indiboi.com

When Jon was in Mexico his iBook took a rather large dive into the realm of non-function, we speculated it was a dead harddrive. Well, we finally took the plunge into fixing it, shockingly enough. Monday afternoon I went to pick him up, once back here I ordered the drive for him overnight (he paid me, so don’t be thinking I bought it for him, lol). Tuesday morning I randomly awoke, realized it was kind of late, and then I ran to the door, still in my sleeping clothes — aka just, uhm, underwear. Much to my surprise and horror the guy delivering the drive was there at the door. Keep in mind that I didn’t hear anything… not a truck, knock on the door, or otherwise the doorbell. Granted, I may have heard something, which woke me originally, but I doubt it. Anyway, I think that guy was a little surprised too, lol.

After milling around and doing various other things, including a trip to get the micro-sized tools required, we began the “procedure” that evening. We printed two huge guides, put down a towel, and some looped packing tape to hold the screws. Getting the plastic cover off wasn’t terribly difficult, though some of the corners were rather tight. Thankfully we didn’t break, destructively bend, or severely scratch the cover. There’s this little nub of sorts that helps to hold the cover on in the battery compartment, that alone proved to be perhaps the most difficult aspect, lol. Six screws went onto the tape during that little bit of the process.

We had different strips of tape for screws of different sections, but the problem came in when we realized afterward that some of the screws were just slightly different sizes, almost impossible to notice until it was too late and they were mixed together. Another annoyance, if you will, was that there are layers upon layers of metal, plastic, and such to remove, each layer has its own set of screws, so it was quite easy to put screws into the wrong layer. We, more appropriately me, snapped the magnesium strip around the battery compartment, whooops, but we taped it back together and all seemed well.

The new drive fit perfectly, and apart from the screws in the wrong layers problem along with the problem of not knowing which screws went where, oops, we were able to get it back together. We did have two screws left over though, lol, who knows where they were supposed to go, but considering it was only two of perhaps fifty of them, I guess it’s not so bad afterall. The drive was surely a problem, because it rattled when shaken, a surefire sign of a broken arm… we just didn’t know if it was thee problem. Jon said that he was going to give it to Eddi to destroy, because apparently Jon took out all of his computer frustration on him while in Mexico, heh.

The anticipation of turning the iBook on was very similar to when I built my very first computer, I wasn’t sure then if it would work, explode, or what. :) Sure enough though the iBook booted up, it was confused and flashed the question mark just like it had been doing. I had just then discovered that I no longer had the Panther discs… shit. All I could find were the Jag discs from when I was beta testing for Apple (i.e. they were beta build discs) and my originals that came with the iBook, an ancient 10.1.0 build. Using the ancient discs we were able to finally figure out how to get the new drive formatted and OS X was soon being installed.

It’s so funny how we both had taken the features and stability of the newer versions for granted. OS X circa two plus years ago was pretty awful when it really boils down to it. There were several problems with software though, most of the newer stuff requires newer versions of the OS, thus they weren’t exactly working as they should. Oh well, a few more days and we’ll be able to get that fixed.

We did need to take off the keyboard, airport card, and ram shield though, when we discovered that the trackpad wasn’t working properly. We’d plugged it in backwards, which somehow still allowed it to work, but the cursor would freeze up on a regular basis.

Amazingly enough we were able to accomplish something that is generally regarded as impossible, lol. It surely was a “never again” sort of procedure though, it took forever, was very painstaking, annoying, and, well… exhausting. Hehe, well, he did buy me lunch, and thanked me profusely, so I can’t really complain; it was truly a worthwhile experience, none the less neither of us wishes to ever repeat it. :)

I’ve been mostly just doing a lot of the same lately, mostly working outside in the garden areas. I started building the raised beds for next year, which means basically I’m building concrete block walls around the current beds. The nice thing is that these blocks aren’t the typical gray cinder blocks, but coloured architectural blocks instead. They are, of course, massively heavy, ouch… so sore.

My Louise Odier rose is about to burst into blooms, it has about eight buds about to open right now, whee!

My potted herbs are growing a bit too well for my financial ability to keep them in appropriately sized pots, lol. I’ve been slowly succesively repotting them… whenever I get a new plant, etc, I buy a big pot and repot the larger plants. Of course I’ve sort of reached a point where the mint plants need very expensive and very large pots and that just won’t be happening. I can’t be buying $10 pots (ordinary clay) for all of the mints… especially knowing that they’ll soon outgrow those too. I guess I’ll just either build a raised bed to put them in, and also help contain them, otherwise maybe whiskey barrels, the halved ones, which are $15 each would be a good solution. I made a dumbass mistake when I potted up the original ones by filling part of the pot with rocks… so the roots are growing around the rocks and out through the holes in the bottoms of the pots. I’ve taken care of that and bought them a little more time, lol, but I’ll need to buy a ton of larger pots soon if I don’t put them into the ground (in raised beds).

