Rhapsodies

Well, it was an interesting week for all things involving technical maintenance.

The first thing came as a surprise on Saturday morning when on the way to the U-district I discovered my front wheel was literally bent out of shape. My best guess of how it happened was when I tripped picking it up the night before. It was one of those stumbles where you know you are going to fall no matter what going to fall down so the best thing to do is (again literally) roll with it. It seems weird that after being a bit of a klutz this December with a handful of tumbles I was genuinely surprised I was able to walk away from, the only one that actually damages my bike was a comic pratfall in my front yard.

The biggest pain about it was rescheduling my afternoon around going to the bike shop which involved going to the bank for petty cash, breaking the twenty at a Dick’s Drive-in, and of course waiting for the damn bus. When I got to the shop it turned out I had to get the wheel replaced, which only took another fifteen minutes.

Compared to that, the problems I’ve had with my laptop this week was merely tedious. Over the past year it had been having problems with the back light going out to the point I’d stopped using it for a couple of months. One of my Christmas presents to myself was taking it to the Apple Store Genius bar. It turned out to be an easy fix and I was very glad to have my portable office back. I quickly decided to take the next step and finally get a travel tablet so I could do more than just letter strips It turned out that none of the drivers that Wacom provides run on anything older than OS X 10.6 and my laptop still runs on the OS X 10.5 it came with. To a certain extent this is just as well. I’d been putting off upgrading the operating software on both my computers. The only real stumbling block was in order to upgrade to the current operating system on my laptop I first had to upgrade to 10.6 and guess what software Apple still keeps in disk form and still sends to you by snail mail? (In hindsight I should have checked to see if the Apple Store had a copy but so it goes)

I finally got my copy on Saturday but just to be on the safe side I’m backing up everything before I do anything and since I’m using an old portable hard drive I’ve had way too long and it’s taking forever. (By forever I mean about 1 gig every 15 minutes and that’s not counting the number of times the computer went to sleep and the time I accidentally unplugged the laptop when I moved it to the office!)

All fun but still the sooner I get this over with the better.