A belated Merry Christmas
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you! I haven’t been posting much because of holiday distractions, and posting may be slow yet for a couple of weeks, but we will see how it goes. (I may have some great vacation photos for you, though. Stay tuned.)
Among my Christmas haul was the Lava lamp pictured here (a 10″ Lava lamp — so cute and tiny), and the very cool DVD Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. However, I am disappointed that some of the bonus DVD-ROM features aren’t available on the Mac, as the features about the history of the POTC attraction at Disneyland were one of the major reasons I wanted the DVD. I didn’t realize they weren’t Mac-friendly. And I don’t think Jason has a PC with a DVD drive. When I try to access the special features the DVD just tells me I should use a computer with a DVD-ROM drive. Um, I thought I was… Oh well, the movie is good, and there is at least one neat feature about the ride that I can see: a 1968 tv show promoting the ride, with a filmed (but oddly edited) ride through.
We spent our Christmas evening installing Mac OS X 10.3 on a relative’s old indigo iMac 350, which was running OS 9.0.4. This was not exactly fun. First she needed a firmware update. But the firmware update required OS 9.1. She only has dialup and 9.1 is 70 megs. So we had to go home, download it, make a cd, and bring it out. But there was something wrong with the .smi file and it wouldn’t mount. So then we took the laptop down to the Apple Store and downloaded 9.1 again. (Thank you Apple Store for free wireless bandwidth!) We went back to the relative’s house and installed 9.1, but this took some messing around before it would work. (Had to stuff the file for some reason before the Mac could deal with it. Then unstuffed it and off we went.) Then the firmware update. Then the Panther installation, but this took at least an hour of installation time.
Finally it was installed, and amazingly, it seems quite speedy on the slow old iMac. Yay Apple.
But it doesn’t automatically carry over the internet connection info from OS 9, and my relative does not have her login and password because she didn’t think she’d need it again (!). Boo Apple. Why not just import that information if it exists?
But at least the OS is running, so hard crashes will hopefully be a thing of the past for her now. And soon she’ll be back online.
