stevieling in tow to buy a new bios battery for the Mac. The battery, following the design philosophy used in every other part in the machine, cost $20. It was approximately 1/3 the size of an AA battery and cost approximately 2 000% more. As I say, this follows the design concept used throughout on this particular machine. I was so amazed that the battery was still being made that I ponied up the purchase price with only a muted scream of agony. I am obviously growing immune to Macenomics. Had the machine spent any longer in my house I quite likely would start looking upon "hard-to-find" and "costs-an-arm-and-a-leg" to be acceptable downsides to the joy to be had from just looking at the Mac.

Once the Lithium-Diamond battery was in place and I had the date and time adjusted properly, the machine began to connect to my modem with relative ease⁶. Then it was a voyage of discovery to try and stop the OS crashing every time a page was loaded.

Bil the Elder had his home page defined as Optimum Online's splash page. That wouldn't load for me using his Netscape browser. Occasionally, Netscape would try and link to AOL.com, with disastrous results. If I didn't stop the page loading in time, it would announce that the page couldn't be viewed using this version of Netscape, which would cause the browser to launch some sort of utility, which in turn would freeze OS 9 and require an IFR⁷. Nor would the newest version of Netscape run on OS 9. I tried Firefox's page, but it also won't run on OS 9. I managed to change the default Homepage for the Netscape browser to Google in the end, but it was a tough fight for dominance between man and machine in a World Gone Mad, let me tell you.

I switched back to my trusty inferior design, loathsomely Windows-infested Compaq so that I could browse a few tech forums before the year was out, and I asked a few net acquaintances I trust⁸ what I might do. The consensus was that adding more memory to the machine couldn't hurt (all those Error1/2/3 messages meant "You're out of memory, Bub") and would allow a switch to OS X - version 10.3 seemed to be the likeliest to work on such an antique. The problem, as was pointed out to me by rab, one of the team advising me, was finding someone who could sell me a copy.

That turned out to be less of a problem than either of us imagined, because Bil the Elder turned up around 7 pm to reclaim his computer. He was delighted and surprised that it was working again. I was puzzled as to why he had suddenly appeared on our doorstep. Bil the Elder explained that Mrs Stevie had phoned him earlier.

"Come and get your computer. It's fixed" she said.

"Fixed? You mean it's working?" he asked in amazement⁹.

"It's working."

"How? What was wrong with it? What did Stevie do to get it working?" he asked.

"That idiot? Nothing. I figured out that the date was wrong in it. All it needed was a new battery. I don't know what all the fuss was about really" she purred, smugly. "Oh, I tell a lie: He did break your monitor stand. He fixed it but it looks a right mess".

I walked Bil the Elder through some basics, like how not to use the cord of the mouse to tie it to anything, how to get the pictures out of his camera and onto the machine and the advisability of using an external drive to copy everything to before he does any kind of software upgrade, and he left clutching the iBrik.

The house seems so big and empty now

1. Our circulation here at TOS has been verified at somewhere between four and five, Steve the Oracle having been spotted in the wild and confirmed as still visiting once in a while and Paul the Globetrotting Wargamer now engaged in a frenzied search for libels in these pages vis-a-vis his good self on an almost weekly basis. Hello Paul↑
2. For such it is↑
3. Documentation on file with the webmaster to prove everyone involved is, no matter how barely, of legal age↑
4. As we do in blogs, though it makes no sense to me. Why don't blogs display as "bottom-appended" lists of entries, positioning the reader at the latest (bottom-most) entry by default? Much easier to read from the top down than from the bottom up↑
5. Which I couldn't, not being a citizen↑
6. Relative to the weekend, when it wouldn't do so no matter what I did. One should not infer any sort of absolute ease here↑
7. Index Finger Reboot↑
8. Thanks Dunx, Raak, rab and Dan↑
9. I confess to being a little disappointed in Bil the Elder's lack of respect for my abilities here. Although it is true that I honestly despaired of ever getting the damn thing running properly again, he doesn't know that↑

Whingeing, Whining, OS Nining

I spent pretty much all day Saturday wrestling with Bil the Elder's Mac G4, trying to trick it into connecting to my broadband modem.

I have no idea how Mac computers of this or any vintage work, so the process was a voyage of discovery from the get-go. An what a voyage! What discoveries! Vistas of knowledge opened before me in a veritable cascade of stuff previously unknown.

Not

The much-vaunted Mac help system was about as unhelpful as Microsoft's for a start. People I trust and respect have been telling me for years that these computers were easier to use than PCs running Windows, and I (still) believe that they found them so. I, however, have seen no evidence whatsoever of easierness, and nowhere was this more evident that the help. Of course, the Microsoft help was developed into what it is now over several years and the Mac help I was looking at was 4 years old so it probably was "better" (in some as yet unobvious way) then.

I knew what needed to be done inasmuch as TCP/IP needed to be set up so the machine would passively accept an address from the modem. This is resolutely would not do. The settings were straightforward, except for the annoyance of not being an administrator. I found out how to switch to administrative rights for each job, but I didn't find any way of staying with them across the various little tasks that had to be done. No doubt there is a way of signing on to the machine as an admin but I don't know how and I don't doubt Bil the Elder doesn't either.

Most of the time was spent fruitlessly searching the internet trying to find someone, anyone who had connected a Mac to Optimum Online using OS9. Nothing. For all the info on the 'net, Bil the Elder is the only person in the world trying to use Optimum Online via a G4 running OS9. It has been one of the most frustrating experiences I've gone through in a long while.

The biggest laugh was seeing a network wizard pop up to offer help. I've been listening for years to Applejax whine about Microsoft’s use of Wizards, and how only fools would invent them because they encourage the untrained to do stuff only a skilled computer technician should yaddayaddayadda. One more Dirty Little Mac Secret outed there then. In all fairness, the G4 didn't insist I use the wizard, whereas XP assumes you will want to use one, but most of the time the XP assumption is a good one. You can do Wizard-enabled jobs on XP without the wizards, if you know how.

And thereby hangs the nub of the horse I'm changing in mid-flagpole. I don't know my way around OS9 and the OS isn't helping me nearly as much as I hoped it would, not nearly as much as XP would in the same circumstances. I've no doubt someone out there could simply walk over, type a couple of lines and it would burst into internetty life, but if they are out there, they are being very quiet, at least, quiet on the nets.

So no internet for Bil the Elder yet then.

The camera "issue" turned out to be nothing more than a mis-communication. The software that wouldn't load was only for XP. I have no idea what the disk contained other than USB drivers, but the camera is accessible as a detachable drive when connected to the G4. It pops up on the desktop and if one knows where to look (I do) one can find the pictures in it and cherry-pick them onto the computer using drag-and-drop. The camera works (albeit in the most basic way imaginable) on the G4. I went to the Samsung website to see if a Mac-compatible "library" program like that given away with Kodak cameras was available for download, but Samsung, taking a leaf from Apple's playbook, have discontinued support for the camera two years after selling it to us and make no mention of it.

This has been a big disappointment, to be honest. I originally went round for a look at things to see if I could figure out what was wrong with Bil the Elder's internet connectivity, then removed the power supply to save him the cost of a $250-300"Bench Charge", ended up buying and fitting first one, then another power supply to finally get the thing unbricked, replaced the mouse, repaired the monitor stand that broke when the monitor realised what an utter piece of crap the G4 really was and committed suicide and I still haven't gotten Bil the Elder his interwebs back.

Intolerable.

Metalworking For Mac Users

So last night it was back to the workshop to fix the design flaws inherent in the stand for the Mac Studio Monitor.

As soon as I got in from my evening commute, right after I washed of the 2 inches of bird excrement that had been deposited on the windows of my car that day¹, I descended into the basement and once again went through the elaborate ritual needed to remove the stand from the Monitor of Damocles. I then located the last two aluminum plates I possessed² and began the process of turning them into a businesslike repair.

