Uncle Roger's Notebooks of Daily Life

Introduction

My life is, to me, ripe with frequent challenges, occasional successes, spontaneous laughter, adequate tears, and enough *life* to last me a lifetime. To you, however, it surely seems most pedestrian. And therefore, I recycle the name I used previously and call this my Notebooks of Daily Life. Daily, because it's everyday in nature, ordinary. These conglomeration of events that are my life are of interest to me because I live it, perhaps mildly so to those who are touched by it, and could only be of perverse, morbid curiosity to anyone else. Yet, I offer them here nonetheless. Make of them what you will, and perhaps you can learn from my mistakes.

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Monday, February 28, 2005

February Challenge Complete!

Well, I finally got my laptop working enough that I could get my posts off of my handheld and get them uploaded. They were all basically done by the end of February (except for minor editing and adding URL's and such); they were just stuck in my wee little Visor with no way to get out.

All told, I've been down for three weeks -- unable to post stories, check e-mail, or do any real work. If there weren't the concerns about data loss and the work to get things back, I would say it was actually kinda nice.

Basically, I put the drive that died into an external case and put a drive with a mirror image from last June in the laptop. I then made a complete backup of the June drive. The next step was to start copying data and configuration files from the external drive onto the internal one.

I am very glad I made the backup of the June drive because it turns out the windows system registry from the dead drive was not entirely compatible with what was installed on the June drive (or else running regedit in DOS mode does not extract the entire registry.) I ended up having to put the backup drive in the laptop to extract some registry settings for PFE and NetSwitcher. I also had to reinstall most of my desktop PalmOS applications.

Things are still not 100% -- E-mail mailboxes seem to be a little flakey and Bonsai didn't know who I was this morning. Still, I do seem to be back and functional. Next, I'll have to do another full backup (as well as, perhaps, think about reloading everything from scratch.)

Meanwhile, Rachel has approved the purchase of a new laptop once we get our tax refund. That, of course, represents a whole 'nother set of posts -- should I look for one that I can load Win98 on? Should I prepare to face the hideousness of WinXP? Should I try to make the switch to Linux? Or should I go all tingly and get a Mac? The latter seems unlikely, mostly due to the cost. Anyway, for now, February is finally over. It's lasted quite a while for such a short month!

Comments

Mac. Mac. Mac.

Addressing <i>only</i> your concern for cost for an Apple product: The long term cost of getting an iBook is significantly less than any PC on the market. It will come with better hardware that will last longer and breakdown less. It has a longer shelf life, too. My two year old iBook will probably last me another two years of high quality usage. While the initial cost is slightly more expensive (and really not even that much more) the long term savings in actual costs for repairs, time, and aggravation make it a clear winner.
The only concern I see that might be significant is replacing some of the software you use. Previously you had a list of installations and many of them I did not know. However, OSX has tons of freeware from the Apple universe as well as unix applications through X11 (or completely ported) and more are coming on board all the time.
If you have questions feel free to ask, either here or in an email!

Posted by dugh

Listen, Mac...

I dunno... I've been an eight since the days when people knew the difference between the sixes and the eights... Mind you, I'm not *anti* mac; we've certainly got enough of them (Rachel has a dual G4? desktop and the last of the black laptops, and we're setting one up for Jared as well).

There's a whole different way of thinking, it seems, in using a Mac. I'm not into the prettiness of GUI's -- I like them because you can run multiple programs at the same time and switch back and forth. Other than that, I'm more comfortable with a command line prompt. I know OS X is based on BSD, but I've only ever seen it set up for seniors who don't really know much about computers. In that guise, it seems toy-like (but the same is true of WinXP, with all its pretty colors and such.)

As it has been since the beginning of time, the software is more important than the hardware... I'll have to (one of these days) sit down and figure out what I can replace my software with for each of the platforms that are possibilities. Just as I switched from PC-Write (under MS-DOS) to MS Word and Programmer's File Editor, I suppose I can switch again.

Posted by Uncle Roger

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