2002 Story Set
| April 2, 2002 The Programming God has arrived, to rescue his mother. I have not been able to get the newly-repaired HP LaserJet 4M printer to talk to the G4's new operating system. I have been fussing. He swaggers in, drops his Mac Bag on the ground under my desk (he goes nowhere without the G4 Titanium laptop I bought him) and takes over my keyboard. "I'll drive," says he. This is not a request. I let him. One does not argue with a Programming God. One caters to their every little whim. He checks the connections for the HP printer that is not responding, unplugs and replugs, connections and checks for drivers. He looks for an Asante driver - then stops and checks AppleTalk. Well, OpSys 9.1 had reset Apple Talk to remote only, instead of Ethernet - which is where the Asanti unit is plugged in. The printer is an old one - with an A/B port that the Asanti converts to Ethernet. He reset the setting. I had missed that one with all my clicking and dragging and downloading of new drivers. Voila! My old HP LaserJet 4M now talks to the G4 running OpSys 9.1. (We speak Geek in my house.) Next, he decided that the fact that a floppy appears as two images was a bad thing. He went hunting and found that the Norton virus software was doing that, not the operating system. (This took a bit of time while he ran debugging.) He also updated the Norton virus files. The floppy is still mounted twice - so we stopped Norton from checking floppies. I seldom use the floppy so that is not a big deal. I can manually trigger a scan. Mostly I use 100MB zips anyway. I just have a bunch of old floppies running around. I will remember to manually check them before moving files. We batted around if I should move up to OpSys 9.2 - but if I had all this trouble to go to 9.1 -----. I think I will freeze and hold for the time being. Everything currently works. Don't move if everything currently works. Postpone the major change in OS until the last possible moment. All of my software is going into upgrade cycle (Adobe, Macromedia) and it will all run on OpSysX. The Unix-like OS on the Mac. It will also run on the OS9.1. Good. Because I dread when I have to do that change. It's the kind of change that causes me to buy a new computer already set-up and just drag the software over to it. That will be awhile. The Programming God accepted a hug and a salmon-shrimp dinner and a stint in my spa. Mother's way of thanking her older son. Of course, he would prefer that I get a job and buy him the new flat-panel Mac terminal screen - 24" or 26" - for his G4 Titanium laptop that I bought him last year. If you haven't seen those screens----. And of course he still wants about 500MB more RAM for the laptop. My younger son has been listening. It is but a short matter of time before he adds his voice to the gimme list. I may have to get a job just so I can afford a flat screen for me! They are beautiful! I'd rather have that than food! But then, I am a computer geek. Probably why my sons are. |
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