Smart and funny. I nearly spit food over my laptop at one point. I’ll be keeping an eye on this guy.

The network card for my ancient Mac arrived yesterday but I was at the garage getting our car repaired, so I didn’t get time to work on it. I found time today (strangely enough), and had a few issues getting the network to actually work. The machine had System 7.1, which is so old that it doesn’t have a standard TCP/IP stack, meaning that it might have worked if connected to an Apple server, but certainly didn’t work with a standard DHCP server like my Linux gateway.

So, I needed to upgrade it to System 7.5.3, which was the first version of the OS to use Open Transport. OT is still pretty hoary compared to what you get in OS X, but it does the job. The obstacle in front of me was that the Mac had no functioning network and no CD-ROM, so I didn’t have a fast way to get the installer onto the machine. Instead, I had to download 19 disk images with the PowerBook, copy them across to the PC over the LAN and write them to floppy disks (the PowerBook has no floppy drive), then use the good old sneakernet to get them onto the Mac. Fortunately the Mac could read PC format disks without a problem.

Anyhow, the end result can be seen below – the Mac online, looking at this website and a picture of itself.

This morning Crumpet had a cry.

It’s something she does on days when she’s stressed and something minor happens to tip her over the edge. In this instance, she was trying to record an audio comment for a podcast she was listening to, but she wasn’t getting any output from the microphone. All she could hear was noise.

This noise was characteristic of the sound you hear with a modern mic preamp circuit when phantom power (a 48V charge that allows high-quality studio microphones to work) is engaged without a microphone attached. Except that there clearly was a mic attached, which suggested a problem with the lead. I wiggled the lead. Horrible noises ensued. We had a dead lead.

So today I made a special trip to Manny’s and bought a nice 10-foot high quality microphone cable just for Crumpet to use for podcasting. Dry those tears, sweety.

I couldn’t help myself – I got another Mac.

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I just sent off our Motion CD with the fee to upgrade to Final Cut Studio… I guess it will be here in about a week. I also got a call this morning from the real estate agent saying ‘Um… actually the offer of only paying half your rent until the painting of the house was done was only for one month’, so we need to fork out more cash for this month’s rent. Bah, I say.

Crumpet bought me Architecture in Helsinki’s latest album to make up for me having to drive her in to work the other day. I just listened to half of it and gave up… it sounds like a bad school musical. Luckily I think she mostly bought it for herself, so she can put it in her collection.

My CD order showed up today. Right now I’m listening to the first track from Hem’s ‘Eveningland’ which is even more stunning than anything off their debut. The band’s grown from 4 members to 8 and recruited the Slovak National Radio Orchestra to fill out the sound even further.

Live gigging has made Sally Ellyson’s voice even more assured and the album sounds like it had a real budget instead of being recorded in bits and pieces over several months. The fourth track, ‘Redwing’, is enormous. I couldn’t imagine ever putting something like that down to tape.

edit: It turns out that the album was recorded with Dreamworks money, but then Dreamworks fell down went boom. That’d be why it sounds so incredible then.

ROCK! NOW!

So awesome.

Yesterday was not nearly as much fun as I’d hoped it would be. Kym and Crumpet got frozen/blown about/rained on at the ‘festival’ at the Basin, and I stupidly brought my extremely-thin firewire cable for Giz and I to do some recording on the PowerBook. Problem was that it was so thin that it didn’t actually work properly, so the Traveler would get power but not actually get recognised properly by the PowerBook… cue about an hour of attempting to fix it followed by much pouting.

Oh, and it was cold.

Still, it was nice seeing the easternites again (and Joffa/Vetti as well, hurrah!)… mebbe next time won’t be so disappointing.