PRABOB, once again, for the first time in several years, the computer is waiting for ME, rather than the other way around. NO MORE TIME FOR BAD HABITS FOR ME!! No nose-strokin' or pocket-pickin'. Only GRINDSTONE-nosin', now!
I thought all those websites and newsgroups were so slow because of my MODEM. CHRIST!! I might actually start LOOKING at WEBSITES. And even Photoshop, with EVERY KNOWN FILTER, fairly SPURTS open! Opening Photoshop on my Pee-Mac 7500 used to involve several minutes of loud grinding noises and steam shooting out of the sides of the computer. And POSER!!! Poser just BLIPS on. I don't even have to CLICK on WORD, just look at the icon and CONSIDER opening it, and it opens.
Too bad I only type 3 words a minute!
On Friday, when I knew the great machine would be delivered, I spent the day TOTALLY REVISING MY OFFICE/THRONE ROOM/STUDIO TIGER-CAGE, making room for a second computer and monitor using a technique akin to playing Tetris. Compressing the strewn-about intestines of THE HOUR OF SLACK alone took almost all day. Lucky for Princess Wei, she was in Canada singing at a festival, and missed my intense, mounting single-minded ubergeekery.
THEN, in the late afternoon, THE BOX WAS DELIVERED! A box the size of a CITY BUS. THE ELECTRICAL POWER FOR SEVERAL BLOCKS AROUND IMMEDIATELY WENT OFF. The entire neighborhood was plunged into steaming, sweaty near-darknes for almost three hours. MULESKINNER II HAD ARRIVED IN CLEVELAND. I strolled around th neighborhood, enjoying the "mini-End-Times" ambience.
Eventually, after power was restored to East Cleveland, I had cleared space for the new member of the family, opened the box, and, using pulley and rope, hoisted the new G4 Power Mac and swung it over to the work bench. My god, it didn't smell like a new computer, it smelled like a new HOUSE. It LOOKS like a shiny new modern CAR and is almost as heavy as one.
FINALLY I once again have a better computer than my KIDS have!!
I had been kidding myself about how massive this device would be. I had to seriously rethink placement. It HAD to go on the floor... if it fell from a table, it might kill somebody. But what would become of all my SCSI babies, my JAZ and ZIP and Syquest drives and so forth? Would they be rudely ripped from the tet of Muleskinner, from their nursery atop Muleskinner's back, in order to reach the butt of Muleskinner II, way down there on the floor?
First I had to make sure the SCSI babies COULD nurse off their new Papa... I had to install a "PCI card", literally a second anus and lower intestine, to Muleskinner II's butt, so that the many expensive little SCSI devices could sup thereupon! And I DID! It was easy. You can crck open these new computers like an old shotgun and just REAM 'em out. This new one took a whole 140 kilamegs of REAM.
THEN--! I had the scarifying job of INSTALLING THE DONATED SECOND HARD DRIVE!! The fine Rev. Reynolds of Clevelandia GAVE me a 10-gig internal hard drive!! And I tried to stick it in Muleskinner I and IT WOULDN'T GO. But LO, thanks to the GUIDANCE of my PERIPHERALS ANGEL, Rev. C. Bear, I was led to STICK IT IN MULESKINNER II since it was after all an IDE type of drive and not some olden days type of thing like Muleskinner I. So I just INSTALLED the HELL out of it, without a by-your-leave or any hesitancy at all, such a geek am I.
I still had only the one monitor, though... the ViewSonic tied to olde Muleskinner I. WOULD IT WORK??!? That was a matter of suspense. And these new USB cords!! My GOD man, what's with these dinky little things. Outlandish. PRABEAR I already had a "hub". So now was the final moment... the moment of truth, the terrifying suspense of the FIRST TIME START-UP.
The LOOONG first-time start-up. For a minute there I thought surely that my chimp-like wrenching and screwdrivering of this $1500 machine's guts had destroyed it OFF-WARRANTY!
THE SCREEN LIT UP!
THEN IT WENT BLACK AND CUT OFF!!
THEN IT CAME BACK AGAIN!
And by gobbs if the god damned thing didn't suddenly start showing me a MOVIE! A great big full screen movie about "welcome to the G4" or some such sexy shit. It even had snappy canned music and a cartoon showing you HOW TO WORK THE MOUSE!!
"TIME TO FROP," sez I. The hard part is over; now to GEEK IN EARNEST.
I had already prepared myself for dealing with the crappy new UBS keyboard that comes with the Macs, which has NO familiar old brown stains on it (!!), and the HORRIBLE CIRCULAR MOUSE that they force you to use at first, THE single WORST designed piece of shit mouse in the cosmos. CIRCULAR!!! Oh, that makes a TON of sense.
The movie ended and suddenly the computer was asking me my ISP info and configuring me for "the Internet!" "You're going online!" it announced, and suddenly I was signed up to a fre Excite.com acount! (The name "Stand" was already taken, so I had to use my fall-back, "revstang".) I HADN'T EVEN SEEN THE GOD DAMNED DESKTOP YET, for crysakes, and here I was already looking at my own new web page "online."