Each plate would end up as a 2.75 inch long, 1.5 inch wide affair, roughly trapezoidal but each end sloping at different angles and with a deep arc cut into the "short" long side so it would snug up to the center of the stand (recall that the new crack has formed running inwards, threatening to break into the center of the stand, so the plates must be set deeper in towards the center than the first repair). Mr Hacksaw mad short work of the various sloping cuts, and by cutting a series of slots into what would be the arc I was able to use it for getting out most of the metal there too. Then it was up to Mr Elbow Grease and Mr Half-Round File to achieve a professional-looking curve. Once again each plate was carefully bent by hand to the compound curve of the stand, glued in place with Gorilla Glue and clamped for a couple of hours during which I ate, watched "CSI" and sulked. Around midnight I drilled some holes and bolted the plates together.

Whoopee. Another successful repair achieved.

Overnight, Mr Brain mulled the problem of the Ever-Snapping Monitor Non-Support Of Stupidity instead of shutting down while I slept, with the result that although I passed out for seven hours or so, I feel like I just pulled an all-nighter. Magic.

What I've come up with is less than stellar. The problem is that too much of the weight is balanced over the front "legs" of the stand, causing the legs to try and spread when the monitor is on it. It is inevitable that now I have prevented the bloody thing breaking at its weakest spots, it will eventually break at the next weakest spot. The design is fundamentally flawed to the point of uselessness, and needs supplementing to remain functional. I tried various mock-ups for an aluminum strap running between the legs and holding them together, but I couldn't find a place to attach it without requiring a bend in the strap or screws in the part that rests on the bench. The former will mean the strap can flex, rendering it useless, and the latter will mar the surface the stand is set upon.

The only other things I could come up with were a triangular arrangement of blocks on a baseboard that the stand would sit in and the iBlox. The baseboard idea works by preventing the legs spreading. The legs start to widen, then engage in the blocks that stop them moving any more. The iBlox simply let the stand sag a small distance (less than a millimeter I'm thinking) and then provide support at the stand center where it should have been all along. The down side of that is that the point of contact is the locking boss for the stand, which, being made of plastic, could be damaged by having weight put on it.

It's all very annoying.

1. I did this to avoid getting crap inside my doors when I wound down the windows, which I would have to do since I literally could not see through them any other way, and to put me in the mood for jousting with the idiotic design of the monitor stand↑
2. one of the annoyances of this business is that it has exhausted my stock of small aluminum plates kept around for quick repair jobs. Now I shall have to find some more↑

More Mac Nonsense

Last night I put the finishing touches to the repair of the stand for Bil the Elder's Mac Studio Monitor.

It involved more Gorilla Glue, some drilling and a bunch of nuts and bolts, but around midnight I was able to set the monitor upright on its stand and it didn't collapse in a heap again! A great triumph was declared and I went to bed.

Today, before work, I decided to see if Bil the Elder's Mac would talk to the internet if I connected it to my broadband modem. I carried it upstairs to my small, crowded computer room, placed the processor in an out of the way place, improvised a desk for the mouse and keyboard from a chair and positioned the newly repaired monitor on the floor. I pulled my own hateful, inferior-design Compaq Wintel box¹ out of its slot and unplugged the ethernet connection between it and the modem. I plugged this into the Mac and booted.

Once again I heard the horrible tinny boot noise come from the box, but this time there was absolutely no writing on the monitor. Nothing. The little Apple button was alight and so were the two control buttons³, but there was nothing at all on the screen itself.

Had I seen The Black Screen of (Monitor) Death, yet another under discussed known problem hidden by the Apple community, chained in some attic room where no-one could see it and comment? Had I killed the monitor completely by the simple act of relocating it spatially? All these things, formerly thought impossible but now well within the realms of the almost inevitable were racing through Mr Brain.

Perhaps the answer was more simple. Perhaps I had somehow inadvertantly turned down the brightness and so just was not seeing the images that were being displayed normally. I reached down but could not reach the settings control button comfortably, so I carefully reached under the monitor and lifted it slightly while pulling it gently forward in order to tilt it a little further upward.

The monitor stand let out a sharp CRACK and I let out some sharp swear words.

Yes, the other side of the stand had broken. It had broken when I had reduced the load on the stand, obeying (once again) some bizarre Apple physics that work the opposite of the stuff normally in operation on a day-to-day basis.

I disconnected everything and carted the iBrik back down to the basement, where I went through the complex little dance needed to detach the 1960's pop-art sculpture from the bottom of the depleted uranium anvil it was "designed" to (almost) support⁴ and assess the damage.

The crack was, as expected, on the opposite "front leg/lobe" to the one I repaired fully last night by constructing a sandwich of custom made aluminum plates around the break and screwing it all together. I had had qualms last night as I finished the repair that the monitor designers had gone for a "Panther Tank" approach to the job, placing most of the weight over the front legs. The Germans faced this outcome of using the long 75mm cannon on the Panther, which pitched a great deal of weight onto the frontmost roadwheels. The monitor was now recapitulating the problems that arose from this design. On the tank, the front torsion bars had a tendency to snap giving the tank a nose-down aspect and reducing its battlefield utility. On the monitor, the front "legs" of the stand have a tendency to flex, twist and spread, causing the Plexiglas to fail and the monitor to adopt a drunken slouch to one side. They never did fix the Panther design, since it was late in the war, materials were scarce and the tank was otherwise so good at what it did that the benefits of the design outweighed the problems. The situation with the Mac is both similar and different. The problem doesn't get addressed because within a year any individual item is so retro no-one with any aesthetic sensibilities at all will tolerate whatever it is and Apple can simply remove the item from its catalog. Here also there are claims of superior design outweighing other concerns, but in all honesty, after rolling up my sleeves and getting my hands wet you couldn't prove it by me⁵.

The stand had begun to crack, but I was fortunate to have caught it before it failed totally this time. The crack only went across about half the width of the "leg". That was the good news. The fbleep this fbleeping fbleep-shbleep waste of fbleeping time news was that the crack ran back into the center of the stand, far enough back that I'm not sure a second cunning fix along the lines of the first will work at all. I'd replace the entire construct with some sort of plate and cup assembly, but the attachment mechanism is not a simple pin/bolt: It involves engaging a specially shaped flange on the stand in a specially shaped hole in the monitor, twisting the stand to "lock" it in place in its slot, then inserting a locking boss to stop people pulling the stand off unless they have a set of miniature screwdrivers like mine. It is all very tiresome.

There is no way I am going to spend any more money to replace the stand with an unbroken one of the same design.

Bil the Elder will no doubt blame me for breaking his computer. Maddeningly, there isn't any way I will be able to persuade him it simply yielded to time and abuse, but even my desire not to appear as one of the mass of people just waiting to cheat him is not great enough to overcome my absolute disgust at this so-called computer. I've replaced the power supply. I've replaced the mouse. If it were my own computer I would be concocting some Stevie-designed stand for the monitor or looking for a decently-priced LCD one⁶. Bil the Elder can replace his monitor if he sees fit. I won't. I'm done spending money on the thing.

It has been a long time since I hated a machine of any kind quite this much.

1. Which has given sterling service with only two lockups requiring a factory reinstall in five years. Yes that is excessive and a pain in the arse, but I now believe that five years is the total expected lifetime of the better-designed, more well-loved² Mac, at which point the user simply replaces the dead "better" hardware with the latest version↑
2. Well, outside Chateaû Stevie anyway↑
3. They glow with a scabrous, wan and altogether unholy radiance. Yet another reason to hate them↑
4. Before anyone writes to me to debate the inutility of the Mac Studio Monitor Display Stand and Abstract Visualization of Man's Struggle Against Adversity In A World Gone Mad (Or Something), be aware there are dozens of people publishing on the web using their own version of the iBlox↑
5. Power supply, fabricated from pure gold if the cost and mass are any indication, positioned directly above delicate motherboard. Superdense Monitor perched precariously on stand suitable for holding a small, helium-filled balloon. GUI so self-explanatory that after fooling for an hour I was no nearer discovering how to use hotkey screen navigation (no mouse d'y'see) than I was when I booted the thing for the first time. All the marks of epic great design there. Yep↑
6. Fat chance of that: I've learned the hard way that "Apple" and "Obscene Pricing" are synonyms↑

Just Call Me "Adrian Monk"

Last night I got three more techy computer books¹ in the mail from Amazon, including a "new" copy of Maurice Bach's The Design of the Unix Operating System.

That has two pages with highlighting on them.

