February 2005 Archives
I’m selling rascal and spanky. rascal is my venerable, whisper quiet Pismo Powerbook G3. I love this machine and wish Apple’s laptops were still fanless. I also am a bit sick of the über-chic brushed aluminum. The black molded plastic on the end-of-series Powerbook is, simply, beautiful.
They will be revered by future Mac collectors in a way that the boxy and Scandinavian-esque squareness current G4 Powerbooks will never be.
Ever.
Alas, I need to be able to synchronize my work across machines and ever since my department requisitioned a Final Cut Pro- and DVD Studio Pro-capable 15-inch aluminum Powerbook—which I named varmint—for me, work synchronization has been an issue. I also am considering trying out Apple’s iWork suite, for Pages in particular as I’m tired of quasi-professional wordprocessors like Mariner Write and Nisus Writer. I loathe Word. I’m disturbed that Corel doesn’t see the Macintosh as a viable platform. I guess they’re married to the lawyers and that’s enough for them.
Anyway, I didn’t intend for this to be a long rambling post. I only wanted to acknowledge that these machines—which have served me so well for the better part of a decade (I’ve had spanky since 1998 and rascal since 2000) and which have quite a bit of life in them yet—are soon to find new homes.
rascal’s eBay listing has a link back to this organ. Yesterday (Saturday, 19 February), I backed rascal up using Bombich’s Carbon Copy Cloner over the Internet. (I ran the session using Chicken of the VNC.) When fygar, the main hard drive partition on rascal, was backed up, I took varmint to the office and copied the contents of rascal’s several hard drive partitions: fygar, pooka, siggie, wire, and writers.
When I returned to Vanilla Falls (my rented home), I used Apple’s Disk Utility to restore fygar to the used 1.04 GHz Mirror Drive Door G4 I recently won on eBay. I booted that machine and hooked it up to my LAN. It faithfully behaved just like rascal, up to and including running DNSUpdate and commandeering desiringmachine.net! The result was that dyndns.org started routing requests to my home LAN which requests were handled spanky’s doppleganger (a dual 1.25 GHz G4 MDD G4, which I also recently acquired on eBay). I didn’t realize what I had done until I pulled up this page.
So, this morning I drove back to the office to wake rascal up and get him talking to dyndns.org. Things appear to be back to normal. On the cloverleaf from 682 South to 50 East, I thought about how these networked objects require so much care, that bringing a machine onto the network even from backups or already working hard drives requires quite a bit of attention, a lot of face-to-face, a lot like babies. (Of course, when I reflect more concretely on the analogy, I am not for a second fooled into thinking a machine is anything like a real live baby. I suppose being single and without children makes me think of the ways I fill my life with non-humans that require my care.)
baby will take her place just after rascal’s winning bidder pays.
