iPod battery replacement

Today my wife gave me her 4GB blue iPod mini. I set it up on my MacBook Pro. Nice.

I also replaced the battery in my 4G (fourth generation) 40GB iPod. It was easy.

First glimpse of Leopard

I ordered a Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard five-pack the other day. It hasn’t arrived. Today I went to the Apple Store at Int’l Plaza and checked it out. Very nice. Ran fast, too, on Macs comparable to mine. Great. iCal looks a lot nicer.

BlackBerry Curve 8320 GSM T-Mobile

My wife decided to take her paper calendars, paper address book and RAZR cell phone and roll them all into a smartphone. She wanted a BlackBerry Curve. (I showed her her choices about a week ago and she liked the look of the Curve above everything else I showed her.) Today she upgraded to the Curve.

My wife has a facebook account

I just discovered that my wife has a Facebook account. I don’t even have a Facebook account yet. Why did she get it? Because two friends of hers asked her to do it.

La Fonera Plus is live!

I took ten minutes — okay, fifteen — and plugged in my La Fonera + tonight. It’s working great. No hitches so far.

Fon arrived.

La Fonera and Fontenna arrived a few days ago. Faster than the three weeks I was told to expect when I ordered. Good deal.

3GB’s of RAM

My 2GB Crucial PC2-5300 SODIMM arrived today. Thanks, newegg!

I replaced the original 1GB SODIMM in my MacBook Pro with it. So now my MBP contains a 2GB Crucial SODIMM ($115) and a 1GB Crucial SODIMM ($25 after rebate, $45 before). Boy, does XP Pro run nicely in Parallels Desktop now!

The big reason I bought this extra gig of RAM was to run parallel XP Pro and XP Home virtual machines in Parallels. With just 2GB, my machine went absolutely nuts trying to do this. Now it works great — it’s one of the first things I tried.

iPod song count: 7259

I ripped perhaps 40 CDs into MP3s today. Current iPod song count: 7259

Loose MacBook Pro hinge

I’ve owned a 2.16GB Core 2 Duo 1GB 120GB 128MB MacBook Pro for about two months, perhaps three by now. Some time back the screen got a bit loose. It has a few degrees of travel that aren’t tight.

I brought it to the Apple Store at International Plaza mall in Tampa, Florida yesterday, Saturday, 6 October 2007. The guy at the Genius Bar told me there is a clutch in there that has to be replaced and Apple must do it — they cannot do it in the store. He told me to expect the computer to be gone 5-7 days. What!?! This is my work machine.

Dell will come to my house to fix a Dell notebook. I thought that getting a Mac would be great because I could just walk into the store and walk out with my notebook fixed if something should come up. I was wrong this time.

He said the condition is not degenerative and will not spread. That is, it will not get worse and so there is no rush bringing it in.

HP LaserJet 4 Plus (HPLJet 4+) fixed

I replaced the fuser roller in my HPLJet yesterday. Fifteen years or so and still going strong. About six of those years have been with me. It has a JetDirect 10BT network card and, if I recall correctly, 48MB of RAM.

Fon

I’d read about Fon some time ago. I’m not sure where. I was very interested. It works like this: You buy a wireless router for $50. You use it to share your wireless internet with other Fon users. Those users either pay Fon for the privilege or they have their own routers and they let people use it for free, in which case they can use any Fon routers for free themselves. Or they can get some money from Fon but then they have to pay (half off, I think) to use other Fon routers.

For me, they’re throwing in a wifi area extender antenna which is usually $20 for $2 when I buy the Fonera+ router at the same time. So for me, heck, if this just extends my home wifi signal, that has some value to me. But it’s really about sharing. What I’d really like to see is a countrywide (reasonable coverage, anyway) wireless mesh network connecting people to the internet for a small cost.

Fon is a step in the right direction.

[Not] Fingerprinted at Disney World

We went to Disney World in Orlando yesterday, Sunday, 30 September 2007. It was a nice day.

What surprised and dismayed me was the fingerprint scanner at the entrance. Just slide your card (ticket) in here, then put your finger (thumb, I guess) here on top. Uh… no, thanks, I’ll pass. And pass, I did. I tried putting the top of my bent finger on there (no print up top) a few times but it just spit out my ticket each time. So some guy came over and told me to put my finger on there. I told him, simply, “No.” He asked me at least one more time and I did not vary my response.

Eventually, he asked me if I have ID. Sure, I have ID. He asked me for my ID and to sign my Disney World ticket. Okay. I signed my ticket then handed it to him with my driver’s license and he inspected both in parallel, apparently confirming that the signatures matched.

Then he put the ticket back through the machine and keyed in something on a keypad on his side of the entrance-blocking, person-counting, ticket-confirming, fingerprint-taking machine. It didn’t work and the machine spit the ticket back out. He repeated this, reaching over and reinserting the ticket easily ten times or more. He surely tried every ticket orientation as he fed it into the machine — though, at my questioning, he told me he should be able to put the ticket in at any orientation.

Sometimes the machine held on to the ticket for a bit, probably expecing a fingerprint despite whatever he was keying in on his side. Sometimes it spit the ticket right out after it was inserted.

The guy then told me I needed a new ticket. So he brought me a new ticket and had me sign that new one then put it through the machine.

After we got in, a good friend we were there with remarked, “I’m already in the system.” And a few minutes later, my mother-in-law came up beside me and told me, “I didn’t know being fingerprinted was optional.” I replied, “Neither did I.”

I won’t be fingerprinted to attend an amusement park.

A quick google search of “disney fingerprinting” returned some interesting articles:

Google
Boing Boing
Engadget
http://newsinitiative.org/story/2006/09/01/walt_disney_world_the_governments