I only paid half price for it, but I absolutely hate, loathe and detest the wuckfit habit of using a highlighter on a book in the hope it will mean you don't have to take notes. I bought this particular book because it was punted as new and not unreasonably priced². I have been trying off and on to get my hands on a copy of this since about 1990, when I first saw it, and was quite pleasantly surprised to see it back in print and widely available, but this has quite ruined the fun for me. I will have less cringe-factor when I read the very used "Building Storage Networks" which, while battered, only has the previous owner's name discretely written inside the cover. I was going to leave some negative feedback for the seller (I always try and give feedback, however useless it may become) when I noticed that the seller urged anyone with a problem to contact him before doing that, so I sent him a pointed but polite e-mail around 11 pm. The vendor replied about ten minutes later apologising for the problem, and he offered to either have m e return the book for a refund or keep it with an additional 10% discount. This entirely businesslike offer took the wind right out of my sails and I gratefully accepted it, since returning the book would leave me out of pocket. If only the LIRR could deal with customer relations in this way. "Commute buggered to hell and gone sir? how about we credit your visa with 50% of the day's commute cost?"

On the plus side, the new(ish) mouse for BiL the Elder's iBrik came today and I was able, by propping up the monitor on blocks of wood³ to provoke the wretched pile of crap to boot into it's horrible GUI⁴ and was able to actually do stuff. Not meaningful stuff, but stuff all the same.

I have to say that the experience of the Mac, for me, has not shown any of the "easierness" that is so often touted by Applejax. Indeed, my experience with it is that you need an electronics store, various glues, some aluminum sheet, a selection of screwdrivers, extra overpriced peripheral devices, an electric drill and a wallet stuffed with twenties just to browse the hard drive.

I spent the bits of time between eBaying and Amazoning putting Mr Brain to the task of devising a method for fixing the Apple Monitor Stand of Extreme Uselessness which, as I may have alluded, broke because the monitor felt it should be contributing more to the general G4 Jujuflop situation and collapsed under its own weight. I came up with a plan, which I am calling "The Plan (to fix Bil the Elder's Stupid Artsyfartsy Computer Monitor Stand So I Can Get the OYFOHE⁵ Out of My Life Forever and Get Back To The Paradise On Earth It Was Before I Ever Saw The Wretched Brick)".

Welding the plastic stand back together hadn't worked because the stresses on the joint were just too much in every conceivable direction. The weld got twisted, stretched and sheared as the Plexiglas flexed under the monitor's eight and a half ton mass⁶. What was needed was some way of supporting the two opposite sides of the join while preventing them slipping sideways or up and down and keeping them together against the tensile forces pulling them apart. I tried and rejected an Aluminum beam running under the arch of the "legs", then hit on the idea of two aluminum plates, one above the joint, one below, held in place with Gorilla Glue⁷ and fastened with two rows of nuts and bolts. The plates would spread the strain as the joint tried to twist and tear the bolts out of the plastic and help prevent new cracks forming around those bolts as a result of those forces. I chose aluminum because it was A) ductile enough to allow hand-shaping for conformance along the compound-curve of the plastic stand and 2) near at hand.

I took one of the aluminum plates I had in my non-ferrous metal supply bin, and using the slot formed by the separation from the main body of one of the leaves of the table I use for a workbench to gently work the required compound curve into the plate. Once the fit was reasonable, I traced out the edges of the stand on it with a pencil and cut it to shape using Mr Hacksaw, finishing the job by means of a half round and a bastard file. I glued this to the underside of the break after coating it sparingly with Gorilla Glue, and clamped it as best I could while the glue set up. The glue will not provide enough strength on its own. Actually, I expect the glue joint will fail quite rapidly since the Plexiglas offers little of a keying surface to grip to. Although I will take any added strength I can get, the glue is really only to hold everything in place for drilling and bolting. It is the sandwich that will provide strength in the major flex axis (up and down) and prevent twisting while the bolts provide the strength against shearing and tensile forces (smaller than the up/down force but significant). I shaped the top plate after dealing with the book problem, around midnight and once it was the right size and shape, called it a night and went to bed.

Azathoth, I hope this works. If it doesn't I will have to listen to Bil the Elder complain that I broke his computer despite my having actually resurrected the bloody thing, and I am fresh out of ideas other than junking the stand completely and designing a new one from steel or wood. Assuming it all works as planned the next job is to connect it to my cable modem to see if I can provoke it into talking to the internets. Bil the Elder's original complaint was, you may remember, that it wouldn't. He claims that was the case even before the OYFOHE iBrikked. We'll never know the real story since, like everyone not "computer literate" he didn't make a note of the error he was getting. Assuming I can get that part to work properly, step 3 is to install his digital camera software or know the reason why that didn't "just work" when we gave it to him.

Let's hope it all goes as planned and the evil anti-handyman spirits⁸ have better fish to fry.

1. I've been on a small spree, techy computer book acquisition wise of late↑
2. New, it costs almost $70 - for a description of the obsolete and then some SVR3 Unix operating system↑
3. Which I am thinking of marketing to poorboob G4 owners under the name "iBlox" for when their monitors collapse under their own weight↑
4. A thought occurs: if the Apple computer is such a delight to use, why has it seen first OS X and now the so-called "Leopard" replacements for it? Leopard is supposed to "add functionality" to the OS, but I thought OS9 "just worked", in which event, what extra "functionality" was needed? If it wasn't needed, it counts as "cruft", something Applejax are avowedly of the opinion is one of the evils of Windows↑
5. Overpriced Yuppie Fadmachine of Hideous Expense↑
6. Which would be approximately 4.4 Newton Hogsheads per Square Ohm Hectare in metric↑
7. The only adhesive I though stood a chance of binding two such materials together↑
8. Who, let's face it, aren't really needed with the OYFOHEs natural tendency to go nails-up at the drop of a hat↑

Well, That Worked!

Last night, at around 11:30 pm, I descended into my basement workshop took Bil the Elder's once broken but now carefully repaired Mac monitor and stood it upright on its 1960s pop-art Plexiglas stand.

It immediately snapped again.

Sunday Is Fix-It Day

Sunday dawned with the promise of advanced tool usage opportunities.

The Electric Magic Staff of Thundering was in pieces on the workbench, and I needed to formulate a plan to deal with it since it turned out that when the upper part had split open it had torn out some very small but very important wires. The thing had been assembled out of a set of half-staff parts that were glued together after the electronics were connected up. I had to decide whether to split the staff down its joint to do the repairs or do it some other clever way. I looked at the split, which crossed the glued seam at right(ish) angles and decided that I would be lucky if I could glue the split successfully, let alone split the staff again and glue it.

Cleverness was called for.

I glued up the split part using an industrial strength plastic solvent/welding glue containing a bunch of strongly controlled chemicals of known carcinogenic effect in the State of California. I was outside California though, so that was OK. Once I had the joint nice and molten and the two halves mated properly, I set them aside to dry and drank tea until the violent headache and hallucinations brought on by the glue fumes subsided. Perhaps more attention should be paid to the exhortation on the label to work only in well ventilated areas next time I used this product. I pondered the chances that the fumes would explode if I made more tea, and decided to do so anyway. If nothing else, valuable science would be done.

Mrs Stevie and the Stevieling had vacated the premises so I used the time to view the seminal work in the brutal rape followed by justified brutal axe-murder vengeance field: I Spit On Your Grave. The Stevieling remained by her own reports "totally freaked" after my having insisted she watch The Haunting with us on Thursday and in any event was far too young to be exposed to this sort of movie, and Mrs Stevie disapproves of brutal axe murder, even when totally justified and the axe-murderess is totally hot, so this was the perfect time. What can I say? The woman has no taste for the real meaning of Hallowe’en (naked hot women seeking brutal axe-murder vengeance in a World Gone Mad).

The movie ended just as the womenfolk returned and re-established their tyrannical rule, so I went outside to put the finishing touches to our Hallowe’en tableau - the black cat "flats" I put out on our lawn that are hard to see themselves but throw elongated, fast-moving shadows when cars pass. The effect is one of my greater successes in the Hallowe'en set-dressing field. Then it was downstairs to commence Staff Repair.

