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Wednesday, April 20, 2005 |
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Floridiots Have Guns! Broward man shoots car to put it out of misery
 LAUDERDALE-BY-THE-SEA, Fla.
A man with car trouble is in trouble after shooting his 1994 Chrysler LeBaron.
John McGivney, 64, pumped five rounds from a .380-caliber semiautomatic
into the hood, Broward County sheriff's deputies said Tuesday.
When the property manager at his apartment complex asked what he was
doing, McGivney said, "I'm putting my car out of its misery." He tucked
his gun in a pocket and went back inside...
..."I think every guy in the universe has wanted to do it," McGivney told the South Florida Sun-Sentinel on Tuesday...
LINK
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6:03:59 PM 
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Old iMacs in Paradise The Attack of the Oxide
 Yesterday
I spent most of the day trying to track down the cause of frequent
crashes and freezes on an old ‘Lime” iMac.
I must have
rebooted the damn thing twenty-five times just trying to keep it
running long enough to find out what was wrong. But it never did the
same thing
twice, crashing sometimes when opening a window or dragging, at other
times locking up while
connecting to the web or starting an application.
This computer lived in Haiku - a lush region on the windward (wet)
side of Maui. Anything on the northwest slope not cared for usually
turns green and fuzzy in short order. There’s also a lot of
dust blown up by trade
winds sweeping across the pineapple fields and pastures. This volcanic
dust is bright red and ground fine as powder by decades of agriculture.
Computers are very predictable, they like to always fall over the same way.
Application problems are obvious, and the most common. Use any
Microsoft program for a while and you’ll see what I mean.
Hard drive hassles though, are usually black and white and present warning
messages of some kind, like the flashing icon at startup which is the
Mac’s way of saying ‘you might be
fucked’. In contrast, trouble caused by too little RAM
happens fast: snappy, quick freezes indicating that you've run out of
room and need more megs on board.
But when a computer behaves randomly like this it indicates damage to a circuit or the memory chips. So, instead of a quick and merciful application of recreational explosives,
I dug a 128meg RAM chip out of my tool box and began the onerous
process of breaking the old iMac down to where the memory hides. This
model - the colorful second version of the iMac - was based on my beloved
Pismo PowerBook and the innards were tucked inside a translucent
plastic case like one of those oriental puzzle boxes.
Taking one apart is like doing a lobotomy on a sand crab. Finally
I got down to the steel sheet covering the processor and memory
circuits. It was so rusty it looked to have grown hair! On prying that
off I found that the rust had migrated onto the RAM chip beneath and
coated the pins with a hard brown crust of wonderfully conductive iron
oxide which could not be removed by genial means. The combination of rainy weather and iron-oxine based volcanic dust was a perfect environment for growing random connections on electronic curcuits. So I replaced the chip,
reassembled everything and said a silent prayer. (”C’mon you son of a bitch, work!)
This time, everything ran just fine. I
was able to quickly install a new system and get her browser on line.
With a magnifying glass I saw later that the rust had shorted out about
twenty-percent of the pins on the memory chip. The computer would start up
fine, but as soon as it used one of those oxide-caked circuits, the
pooch would be screwed causing an instant crash. There was more rust on
other parts inside this iMac, none as critical the memory, but an
indication that the old Lime wasn’t long for this world. I
recommended that the owner warm up her credit card, keep up with
Apple’s product releases and back up everything all the time.
As myna birds fought loudly for their perches
in the full green trees trees around us and a golden sunset filtered
through the light mist of rain, Ulu and I set out up the mountain for home,
tired, rusty and more than ever convinced that while Mac users need not
yet worry about viruses, we do have to be careful about rust, dust and
fungus.
10:39:39 AM
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