“and then i woke up.” –ed tom bell

back on nov 19th or so i attempted to do a leopard install on my g5 power mac, but it didn’t go so well. yesterday i went at it again and was much more successful. in fact, i’m typing this from mac os 10.5 right now. instead of trying to do a “super” erase on the 160gb hard drive, this time i just chose to do a basic wipe. i also recreated a single partition (even though that’s what it was in the first place). after that went well, the installer saw the drive and let me install to it. the install went okay. the only annoying thing was it got to the point it said “about 1 minute left” and it sat there for at least 10 or 20 more minutes. but eventually it finished and wanted to reboot. after the reboot, i put my original hard drive back in (in the second internal slot) to see if i could import the data from my 10.4 tiger drive. it never would see the drive. i even — against my better judgement — rebooted the system in the middle of the installation questions to see if it would see the drive then. it didn’t. but fortunately the installer came back up and let me go through it again. once i made all my settings and created a new account and got logged into the gui, i manually ran the migration assistant out of applications/utilities. it saw the old 10.4 disk and went to work migrating my accounts, files, settings, etc. it appeared to all go well. it was kind of annoying i had to create a new account and then import my old account, but that’s not that big of an issue.
thursday last week i got a letter from state farm stating i would get an estimate and blah blah. all i could tell from it was that state farm knew i had made a claim. it didn’t provide any info about the place i’d selected or any status info. yesterday (monday) i got two letters from state farm. one was an estimate from a state farm inspector, the second was a revision based on other stuff the shop had found. even though i’d told them to cut the checks to the shop, they were included in the letters i got. oh well. at least i could tell my element really had made it to a legitimate shop and was in the process of being worked on. today i got a call from the dealership and they said my vehicle was going to service and it should probably be ready tomorrow. i reminded them i wanted them to do the 60k maintenance and replace the windshield as part of the class action lawsuit settlement. hopefully that will be taken care of. they said they’d call when everything was done. so i may be making a trip to austin this weekend.
friday night i went and ate supper at tacos-a-go-go and then caught the disco expressions show at the continental club. it was a good show, other than being there by myself. while there, i asked trey where he got his ’64 chevy pickup work done. he mentioned a place far away, but he also mentioned another place. i tried calling them over the weekend but i guess they weren’t open. i called today and talked to them. i’ll probably be taking the ’55 over there sometime this week.
saturday i went to simcha’s first birthday party. beforehand, i went on my motorcycle to a babies’r’us and bought some presents. i took my back rest off awhile back, so i don’t really have anywhere to attach stuff. i was holding the bag between my legs, but in a turn on westheimer it went flying. i had to slow down and turn around and go get it. the bag had some road rash, but i guess all of the contents were okay. after the party i stayed and eventually spent a couple of hours playing mario party with jackson and dietrich. at one point i exclaimed “yoshi keeps stealing crap from me!” to which jackson said “‘crap’? what do you mean?” i kind of sat there with a blank expression for a few seconds, then he said “i think i’m going to put that on my bad word list.”
sunday i went by microcenter and picked up a sata and ide to usb 2.0 adapter. it’s a slick little external connector that can attach to 3.5″ ide, 2.5″ ide, or sata drives and then connect them to your system via usb. it allows you to easily and quickly hook up drives without having to open the case or have an external closure or whatever. from there i went to target to pick up some 3-prong-to-2-prong adapters, but they didn’t have any. i guess they aren’t a commonly needed item these days? so i went by home depot and picked up a few outlet adapters, as well as a 2-aa and 3-d cell mag-lite pack. i went ahead and bought a 3-d cell l.e.d. bulb too.
i ate a late lunch at the house of pies. there was a new waitress i hadn’t seen before and she had an intriguing accent. i asked her about it, and she said she was russian.
after house of pies, i went to the theater and caught no country for old men. it reminded me of blood simple in some ways. it was well-filmed and well-acted. it seemed sort of self-aware sometimes, like the dialogue was too clever and appropriate. it was nice to see the Texas i grew up in. (although idealized, and further west.) the movie mostly had a leisurely pace, but the ending was kind of abrupt. at least to me. it makes me curious how it compares to the book. i’ve never read any of mccarthy’s stuff.
here‘s a good discussion (read the comments) linked from the movie’s website.
sunday evening i managed to repair a 2-aa mag-lite that i’d had to pull apart a month or two ago. i also pulled apart and cleaned a 3-d mag-lite that the batteries has leaked in. after buying the pair and fixing a pair that was broken, i’m mag-lite rich.