A short but very irritating interlude had to be taken when, having cleared my workbench of all the crap on it and moving the wretched OYFOHE¹ to the back so I had some room to work, I paused to reflect that at least I would soon be rid of one piece of useless junk. I completed the thought and glanced down at the monitor for it sitting on the floor, at which point it let out a sharp "CRACK" and sagged drunkenly on its stupid, artsy-farsty moulded Plexiglas stand. I picked it up and confirmed what I suspected: The Plexiglas had broken.

That's right. I broke this sorry-ass piece of junk by looking at it wrong.

The base for the OYFOHE's monitor follows the design ethic of the rest of the damn thing: form over function. It is balanced on a tripod formed from a ribbon of Plexiglas that swirls in an elegant, endless, three-lobed loop forming feet for the stand, with the usual tilt and rotate bearing at the top of it. It had always seemed to me to be overly flimsy for the not inconsiderable weight of the 17" monitor, and on examination it proved to be designed with a stupid weak spot in exactly the place it needed strength: the point just to one side of the bearing mount. The Plexiglas is about a quarter inch thick on the bits that form the feet, where it could have been thinner with little compromise in strength to my eyes. But where the three legs join to form the support for the monitor, the plexi thins to about 3/16ths of an inch. Gussets have been moulded in to strengthen the thing at this point, but a quick examination showed that over the years chez Bil the Elder, these gussets had suffered a series of minor nicks and bumps as they caught on whatever was under the stand. One of these nicks must have formed the weak spot that allowed the whole thing to fail.

I looked at this triumph of modern art and compared it to the utilitarian stands that each of my monitors has, none of which have broken and one of which is over ten years old, then I sighed and began to see if it could be fixed. I ended up using the same glue I used on the staff to melt the plexi and weld it together, but because it was a stupid shape, no clamp in the world would hold the joint while it set up and the base appears to have had internal stresses in it from the get-go because it preferentially adopted a join with a 1/32nd of an inch "sideslip" in it. I'm sorry to say I didn't do battle with this and hold it by hand until it set hard (which would have taken half an hour with the thicknesses involved) but let it do what it wanted. I harboured severe doubts that the glue would hold given the stresses the joint would be put under. No doubt a new support can be found for a few hundred dollars somewhere, but I'm done putting money into this waste of perfectly good sand.

What a total piece of crap this machine is. The next person who has the nerve to tell me how great a Mac is will find themselves being challenged to defend their agitprop with verifiable facts or eat their words. Windows computer owners buy new machines because the O/S becomes obsolete every 5 years or so. Mac owners crow about this, but they also talk about buying new Macs on about the same schedule and now I know why: the damned things break down and it is too fbleeping expensive to repair them.

The repair of the staff turned out to be very challenging indeed. The first challenge was to finally discover where the hell I had put my miniature screwdrivers that had been lost to me for Lo! these many weeks. I found them in a toolbox², grabbed a hemostat from my modelling toolbox and Mr Drill and began The Plan.

The actuating pushbutton seemed to work by contacting some sort of small circuit board which was held in place by screws. I would drill two holes a close as I could judge to being opposite the heads of those screws, then use the holes to gain access with a miniature Phillips-head screwdriver and undo the screws. The board would be recovered using the hemostat. I would solder in two new wires to replace the broken ones, feed them through the staff and solder them to the wires inside it and resolder the negative battery wire to the terminal. I would place the button assembly in its hole and position the board above it, use the hemostat to hold the screws in position and drive them in with the miniature screwdriver. It was elegantly simple.

And against all odds, it pretty much went as planned. The holes got drilled in the right places, the screws came out as planned and were not dropped on the floor and lost, the board was removed and the button assembly examined to figure out what it was doing when it was pressed⁴, the board repaired, resoldered and replaced with relative ease. The only hard parts were figuring out that the button had a keyway for some unknown reason and would only fit properly one way (but would fit improperly umpteen other ways) and trying to hold the board in place with one screwdriver while holding a screw with the hemostat and using another screwdriver to drive the screw despite only having two hands. It turns out the human hand is quite flexible and capable of a small amount of multitasking, and it all happened pretty much as planned without problems.

I had just finished when Mrs Stevie sounded the dinner gong and we all trooped upstairs for dinner over an early evening showing of The Innocents.

The Stevieling pronounced herself freaked all over again, and became abusive when I suggested, while trolling the DVD extras after the movie finished, that we purchase and view The Legend of Hell House, another psychological horror movie from the early 70s.

My work was done

1. Overpriced Yuppie Fadmachine Of Hideous Expense↑
2. Before you start snickering you should understand that I have several toolboxes³ and that this one was otherwise empty, fooling me into thinking it had nothing in it↑
3. Off the top of my head there is the yellow one with my electrical gear in it and the yellow one I thought was empty but actually had the screwdrivers in it and the grey one that has my modeling tools in it and the red one with my paints in it and the grey flat one that has my socket set in it and the red one that has my plumbing stuff in it and the red one that has doorknob replacement tools in it and the miniature workmate one that has the self-adjusting tools, some screwdrivers, an eggbeater drill and various other things in it and the blue one that has lead soldiers in it and the big rolling red one that has three drawers of tools and a top tray of tools and the base is full of screws↑
4. It turned out to be a little metal disk in a rubber cone that acted to stand it off from the circuit board that formed the switch. The button depressed the cone, the metal disc bridged a series of interleaved but isolated electrical tracks and current flowed through the switch thus formed↑

A Quite Productive Saturday

Tonight was the night Pete'n'Caroline were to have their Hallowe'en party.

Normally I would have been eager to get going at around 8 am, sorting out costuming and so forth since I am probably the world's biggest Hallowe'en junky. Today, however, my spirits were low on account of my having eaten food bought at a local Taco Shoppe. This food is just about guaranteed to give you an urgent reason to visit the water closet, sometimes for days on end, but I am addicted to their quesadillas and sometimes cannot gather the wit to consider the consequences. Today, those consequences would be a violent stomach ache and periodic moments of urgency, bowel-voiding wise. By evening my insides felt like they had been sandpapered then lightly salted and set on fire.

I tried not to let it get in the way of the day's chores, but I may have failed once or twice, such as when I gave my dry cleaner my shirts and replied to his jaunty "Next week all right?" by clutching my stomach, doubling over and screaming "Aaarrrgh!", and running from his place of business so that the ensuing flood of noxious bowel gasses didn't get a chance to combine with the chemicals in the air of his laundry and explode. I'm getting ahead of the day, though

I was woken from what little sleep I had had by the FedEx man bringing the right kind of power supply for Bil the Elder's wretched Mac, which has lain dead as a very dead dead thing on my basement workbench for Lo! these last eight weeks before I lost patience and fitted it with a working but not-quite-right power supply as detailed here. I immediately ran for the toilet, then went downstairs to strip out the working-but-wrong power supply and replace it with the hopefully working and right one. In about 30 minutes I once again had the dubious pleasure of seeing the Overpriced Yuppie Fadmachine Of Hideous Expense boot up, but was still unable to work on it owing to the mouse having been trashed by the tender mercies of Bil the Elder, who had managed to destroy the connecting cable by using it as a string to lash the mouse and keyboard together, dropping stuff on it (judging by the state of it) and putting it through a lye and gravel wash (judging by the marks on it).

I will pause here to remark on the mendacity of the Apple fanboy community that holds these machines to be superior in some way to the common PC. How many times have you had to listen to some applejack whining about The Blue Screen Of Death¹? Now, how many times have you heard them complain of the OS 9.earlyrelease habit of hanging if you Hovered the mouse pointer over a desktop icon too long? I'll bet "never" on that last one, but dig deep into the OS 9 "issues" boards over at Apple dotcom and it's a very different story. Oh yeah, Apple computers are "better" alright, providing you don't mention their inconvenient problems that is.

In any event, I went out afterward to the dry cleaner's and afterward did some light shopping for things to add to my costume of choice - Death.

