Hardware

Yesterday I became the proud new owner of a Dell D630 Latitude. Today I began the tiresome task of transferring my life from my old D610 to it. The old laptop was Anchor. (Previous computers were Budweiser, Guinness, and Corona.) The new laptop is Maui. Here is a list of the software that Dell decided to install on my new machine that I either immediately disabled or deleted:

• Google Desktop
• Google Toolbar
• AOL Setup
• Intellisonic Speech Enhancement
• the “language” taskbar toolbar
• Dell’s Wireless WLAN Card monitor

My mom just sent me the following text message:

Attempts to contact my mom via her cell phone have failed. Unfortunately even if I could get her on the phone, the only advice I could give her — after over a decade of working in the computer industry — is to maybe try to shake the liquid out and blow-dry it.

When the revolution comes and the computers try to squash humanity out of existence, hopefully some of us will remember their Achilles’ heel: ill-placed cups of coffee.

While shopping at Best Buy you may notice a somewhat newish brand of computer products going by the name Dynex. At first I wasn’t sure if I could trust these things; they’re usually exactly the same as the name brand stuff but 50% less expensive. I’m always wary of getting something that seems like such a good deal. In this case you’re wise to buy. Dynex is apparently the Best Buy “generic” brand. I just bought an A/V cable for connecting my iPod to my TV and it works perfectly.

For Christmas ‘04 I got my girlfriend a shiny new HP Photosmart 7960. She loves it. It prints fabulous, high-quality images and it comes with some great photo-printing software. Sure you have to mortgage your house to keep the ink flowing, but you knew that was going to be the case when you bought the thing, right?

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A Short List of Things That I Had at One Time Thought Were Quite Technologically-Advanced But Which Now Are in My Closet Because I Will Probably Never Use Again (and What Replaced Them)

• VCR (TiVo, DVDs, and 950 Cable Channels)
• Stereo Component MiniDisc Player (iPod, mp3s)
• Portable MiniDisc Player (iPod, mp3s)
• 5-Disc CD Changer (iPod, mp3s)
• Approximately 850 Music CDs (iPod, mp3s)
• 2 Microsoft Sidewinder PC Video Game Controllers (Playstation 2)

Griffin Technology has finally released an update for their iTrip transmitter that works with iTunes. Until now you had to use MusicMatch to get an iTrip to work, and it was a pain because — although it is a great player — MusicMatch bites it when it comes to synching your iPod.

I own an NEC SuperScript 870 laser printer. When I bought it - sometime towards the end of 2000 - I was incredibly thrilled. (I had actually bought one sometime in ‘99, I think. Then I moved to California and couldn’t bring the world’s most-economical, feature-rich, best-performing printer with me. So I bought another one because I was so happy with it.) This printer does everything. And it does everything extremely well. Watermarks, half-tones, headers and footers, multi-column pages, foldable brochures … it had the most incredible software interface! If you were working in Word and clicked Print and then looked at the Preferences (or Options) it was boggling how many awesome things you could do with this printer.

But that was before Windows 2000.

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Someone in Australia invented a combination keyboard and mouse that looks like it would be a pain. I don’t know how quickly I could adapt to using one since I’m not a true touch-typist. Hmmm …

<drool>
Sony CLIÉ^TM handheld.
</drool>

The University of North Carolina has finally found a network server that, although missing for four years, hasn’t missed a packet in all that time. Try as they might, university administrators couldn’t find the server. Working with Novell Inc., IT workers tracked it down by meticulously following cable until they literally ran into a wall. The server had been mistakenly sealed behind drywall by maintenance workers.

Heh. I was only kidding. Yes, I am a computer programmer. I wasn’t kidding about that. (Although “computer programmer” is not usually what people think when they think of me.) But I wasn’t really worried about getting this thing running with a sound card. Hello? How hard is that? I freakin’ built Bud from scratch, y’know? Fooling with HSND02 here is not that big a shmeal. So now we are ready to go. Woo. Hoo. Goodbye MiniDisc action, hello mp3s.

Heh. Cool. I’m a computer programmer. I am not a hardware guy. I am using a server as a development machine. The hardware guy just gave me a sound card and a screwdriver. Let’s see if I can do this … <Dr. Nick>Good night, Everybody!</Dr. Nick>

Jason received this error message from one of the NT Servers at work:

While validating that COM3 was really a serial port, the contents of the divisor latch register was identical to the interrupt enable and the receive registers. The device is assumed not to be a serial port and will be deleted.

Did I already mention that I will absolutely die if I don’t get one of these in the very near future? That’s it. I’m buying one tomorrow. Case closed. Whew! It feels good to get that decision out of the way.