Wednesday, January 26, 2011

my heart... beeps

Today is the 90th anniversary of the word ROBOT. What better way to commemorate it than by ignoring all of my messy, confusing emotional difficulties and concentrating on the (apparently) tidy world of technology?

This week i:

  • installed a new (bigger, faster) hard drive in my MacBook (after cloning my old one, to be safe).
  • installed a ton of new RAM — quadrupled my memory!*

Then:

Today at work (i really love helping people solve computer problems) i managed to help a prof get her weird old Toshiba laptop working with the new projectors (had to fiddle around with the [Windows XP] displays control panel a bit; for some reason it would only work as extended desktop, not mirroring).


…and then (still at work) i used screen sharing (via MobileMe remote access) to copy files and do stuff on my iMac at home — which also enabled me to use Safari on my iMac to Google workarounds when Safari started to hang  on my MacBook (BBoD for like 20 minutes). That’s how i found this sweet Terminal command that kills the Flash plugin: bringing Safari back to life without having to quit and reopen all my 40 windows. Yay!

Then i scanned an old Herbert Read essay (about art, of course) so i can read it on my iPad.

i love computers.


*sort of, in theory... My MacBook now reports having 8GB RAM, but it seems that only 6GB can actually be addressed by the system. That’s fine, though. Based on a few days of giving this machine a good workout, it looks like a little under 4GB is what i actually “need” on a regular basis (and anything more is just elbow room). Oh and yes, of course: i always enjoy talking about RAM.