I was fairly late out of the gate this year, and had done none of the elaborate, if futile² planning of last year. However, over the years we have amassed quite a wardrobe of dressup stuff, most of it for Hallowe'en and I had handy a Skull mask (one of those vinyl head-covering affairs) a long robe with a hood and a cord belt. I had secured a pair of Skeleton hand gloves on Friday night (just before the fateful menu choice) so I nipped into CVS to obtain a pair of black tights which I would fabricate under-sleeves from³ and while I was there I also picked up a huge plastic meat cleaver and a matching sickle. These looked great when hung from the belt. Job done.

The Stevieling had rejected outright any sort of family theme this year in favour of creating her own sorceress look, and Mrs Stevie had joined the mutiny and opted to wear her Ren Fayre gear. I was pretty disgusted with them all. You can get done up as a wench or whatever at any costume party. Hallowe'en is for making children start bedwetting again. If the child starts bedwetting at the sight of Mrs Stevie in her Ren Fayre togs that would be A) understandable and 2) no big deal because the reaction would be the same whatever Mrs Stevie was wearing. It only counts if you worked for the effect. Oh Well, I would work alone.

In addition to the various costumes we have, we have also amassed a small collection of props. This collection includes two plastic "wizard's staffs" which are topped with a monstrous claw clasping an opaque globe. The staff can be made to issue a thunderclap which is accompanied by the globe flashing in a satisfying manner, and it can be done with an unobtrusive switch so the seeming activation can be as elaborate or as simple as the user wishes to enhance the specific effect he or she is trying for in the viewer. The Stevieling lobbied to be allowed to use one of these and it was with great pleasure that I was able (for once) to reach into the basement and dig one out for her, which I fitted with batteries and tested for her.

We picked up the Stevieling's friend around 5:45 pm, put "War of the Worlds⁴" on the CD player to freak out the girls and set off for the party, arriving just after dark had fallen.

Pete'n'Caroline's humungous house⁵ was decorated outside with a very satisfying graveyard (rumour has it that next year their enormous front lawn will be one large graveyard) and we entered within to mixed reaction. Mrs Stevie and the Stevieling were welcomed with open arms. I was harangued and assaulted until I removed my skull mask for fear it would scare the bejayzuz out of the small children, several of whome were dashing around dressed as Thomas the Tank Engine, Giraffes, Horses and I don't know what else. The Stevieling and her friend went outside into the dark to play with the older kids.

And returned inside about 15 minutes later, the Stevieling's friend having lost her bracelet made of faceted black stones of some sort. Mrs Stevie marched out and by some chance found it almost immediately on the front lawn in the pitch dark.

The bracelet was lost again about 20 minutes later, and this time I recovered it with the aid of a flashlight that could put a dot on the moon. Appropos of this, I decided to box clever and said I would keep the bracelet for safekeeping. The Stevieling's friend proposed a different plan, by which she put it in her pocketbook. We agreed and I felt clever.

Until the Stevieling appeared with the shattered remains of my beloved magic staff in her hands.

When these were bought, about 8 years ago, they had a tendency to fire randomly because the springs in the battery compartment were too weak to maintain contact when the three "C" type cells were loaded. Intermittent contact caused the sound circuitry to trigger without the button being pressed, ruining the performance. It was all very irritating, so I fitted a stronger spring in each staff and cured the problem. What I hadn't thought about was what this would mean in terms of stresses on the body of the thing though. The way it was constructed, the spring would cause the staff to be stressed at the point where the battery door was fitted, where the "wall" of the hollow staff only went just over half way round the circumference.

I had warned The Stevieling that all the weight and mass was at one end, an that she needed to be a little carefull how she held and waved the staff because it could conceivably break⁶, and this advice was good because it had. Broken that is.

The Stevieling appeared almost in tears with a handful of batteries and, Azathoth be praised, all the component parts in her hands. I took a look, did an inner "Aarrgghh!" and said "It's okay, I can fix it" and went out into the cold again to put it in the trunk of the car, along with my costume which I decided to remove entirely⁷ in the interests of not being beaten up by irate parents of terrified, newly de-potty trained children. I wasn't really bothered. I had achieved the required reaction early on and the mask was too itchy anyway.

Not long after that my Taco Belly re-asserted itself and I spent large parts of the evening in the privacy of Pete'n'Caroline's bathroom begging for death.

It was, we agreed on the drive home, a great triumph.

1. Often enough to know that Applejacks have never used Windows XP, I'll bet↑
2. As it turned out↑
3. The one problem with doing Death is that bits of palid skin can poke through at the joints and spoile the effect. Covering my arms and wrists with black nylon would prevent the worst of it though↑
4. the Jeff Wayne version↑
5. Vincent Price large and well-suited to haunting↑
6. I was thinking it would give at one of the many joints, the staff being composed of four short, screw-together parts↑
7. I had remembered to wear something presentable under it thankfully↑

It Doesn't Get Any Better Than This

Oh wait: Yes it does.

The weekend got off to a bang on Friday evening. Mrs Stevie had called Bil the Elder and asked him to come round so he could return the keyboard and mouse to his Mac and I could continue trying to bring it back to life. Yes, that's right, at some point in the week, Bil the Elder had come round and removed the keyboard and mouse I had been turning the house upside down for. Why? Another of his "friends"¹ had an old iMac he was thinking of donating to the cause, but it didn't have a mouse or keyboard. Bil the Elder claimed that the G4 mouse and keyboard didn't work with the iMac, something I would have scoffed at out-of-hand a week ago but since having done battle with the G4 could now credit fully.

Bil the Elder arrived clutching the keyboard and mouse (having wrapped the mouse cord around the keyboard to keep everything together, a choice that would end up costing² dearly). He also brought the old, non functioning power supply³.

He looked at the G4 sitting on the old dining table I use as a workbench, and said "It's the wrong power supply".

"That's right" I answered. "I couldn't get an exact match. This was the nearest I could find."

"Well there's a plug missing" he noted, although in all fairness I had told him that before we came down into the basement.

"It's only used for a monitor. You don't need it. Your monitor gets its power through the same cord it gets its video signal." I said.

"But I need an extra plug. For the internet" keened Bil the Elder.

"You don't need an extra plug for the internet" I replied, somewhat testily I admit.

"Yes I do. I need an extra plug" he insisted.

"You don't need an extra plug for the internet" I said, becoming more exasperated by the nanosecond.

"They told me at the repair place⁴ that I needed an extra plug for power for my internet" he said, with an increased tone of firmness.

I had a sudden thought. "Show me this extra plug, on the dead power supply you have in your hand. Before you start, be aware that the power supply now residing in your formerly broken G4 has more plugs on it than the one you are holding up."

"This one" He said, pointing to the 22-pin motherboard power plug.

"So what you are trying to say is that your computer needs a 22-pin motherboard power plug rather than the 20-pin type? I asked.

"Yes" he answered, though to be honest I think he was guessing.

"Well, if you come and look you'll see that there are no spare pins on the motherboard socket. This power supply appears to be working fine, although there would seem to be some differences in supply voltages to various sub-components."

Bil the Elder's mouth opened to voice protest, and I hurriedly forestalled him.

"This power supply puts out a couple of volts less than the one in your hands used to, before it stopped putting out any volts whatsoever. I'm told this will prevent the computer booting. You can see it does boot, so there you go." I could see he still wasn't happy. I could not have cared less.

"Look" I snarled, "You've had eight weeks to buy yourself the correct power supply for this bloody thing. Eight weeks in which you've done absolutely nothing. It's not like it's costing you anything either. You need to shut up and give me the keyboard now." I admit to a slight lessening of patience with Bil the Elder. I'm not proud of that, but in my defense I would like to say I didn't go with my first instinct and simply throw the G4 at him⁵.

We connected the keyboard, which worked fine, and the mouse, which didn't.

The mouse seemed to work at first but then just stopped responding. Hmm, could the voltage difference be great enough to stop the USB mouse for working properly? I gave the mouse, a smoke-grey translucent affair, the once over. There was some sort of rotary switch on the base.

"What does this do?" I asked.

"Dunno."

Alright, well, all I needed to do was to close down the system gracefully, shoo away Bil the Elder and I could diagnose it later in peace.

"How do the shortcut keys work?" I asked. "How do I get into this menu using the keyboard?"

"Dunno. I always use the mouse."

"Hmm, well, if this were a PC I would have a standard set of keyboard shortcuts that would let me work without a mouse. You don't have the same thing with a G4?"