So this is how Normals get online these days!
Sure is EASY!!
Finally I had me a plain old Mac OS desktop staring me in the face like a blank sheet of paper, with 10 gigs waiting for me to fill up. Wait, there were supposed to be 20 gigs! That damn donated new second ATA hard drive WASN'T THERE! HMMPH! Drive Set-Up can't detect it. I opened the Mac and redid the connections. Still nada. BUT COULD IT BE THAT IT NEEDS A CONFIGURATION OF JUMPER PINS?? I was told to remove the one jumper pin so that it would be a SLAVE and not a MASTER, so i did. But... are pins supposed to go ELSEWHERE, in another position back there? Currently there are NO jumper pins on it, just the data ribbon and the power supply.
Once I get that other 10 gigs to mount, I WILL PUT SUBSITE ON IT!!! THE WHOLE THING!! IN ONE PLACE!!
Also, I notice that on the butt side of this G4 there are many wonderful new sockets like Firewire, USB and even a stereo audio mini-plug... BUT WHERE IS MY PLAIN OLD RCA "VIDEO IN"??? You know, for the NON-digital video image, LIKE EVERY VIDEO CAMERA AND TAPE BEFORE LAST YEAR!!! Like I used to have for my OLD OLD Mac. Why, it turns out, I need a SPECIAL GRAPHICS CARD for "analog" video-in, or out, GOBBS DANG IT!!!
Or is there an adapter of some kind? How can I run my High 8 camera into Muleskinner II besides buying a new card with a video in port?
BUT, the main thing was, MY NEW COMPUTER WAS RUNNING!! And soon I would ethernet it to its grandpappy, so I looked up the "USERS AND GROUPS" networking details in the Help Guide... AND I HAD MY FIRST CRASH!!
Restarting takes just about as long as my old one did... but the auto-repairing happens in SECONDS.
And by GOLLY but the room sure looks purtier and airier, all cleaned up like this.
AND IT'S ALIVE!!!! IT"S ALIVE!!!
Sure could USE a lot of stuff, though. Needs a Zip drive, either interior or exterior... REALLY ought to have a Jaz drive too although obviously they're about to phase out the 1 gig Jaz cartridges. But what it really REALLY needs is a CD-RW or even a DVD-RAm burner. My plan is to keep Muleskinner burning "product" CDs from Jaz masters SCSI to SCSI like it has been, but this new Mac needs to be able to burn CDs too, through Firewire I guess.
So there's the DONATIONS LIST:
A ZIP DRIVE
A JAZZ DRIVE
A CD-RW
Firewire or SCSI on the CD-RW. Jaz or Zip could be USB or SCSI.
I spent all day Saturday and Sunday POURING PROGRAMS into Muleskinner II, at first by moving my entire SCSI chain of baby devices over to Muleskiner II. But the god damn 1-gig JAZ drive wouldn't mount right! A few small things would copy at first, but then it got to where the whole system would freeze up and crash any time I tried to do anything with a file on the Jaz... such as copy it. I checked SCSI-Probe and every other damn thing, Silverlining Lite, all the Imoga driver stuff... I comared old to new... kept crashing. I could copy from my old Syquest EZ 135, from CDs, from the Zip, but not from the Jaz. Iomega Tools actd crazy and crashed too. Finally I methodicaly went through all the Iomega related items and made sure they were updated to the OS 9, and I rebooted with the Jaz attached and nothing in it and ran the updater that came with the SCSI card again, and FINALLY I got it seemingly working fine... all my JAZ discs mounted, both MAC and PC formatted... EXCEPT SUBSITE.
SubSITE actually covers 2 gigs, but the main working copy that I edit it on, with the "live" sections, was on a very crowded, old JAZ. It only has about 4 megs to spare. And it won't mount, not when the Jaz is connected to Muleskinner II. It wil mount if the Jaz is on Muleskinner 1. I think. (I DO have a safety copy of the whole thing from 2 weeks ago on CD anyway.) It takes a LONG LONG TIME to mount even on Muleskinner I, because it's composed of 14,000 itty bity files.
I notice that Disk Doctor 6 and Tech Tools 2 are for Mac System 8.6. I am afraid to run them on OS 9.
But IT'S ALIVE!!!! All my programs work, and they all work EIGHTEEN THOUSAND TIMES BETTER!!
All need now, are IDEAS! And A MILLION DOLLARS. I need the million dolrs to buy the TIME. I am now WAY BEHIND on other extremely critical jobs, jobs far too importtant to jeopardize by naming here.
AND NOW THE MONITOR has arrived. The 19 inch monitor. IT, TOO, IS VASTLY LARGER THAN I EXPECTED, and in fact I and the "boys" BARELY managed to squeze it into the freight elevators.
NOW WHAT?? Where the hell will the OLD monitor go? I don't know, but I know this new computer ROX NOT PUKES!!
Original file name: New Computer!6-12-00
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