I went up to Harrisburg Thursday night to see Patrick and also offend my sense of sound by going with him to karaoke. There’s really not all that much more to write about in regards to that I guess, heh. He got me a black five gallon bucket from work for my garden, hehe. Oh well, it gave me some time of having clean fingernails.

I suppose sometime tomorrow I’ll be picking Jon up, he’ll be here for at least two days while we attempt to replace the hard drive in his iBook. I’m still feeling really mixed about the whole thing, so hmmmm…I just don’t know.

Andrew randomly showed up at my house Friday, granted I sort of assumed he would because he asked what the ‘house drink’ was going to be that night. The odd thing was I was just sitting there and my phone beeped with text message saying to “answer the door” …haha.

The rose is called “Sheer Bliss” …rather appropriate perhaps, hehe. :-)

My cellphone cover arrived today, it’s definitely cute & tacky… in that odd sort of good way I guess, much better than the metallic poop coloured cover that the phone came with originally. I’m slowly learning how to use the “form over function” keypad, heh, it was such a bitch to be doing text messages with originally. I’m only slightly annoyed with the fact I don’t have a way of inserting premade smiley faces though.

Under the sarcastic “nice that you made room for me in your schedule” title, erm… I don’t know, I’m feeling a little left out, but the irony is that I don’t want to spend all that much time with this particular guy anyway, just because I don’t get a very good feeling about him anymore. I guess perhaps it’s a situation where the feelings don’t match up mutually in the way they should, I just don’t like it. I don’t understand it, I’m confused. I’ve kept my tongue bitten during most conversations, whenever they do rarely happen, but I’m sure one of these days he’ll say something that makes it a bit more difficult to keep quiet. I think that day is coming soon too, judging from what I found myself wanting to say earlier tonight. I think the biggest problem is that I do like him and do, really, want to spend time with him, but the situation is just not anywhere near ideal and I haven’t any idea of how to change it either.

I was thinking, and made mention of it, the other night while Patrick was here, about how I wanted to go to Indiana… of course that means visiting Adam. I’ve been quite remiss about keeping up communication with him, just like with everyone; basically if you don’t get in touch with me I don’t bother, it’s kind of a bad habit in a sense, but it’s also sort of one of those things… if they wanted to talk to me they’d do something, right? It gets nullified because that too works both ways.

I guess it all comes down to disappointment in general. While I tend not to put too much stock into anyone I meet, there are ocassionally people that just kind of instantly mean more than the usual person, especially if things develop in one way or another toward the direction of being more than strangers… and then you sort of learn they aren’t really who you’d expected, perhaps even hoped, they were… it seems to happen too often. With that in mind, I tend to consider myself to be a fairly cynical person… even if that isn’t terribly true, but given so much, I could see myself growing to be even more cynical just because there are so many things to become disappointed with, particularly people, heh.

I look at some of the lives around me and I wonder about them, in the sense of how dismayed I am. There’s someone who jumps from one ‘get rich quick’ sort of scheming job to the next, nothing honest about the work they do in the slightest… it always ends up with them being in some sort of financial or legal trouble, but it just keeps happening anyway. Then there’s one who is basically prostituting himself to the medical world to gain income, which I cannot understand, but then again it seems to be his general way of living too, while he may not be getting paid for sex directly, he seems to profit from people he spends time with in one way or another, be that transporation, dinner, housing, anything he finds himself needing. It fits in well with the general tone I get from him regarding ‘why’ he wants to spend time with me when he does… he needs me to do something for him. There is almost always an ulterior motive involved in one way or another. I realize it and put up with it to an extent, but I think it’s wearing on me heavily…

I don’t see much in terms of worthwhile truth or being anymore.

My new cellphone arrived today, finally, well… today being thursday in this particular sentance. I mentioned it before, but it’s a Nokia 3595 and the cover is this hideous bronze/poop colour, egads, it must be replaced as soon as possible. Since I couldn’t find any covers anywhere, including the kiosk place at the mall in Hagerstown (well, they had some, but they were also ugly and very expensive) I bought one on Ebay, it’s sort of cute and tacky with rainbow coloured smiley faces all over it, heh.

The phone wouldn’t stop beeping after I turned it on, hah, I have a ton of text messages and voicemail notifications arriving all at once, haha. I had two messages from Andrew before I (or was it Patrick?) let him know that my phone was dead; I also had two messages waiting from Jon — he was letting me know that he was back from Mexico and that he wanted my help with computer stuff (shock).

Patrick came down and spent Wednesday night/Thursday morning with me… it was rather nice to see him, I guess it’s kind of been a while. It was a nice stress reliever.

My brother David might be able to hook me up with a cover for the phone, since he has ‘connections’ and recently found himself with two extra covers for his phone, for free, heh… until I find out otherwise I’ll wait before ordering the pearl white one for this phone like I had for the other.