"Dunno. I always use the mouse."

"Yes, and if it were a normal fbleeping computer I have half a dozen mouse pointing devices sitting within arm's reach that I could simply swap in and do the job, but you had to buy a "better" Mac. Oh well" and with that I simply punched the power button.

I told Bil the Elder he should leave it with me and I'd look into it, and that once I was done he should take his G4 home and never mention it to me again and that he needed to leave now. He finally condescended to say "thanks" when he was almost out of the door.

Further examination proved that the cord to the mouse had been trapped under something and mashed quite effectively. It had also been used to lash the mouse to the keyboard, as I said before. Under such circumstances it was no surprise that some of the wires had separated and were making only intermittent contact.

I signed onto eBay and bid on a replacement mouse, and out of curiosity I searched on the serial number of the dead power supply once again. This time⁶ I found two. One dead, being sold for "parts"⁷ and one "guaranteed working". I decided to bid and, assuming the unit worked properly, resell the one currently in the machine. It would be worth it just to get some peace and quiet from the braying masses. That was enough Mac-related aggravation for one weekend.

I wandered outside to check out the swimming pool, which I wanted to put to bed for the winter this weekend. The torrential rainstorm that had been lashing Long Island for most of the day had washed a ton of leaves into the water, which was now bright green with filth again. I fired up the filter and poured in some shock and went to bed around 1 am (again).

On Saturday I spent most of the day dredging out the crap from the pool, vacuuming the floor and cleaning the filter over and over again. It made doing income tax look interesting. That's all I have to say about that.

Sunday began with me getting the last of the crap out of the pool and setting the Pool Robot of Extreme Uselessness on the job of cleaning the floor. I had put the original filter cartridge in a bucket of "filter cleanser" for eight hours during the week and surprisingly it was very effective at bringing that formerly clogged and crocked item back to life, so I put the new filter in the Magic Bucket of Filter Decrappination for a soak before putting it up for winter.

I could not find the nice, high-quality air pillow I used last year and was so pleased to see was still in working order at the end of the season, so it was off to the store to buy a new one. I looked and looked but they didn't have the nice round 4 foot diameter pillows like the one I just lost, just square ones. They also had 4 x 8 foot oblong pillows intended for oval pools somewhat bigger than mine. Mr Brain began to clank and whir, and I visualised this mighty pillow of cover-holding-uppiness making my life much easier by reducing the amount of pool cover in the water which would make siphoning off the foul sumac leaf tea that much easier during the winter. Sold!

Upon arriving home I was disconcerted to see that my front fence had fallen down, mostly.

At the top of my drive there is a run of about 18 feet of cedar fence that then takes a right angle turn for another 8 feet before resuming its original course to the garage by means of gates. It used to look dead good. Unfortunately, I was unaware at the time of building it that planting a cedar fence post in concrete is a bad idea, even with lots of gravel for drainage. The post will rot out in about five to seven years at the ground line. I've replaced almost all the posts I concreted in with the exception of the corner posts, which are difficult to get out and are held up nicely by the fact they are corners and therefore braced on two sides and in two dimensions by fencing. That includes the post that I was looking at now, flapping in the wind and threatening to tear down the "good" fence panel. The other panel, the one at the front of the house, had suffered some sort of failure.

Action was called for.

It transpired that all three rails had rotted out on account of them being made from untreated non-cedar somethingwood. I looked around and spotted the timbers pulled out of the garage during the great garage clean out fiasco, originally a swing built in in the mid 90s for the Stevieling⁸. Hooray! I needed 2 x 4s and there were a bunch of them sitting round doing nothing. Bonus!

Since the joint between the fence rail and the corner post would be a butt joint, it would require me getting above it in order to drive the screws. My Workmate was near to hand, so it was pressed into service as a stepladder, a job it has done many times before. Unfortunately, one of the small rubber feet was lost last year so I couldn't deploy it in its compact configuration but had to extend the legs, which raised it up another 6 inches or so, thereby sowing the seeds of fiasco.

I drove the screws in question⁹ and was just stepping back down from the top of the Workmate to the metal step when the Stevieling sprang into theater and said "Daddy, what's a Stratocaster?"

Mr Brain, sensing the need for a light comedic break, guided my foot past the step to the ground, a distance that exceeded the length of my other leg by about six inches.

For the second time in as many months I experienced the sensation of free-fall as the world span crazily around me. This, of course, was an illusion, for it was not the world spinning but my body as it tumbled towards the driveway. Once again I prepared to meet the hard ground with nature's airbag: the human back. I did this by screaming out some of the most vile words of power in my lexicon, with a healthy disregard for the shell-like ears of my daughter.

It could have been very nasty, but for the fact that several weeks ago I had the forethought to dump an old pool liner at that very spot on the driveway¹⁰.

AaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrgggggWHUMP!

The liner had air trapped in it that nicely cushioned my fall, reducing it from bone-breaking to merely bone-bruising force. I might easily have passed out from this terrible fall if several inches of Friday's storm hadn't sequestered themselves in the various pockets and folds in the liner. Refreshing courses of near-freezing rainwater, nice and green with various growths, sluiced all over me, eliciting a scream of joy from my lips just as the Workmate, which I had apparently upended by clenching it with the toes of my right foot¹¹, fell on me. The Stevieling, with timing that can only be said to be perfect, then said "Are you all right?"

Now the business with Bil the Elder's computer, the pool cleaning, the loss of the air pillow and the discovery of the fence fixing job had made me a might testy, and it was with a light snarl in my voice that I answered:

"Of course I'm not all right! Don't just stand there like idiots, get this thing off me!"

For some unfathomable reason, the child was reluctant to come near me and her mother was too busy laughing, so I hurled the treacherous Workmate away from me and leaped to my hands and knees, uttering my standard wargroan. I was able, after only 5 minutes or so, to jump to my feet and resume work on the fence, using "Finesse", my claw hammer, and by the time the light was failing I had the thing more or less repaired.

Which only left all the stuff I had to pack back in the shed in pitch darkness.

1. Not the one who persuaded him to buy the iBrik, but another Mac-obsessed one↑
2. Me↑
3. I asked him to do that so I could double check the voltage ratings between it and the one I fitted↑
4. The same repair place he took the power supply to to get confirmation of what I had already told him: That his power supply was dead.↑
5. I finally gleaned an understanding of why they come with handles though↑
6. When I searched eBay last time there were precisely none of the right kind of power supply being sold. Bil the Elder has managed to buy a computer containing not only the most expensive power supply on the planet, but the rarest in the world too. Typical↑
7. Not sure what the seller thought would be salvageable inside this white elephant↑
8. Another ingrate: she ordered the swing on the very eve of her fourth birthday, watched me build it then demanded to know where the "other swings" were. Apparently she was expecting a three-swing swingset↑
9. Actually, owing to me not remembering how to align the front of the fence panel to match the rest of the fence, I had to do the job over. Twice↑
10. How the neighbours must hate me. How I return their hatred a hundredfold↑
11. Shod, I might add↑

Not So Fast

And they're off!

Someone has helpfully pointed out that the Power Supply of iBrik Resurrection isn't the right one for the machine¹. They've gone to a great deal of trouble to point me towards articles on Apple's website (which I found almost unnavigable but that's just me), pictures and so forth that explain that the unit I have will simply not do the job because the so-called "trickle voltage" is only 25 volts and the machine needs 28 volts.

What is this "trickle voltage"? It is:

A) A misnomer: volts don't trickle, amps do. Volts, as anyone who has to deal with them will tell you, lurk.

2) The voltage that is needed for the low-level functions on the motherboard to begin the tedious process of bringing the computer to full readiness. Put bluntly, without this "trickle voltage" the machine will not boot. Reams of electronic virtual paper have been defaced on the subject. I'll spare you them.

The fact that the machine in question does boot is apparently of no import. I dun it rong and must be told so.

This experience confirms for me something I've long known about human nature in today's world: that although no-one will pitch in to help someone before a task has been undertaken, once something has been done people come out of the woodwork to tell you how you should have done it. Well pbleepss on them. I say now that such advice is worthless, offered as it is for the sole purpose of demonstrating the superiority of the "advisor" over the "doer", and I don't value it a jot. You want to help me with your knowledge before I do something, I am forever in your debt. You go a-googling after the fact, armed with my detailed description so you can retroactively criticise and patronise me, I'll forever view you as something I would scrape off my shoe.

