To hell with Toast

Note that the snow almost entirely swallows the bus stop bench:


I am fixing someone's iBook right now, which seems to have serious directory corruption. Toast is having a horrible time making a boot CD image to burn. Ugh--this is such annoying garbage. Finally it is working now.... but wait there's more!

I still have to get the network card in the old junker working, I have dubbed the machine "Tarfin" for reasons that a select few of you would know. God I hate how PC hardware works, must be why I avoid the damn things.

Also I am trying to help the Mac Weekly get some sharper headline fonts and maybe something new for the very tired masthead. I'll also try to help them upgrade to new page layout software. These are some of the miscellaneous tasks of the week.

There have been a lot of problems accessing the crucial E Reserves through the library website, off campus. This is such an important system. Now I can't get Chapter 3 of our missing research textbooks, which makes the homework altogether much worse.

I was thinking today about the problem of moving parts in electronics, in this weather. I have micro-hard drives in my iPod, my parents' digital camera, as well as the portable FireWire drive I got for Christmas. All these things need to hover over their disc surfaces at a distance of only a few zillionths of an inch. When I take the iPod outside and it sits in my pocket, it gets colder on the outside pretty quickly, but the inside would stay warmer. Is it inevitable that the heat differences will cause a hard disc platter or arm to bend, and catastrophically collide with the drive surface? The same problem with the digital camera, which has a IBM MicroDrive. The weather is so extreme here, I fear damage is certain with these dramatic swings in temperature.

Nonetheless I couldn't help but take some pictures of all the snow that piled up outside today: