New toy

That Bob doesn't mess around.

Unlike me, who takes an eternity to make a decision, Bob takes care of things.

On my way home Thursday night I stopped at the cable store and exchanged the cable modem, hoping against hope that I had somehow ended up with a defective one, or one that hadn't been reset. So when we got home Sunday afternoon I optimistically hooked it up to the iMac, crossed my fingers and . . . nothing. I was disappointed, but not really surprised.

I resigned myself to being on dial-up for the immediate future -- none of the options were very good -- get the iMac fixed, which would probably have cost a few hundred dollars; set up wireless networking, which would also cost a few hundred dollars, or get a new computer, which while certainly the most attractive of the options, was really out of the realm of possibility for me right now.

I was sharing Bob's AOL account for the duration, which he didn't mind at ALL, but I did. We have two telephone lines, but only one account, and only one person can be signed on at a time. And of course, I didn't really want to tie up our main phone line for hours at a time, even if he didn't mind. I decided to get an Earthlink dial-up account, but after I had signed up and used it for a couple of hours, I discovered that while I could get mail, I couldn't send anything. In order to send mail through Earthlink (their servers require additional authorization), I would have to upgrade my Outlook Express, which was a 12 MB download. And, of course, over a dial-up connection. No thanks.

Bob was sitting in the room with me while I spent what seemed like hours on the phone waiting for an Earthlink representative to come on the line so I could cancel my account, and I'm sure he was watching the vein in my forehead pulse (he's told me that before, although I've never witnessed it myself, or never paid attention). I do admit that my blood pressure was probably rising.

But like I said, I was resigned to it.

Then on Monday he called me at work and asked me, if I was going to buy a new computer, what would I buy? I told him that I'd been thinking about an eMac, which was fairly inexpensive as Macs go, and looked like it would have everything I needed. He asked, "Is that good enough for what you need it for?" and I said it was, but I just wasn't in a position to buy a new computer right now, and he said, "Well, I'm on my way to CompUSA."

He and his dad had gotten together and they bought me a new eMac! Bob had really just intended to scope them out and find out about them, then convince me to go get one later in the week, but the salesman told him that they were flying out of the store because of a rumor that Mac was curtailing production (I had heard that, too), and he was afraid that if we waited, they'd be gone and I'd either have to wait or get something else that either I didn't want, or couldn't afford.

So he bought it, and brought it home, and I've spent the past few nights getting it set up. It's running OS X, which I had not yet upgraded to, so it's completely different from what I'm used to. Which is exciting and frustrating all at once. It's really gorgeous, and the monitor seems huge compared to the iMac. I imagine there will be a few more days of installing software, getting things set up the way I like them, etc., before I can actually do any work on it, but I'm definitely looking forward to it.

Bob said, and I know it makes sense, that I was wasting my time trying to cobble things together to make the iMac work. He said I need good tools in order to do my work, and that's right. The Ethernet was dead, so I was having to connect using a borrowed AOL account and our home phone line, and another major problem was that I'd never been able to get a CD burner working after my old one quit, so I've been kind of on borrowed time there, too, as far as backups go.

He said it was time to stop messing around and get it handled. Yay for Bob! Misty said she thought the computer problems were a message that I needed a new Mac, but I didn't think there was any way that would happen. Happily, I was wrong.

This week I also did a redesign of David Knopfler's homepage. He has a new album, Ship of Dreams, coming out in September, so it was time for an update.