I used to do a lot² of miniature painting for a wargame I once played. My earliest efforts pretty much defined "naff", forming as they did the search for quick and effective ways to paint dozens of similar figures in as short a time as possible³. The problem would often arise that I wanted to remove paint finishes applied years before so I could repurpose figures that were out of production, too expensive or for other reasons not practical to replace with new ones.

The problem is that although some of the figures in question were made of "pewter" or "lead" (actually, both recipes for different types of Whitemetal aka solder), many of them had plastic parts. Some were completely made of plastic. This precludes dropping the figures in a solvent such as acetone or into industrial strength paint stripper for a few days: The plastic would dissolve. What I needed was a solution that was manually non-intensive (I had little free time), absolutely 100% safe for the plastic figures and absolutely guaranteed to get the paint off no matter what type it was.

I searched the 'net and saw all sorts of remedies, from soaking in water to a perennial favourite on the forums, soaking in Pine Sol⁴.

I also am interested in model railways, and had long known that Pine Sol was one of the methods it was claimed you could use to strip paint from (plastic) locomotive bodies in order to repaint them in a finish not offered by the manufacturer. However there was another idea from that hobby that made a great deal of sense to me: brake fluid.

I know that brake fluid can take the cellulose-based paint off a car in a matter of an hour or less. That's a paint specially formulated to stay put and stay the same colour under the most challenging circumstances known to the paint industry⁵. If brake fluid could shift that stuff, it could strip anything. The people who used it said it was safe on plastics too. I had a think and discussed it on a Yahoo forum dedicated to the collecting and painting of Wonkhammer 401k figures, but there was no consensus and suspiciously little advice from the back-benchers.

I decided to run a trial. I had some figures, plastic ones, that I had painted with solvent-based Polly-S spray enamel paint. It was very very hardwearing and I had never seen it flake or chip. I prepared jars of a commercial modellers paint stripper marketed by Polly-S, Pine Sol and el cheapo Castrol brake fluid (by far the cheapest option at 99 cents a pint too). Each day I would carefully take each figure and give it a gentle scrub with an old toothbrush, holding it under the solvent with a hemostat which was perfect for the job. After that, the figures would sit in their jars until I came home from work or got up the next morning. The results were interesting.

The Polly-S paint stripper made no impression whatsoever. I didn't really expect it to. It was alleged to be able to fetch off old brushed acrylic paint, but I reckoned at the time that anything this stripper could work on would probably let go with warm water too.

The Pine Sol softened the plastic after only 8 hours or so. I removed the figure and rinsed it off, but the plastic took several weeks to "outgass" the solvent and harden up again. One of my correspondents repeated my experiment and reported that the figure turned to chewing gum after two days in Pine Sol. To be fair, the paint did start coming off.

The brake fluid performed like a miracle. The paint floated off, all but for a small amount in tiny crevices on the figure. More to the point, the plastic showed no damage whatsoever. I extended the experiment to two weeks. Fourteen days in brake fluid did not hurt the plastic one bit⁶.

What do you think publication of these results did in the community? Nothing, that's what. A few days after I published my results someone posted on the forum asking how to shift paint off a plastic figure and someone suggested Pine Sol! I politely injected myself into the conversation and pointed out my findings, housed in a file on the server. The "advisor" argued with me. I asked him if he'd ever actually tried what he was suggesting himself⁷ and he finally admitted he was working from hearsay. I asked him why he felt the hearsay he was using was more reliable than my version, especially as I had included all the details of my experiment and anyone could try it for themselves. He became abusive. Over the next six months I was directly contradicted on my advice several times by people who blithely admitted they hadn't actually tried the method they knew would work better than mine. It was baffling. I urged everyone to get two pickle jars and a couple of plastic bits from their spares box and prove to themselves the reality of the matter. We even had people try Pine Sol on the advice of others there and come back saying how it worked "quite well" but had caused some minor but acceptable damage to the figures.

To this day I don't understand why people wanted to try the smelly, difficult and dangerous "almost works" method rather than the easy, odourless and dangerous⁸ brake fluid method. But I learned a lesson from the experience: While there's damn few people who will volunteer help or knowledge on the net, there's never a shortage of people who can and will tell you you are doing it wrong after the fact (no matter what the facts actually are).

Well, pbleepss on them all.

1. Actually, if you check, that was me in the posting describing the installation↑
2. And I do mean a lot↑
3. Yes, I played Wonkhammer 401K↑
4. A proprietary pine cleanser intended to disinfect floors and other such surfaces↑
5. You thought paint was paint? Spray paint some lawn furniture and leave it out for one summer, then let me know how you feel↑
6. I'm told that if you pick more expensive brake fluid, that is not the case though↑
7. I knew he couldn't have, of course↑
8. the brake fluid can kill you if you drink it. It tells you not to on the can and in my experimental report too, for that matter↑

Alive, Alive, It's Alive!

I may have mentioned in passing a while ago that my elder brother-in-law, Bil the Elder, had asked me to look at his Mac, taken the news of its need for a new power supply under advisement and then made himself scarce.

I may also have alluded to my being more than a little fed up with having this expensive piece of junk, bricked for weeks for want of an overpriced¹ power supply that Bil the Elder was too scared to buy, and hinted at my shortening tolerance for brothers in law and Apple products, with special reference to broken Apple products left in my basement by brothers in law.

I finally had had it up to here with the damn thing and its owner, and I went out on eBay and bought a compatible power supply for it from a dealer for about half the price a replacement would cost new. Hey, if it was my machine I wouldn't begrudge the cost, but it ain't and I do. All I knew was that the bloody machine wouldn't work without a power supply, and that power rating aside, there appeared to be two basic choices in the G4 power supply market: the 20-pin type which was selling for about 50 bux, and the 22-pin type, selling for about 80 bux ². I could guess what the story would be anyway, but a quick check showed that the iBrik had a 22-pin motherboard.

Of course.

Anyway, I ponied up the money on Monday and last night a new-looking unit arrived in the mail.

It wasn't the same unit, I could see at a glance. The bracket for fixing it was very different for a start, but that was easily removable. The unit was the right overall size, but was missing the second power outlet on the back. Oh well. Tough titty. I removed the bracket from it and installed the power supply temporarily in the case for a power-up test. The dealer had a so-called DOA³ guarantee and would replace the unit if I returned it as dead in three days so delay in testing it was unwise.

The fit in the case is quite tight owing to various bulges, catches and nodules projecting down from the (unseen) inside top of the case. These must be negotiated by twisting the power supply through a path best described as a 5 dimensional hypertorroid mapped onto a standard 4 dimensional manifold. For those who do not possess the skills to visualise this mathematical abstraction fully, it is a ten-to-twelve swear word job. Once in place, I could connect it to the various places it needed to be connected via the integral cable cluster, which was thicker than my thumb. In the middle of connecting it up, it fell out of the case and I only just caught it before it smashed down onto the motherboard⁴. I replaced it, at first attempting fruitlessly to reverse the path it took on its way out, but finding that impossible, by means of the original convoluted method.

It promptly fell out again.

And again.

I eventually wedged it in place with a cardboard box that originally held my cell phone⁵. Then I connected the plugs to the various discs (the super apple design places the primary (and in this case, only) hard-drive so low on the case that the plug fouls a blister in the chassis base. Another win for Apple design there. When I was done, I was confronted by a four pin plug that had no socket to attach it to.

As luck would have it, Shamus Young was discussing an identical plug only a few days ago over at 20-sided and the consensus was that it was only needed for Intel chipsets unless you had AMD in which case it was needed for something else. No help there then.

I could not find the keyboard and mouse, or the power cord. They had been underfoot for eight weeks and sometime around week 6 I had "dealt" with the problem without making any special note of the new location of the items. The power cord was no problem but (of course) I couldn't simply swap in one of the six or seven PC-style keyboards I have because my Brother in Law bought a fbleeping Mac!

No matter. I had a power cord that would work, I had the (special, not replaceable by any of my collection) monitor and all I wanted was to see it boot and have done with the blasted thing.

