Lovely Human Being/Margaritaville Update!

Friends, the unofficial Mayor of Fairyland and my missus have embarked on their trip to Mexico, leaving me to my own devices. As devices go, I’ve returned my attention to the sad little Macintosh Performa 5215 CD. The battery that holds the sad little machine’s settings is dead. It hated my SCSI drive until I forced a unit number on the poor thing, the Ethernet card isn’t working, and the monitor is on the way out.

Did I mention that I’m currently the top bidder for a TV tuner card on eBay for the thing? That’s right. $22.68 is the top bid. If it holds out for three freakin’ days (don’t want to use the f-word. Might make Michael Powell mad.), I’ll be able to watch teevee on the sad little Performa’s sad little display. Does this make me happy?

Damn right it does.

It’s a gizmo, which appeals to my gizmophilia. It’s a cheap and cheerful way to get video into a computer on the network, which appeals to my spooky surveillance bent. It’s dumb, which appeals to my bald-faced idiocy. What’s not to love?

… I’ll tell you what. It’s a time and attention hole. There’s so much wrong with the sad little Mac’s design that there are endless patches, kludges, and scripty bits needed to make the thing work. As it loads the aforementioned patches, kludges and bits, they take forever to come online and clog the operations of the already leisurely performance that was built into the system as a cost-cutting measure. Lovely.

Why should you care? That’s a good question, actually. I’d like to say that I can provide important lessons for your computer troubleshooting adventures. I’d like to say that, but I can’t. Let’s face it, you’ll never be able to apply what I’ve learned with this sad little machine to your modern, fabulous computer. Maybe what I can impart is that a seemingly irrelevant project can help you deal with problems in the rest of your life. Maybe having an intellectually challenging hobby—like finding problems and repairing them—is just the thing to take your mind off of more pressing worries, like still being out of a job, for instance.

Still, why does this matter? It doesn’t…

…unless you take away the lesson.

Your philosophical pal,

bob