I powered it up and there was an immediate CRACK!, a small yet bright spark and the fragrant odour of fried electrolyte filled the air, heady with hints of arsenic, germanium, selenium and silicon. I know that smell from of old. Redolent and toxic in relatively small amounts, it presages the death of any semiconductor or polarised capacitor due to overvoltage incompetence.

Great.

I had fried the motherboard now!

This called for Finesse. I was reaching for it⁶ when Mrs Stevie announced the serving of her delicious tomato soup and cheese sandwiches, the perfect spirit-raiser when events are conspiring to give you a headache.

Over my snack I contemplated my options. I would test the power supply and see if it was still in the land of the living. If so, it could be eBayed off that night. I would tell Bil the Elder that his computer had more problems and urge him to sell it and buy one that worked, preferably a PC. I would finish my soup.

Upon returning to the scene of the crime, I tested the power supply and determined that it was indeed still working⁷. I was about to pack it into a box when I thought I might try connecting it again. I had nothing to lose really⁸.

So I did.

Upon connecting the power cord an pressing the "on" switch⁹ I was horrified to hear a noise blurt out of the case while the monitor erupted with the most awful patterns imaginable. "That must be what few components I didn't fry giving out" I thought, but then the truth dawned: The noise was Apple's version of a greeting jingle and the visual scribble on the screen was the much-vaunted "better" Apple GUI firing up! The computer was working again! A fiasco was become Great Triumph! Man that's an ugly GUI!

Yes, Mac OS 9 was manifesting like some hideous Lovecraftian horror rising from the primeval ooze to stalk amongst humanity in a World Gone Mad!

I have to say, just looking at it, I can't see what the fuss is about. It looks like a washed-out version of Windows for Workgroups, which ranks as the worst interface I've had to use in over thirty years of computing. Marginally better for the non-computer savvy than a console, but very non-intuitive and cluttered worse than my workbench. Oh well.

I powered the thing down and got down to the business of fastening the power supply down properly. The supplied bracket was for one of the umpty-tump case/component variations that obviously plague Apple as badly as Dell and Gateway¹⁰. I got to work with Messrs Dremel and Drill and in some time at all had the bracket and case agreeing as to the number and count of screws needed to accommodate the one inside the other. A quick swipe with the shop-vac¹¹ to remove any nasty swarf from the case and Hey Pasta! "Instant" working Mac.

A detailed search of the house (It was midnight by now and I wasn't a happy camper 'cos I had work in the morning) failed to turn up the keyboard and mouse, so I showered and retired for five hours sleep. Before dropping off I disabled my alarm. I could always take a later train and I needed the sleep.

I was woken at 6:30 am by the Stevieling's cell phone playing a delightful orchestral racket, ten minutes before the time my alarm had been set for. She uses her alarm as an alarm clock, but that night had forgotten to take the rather elementary step of taking her cellphone off the coffee table in the main room and taking it upstairs with her.

Fortunately, I was awake and was able to claw my way groggily up the stairs to wake her for school.

1. Redundant term when speaking of a Mac↑
2. I should point out that I do not have the old power supply. Bil the Elder does. He needed it to identify the replacement part. Which he didn't buy↑
3. Dead On Arrival↑
4. The award-winning suitcase design helpfully arranges things so that while working on the wretched machine, the heaviest things are suspended as high as possible over the most delicate things. Thus are we once again confronted by the evidence of the betterness of Apple design over cheap'n'nasty PCs↑
5. Another over-designed piece of junk that is manifestly unfit for doing the primary job a cell phone is bought for thanks to all the cruft bolted on. I mean, two key operations to use the camera but seven to change the built-in ringtone to another built-in ringtone?↑
6. I named my claw hammer "Finesse" back when I was single. My happy place has a hammer in it. Worth knowing if you ever start to piss me off↑
7. As far as I could tell. Part of the problem is that these things don't come with a detailed data sheet printed on them↑
8. This shows how well I wasn't thinking: I could easily have blown up the working power supply by connecting it to a bollixed motherboard↑
9. A major concession by Apple there: They could easily have gone for some sort of brainwave sensor device instead of a push-button in a bid to once again up the complexity and cost of the machine↑
10. Apple users just don't air their own dirty laundry in public. I wouldn't mind that, but they aren't at all unwilling to air everyone else's↑
11. Actually a Home Despot wet/dry vacuum, from their Rigid line, highly recommended, four Steviestars etc↑

Annoyance Reigns Supreme

Well, the old blood pressure, never my strongest point at the best of times, is being given a right going over this week.

I still have two telephone poles, one cracked and dangerous yet still tasked with holding up the wires to my house and one young, strong and tall that serves to hold flyers printed on inkjet printers announcing various yard sales in the neighbourhood.

I still have a pool full of sludge after the filter pump shut down last week and I stupidly didn't check the fbleeping thing every morning and night.

And most infuriatingly, I still have Bil the Elder's dead mac G4 in my basement.

I discovered that Bil the Elder's report of "not being able to get onto the internet" actually meant his computer¹ didn't work at all about two months ago as detailed here. I offered to save him a bit of cash by dismantling the thing and testing the power supply, which was dead. All he needed to do at this point was to buy a new one and I would fit it for him.

The first "problem" with this theory came when it transpired that although you can buy a PC-style power supply at any computer parts retailer for less than 80 bux, the power supply for this thing costs 250 bux new and has to be specially ordered. An alternative would be to get one for about 90 bucks on eBay. I know which way I'd jump here.

Bil the Elder, faced with the idea he can buy a complete Wintel system for about 500 bux found himself paralysed with indecision. If he buys on eBay, the seller will certainly cheat him³. If he buys new, he will be spending more than half of what a brand new system would cost⁶ and what if there is something else wrong with the computer⁷?

When I offered to help I expected to be fitting the replacement part within about two weeks. Instead the bloody artsy-fartsy doorstop has been cluttering what little space remains in my basement for over two months.

Mrs Stevie asked him to come and get it this weekend. I expected him to phone on Saturday so I could refit all the loose bits and he could call in and pick it up later that day. He waited until the mid-afternoon of Sunday, by which time I was very busy putting up our hallowe'en tableau with the Stevieling. I refused point blank to break off operations and accommodate him.

Tonight I came home and reached a decision of my own. I logged onto eBay, did some browsing to match up the plugs on the motherboard with those on the units people were offloading, and bought one on spec. If the computer boots, it's fixed. If it doesn't, it can be broken for parts and flogged on eBay. Nothing to decide here. If that works, I'll put the damn thing on my internet connection and find out what the fbleep is wrong in that department. If that works I'll download the OS9 patches, something this thing has been crying out for for years. Since I've determined that it is actually a G4 and not, as I had been originally informed, a G3, I may even spring for a copy of OSX.

Assuming it all works, this is Bil the Elder's Christmas Present.

Bil the Elder is one of those unlucky enough to have his birthday on Christmas Day, and normally we allow for that in the size of his gift from us.

This year his birthday gift will involve my not killing him.

1. His superior technology Mac computer²↑
2. That has spent more time broken than actually proving its clear superiority over my old Compaq↑
3. Bil the Elder is convinced everyone is out to cheat him. We went to Canada one year and he decided to buy a sweat shirt. In Edmonton airport the sweatshirts were 25 bux. In the town stores, the sweatshirts were 25 bux. In a giant tepee tourist attraction in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere⁴ the sweatshirts were 25 bux. A reasonable person might weigh this evidence and come to the conclusion that the prevailing price of printed sweatshirts was 25 bux⁵. Not Bil the Elder. He came to the conclusion that everyone in the province of Alberta was trying to cheat him, and refused to buy until we were back in Edmonton airport on the way home, where he became enraged that no-one sold shirts with the name of the town we had been staying in.↑
4. A lie: radio messages took several minutes to traverse the distance between nowhere and this place↑
5. Not only that, 25 bux Canadian: at the time this was a huge advantage for an American in Canada↑
6. albeit a crummy Wintel system: His requirement for cutting edge tech having abated in the last three years↑
7. this, at least, is not an unreasonable fear since the bloody thing has been a catalogue of broken parts since he bought it↑