Stone Soup, and Propeller Beanies

[libertango]

Like nomi, it's been a bit gadget-heavy around here lately. There are many components to that, but I'll talk about the big one.

See, back about... Oh, I think it must've been New Years' Eve or so, someone in our apartment complex left a Macintosh Performa 630CD out by the trash. It had a note on it, reading (more or less), "Works great, we just don't need it any more. Feel free to take."

So I looked at this a while. I've always had more curiosity than wallet when it came to the Mac platform. Still, I had no real experience with it, and ya wanna talk about a pig in a poke...

I left the computer there. Overnight. Two nights, I think.

It rained.

So the poor little Mac is still out there, water drops beading on it, and I figure, aw, what the hell.

I take it inside, plug it in... And sum-bitch, it powers up. The glass on the monitor is cold enough I have to keep wiping condensation off, but it powers up.

Since then, it's been a bit of a thrill ride to see just how far I can push the envelope, upgrade-wise. Because it's not like I can leave well enough alone. To give you an idea, here's a table:

.	Original Spec	Upgrade Spec
Processor	68040, 33MHz	PowerPC 601, 75MHz
Memory	8MB	64MB
Hard drive	250MB	6GB
CD-ROM speed	2x	12x
Networking	None	Asante Ethernet card
Mac OS	7.5.5	9.1

Some of that isn't finished yet -- I'm waiting on the memory and the OS 9.1 CD. But it gives you an idea of just how major an overhaul I'm doing. And it doesn't even mention that I had to buy a new keyboard, because the old one had stuck keys.

Like I say, it's been fun. I get to tinker, and re-build.

But what does this have to do with propeller beanies?, I hear you ask.

Well... Bill Watterson once had a three week thread -- 18 strips -- in Calvin and Hobbes. And it was all about how Calvin found out one day that Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs was having a promotion where, when you sent in enough box tops, they'd send you a propeller beanie.

So Calvin bugs his mom and dad to eat his cereal, so he can get the boxtops faster (they don't). He finally sends his form and the boxtops away, thinking he'll get the beanie quickly, only to read the fine print and discover the usual 6-8 week wait ("I'll be old by then!"). When it comes, he breaks the propeller, and only his dad can fix it ("Hey, Mom! Dad fixed something!" "He did? Your father?").

And, having day-dreamed for weeks about how the propeller beanie will let him fly -- he finds out that all it does is spin (batteries not included). Whereupon he kicks it to the ground, and he and Hobbes play with the box.

A finer parable for the high tech industry I've yet to hear.

And, as an analysis of a personality trait of mine... it's one that cuts exceedingly to the bone.

So while, on the one hand, I want to point out this sparkly thing I'm doing with something I'm not at all familiar with... On the other hand, I want y'all to know what I mean in the future when I say, "Aw, it's just another propeller beanie."

Anyway...

I was looking for a name for the Mac for the network (everyone has to have a machine name), and I was looking at the name of varieties of apples, first. But akirlu, after protesting that I only wanted to use boring apple names, said, "You could always call it Stone Soup."

Ah. Right. Gotcha.

So I am.

Comments

[ckd]

Technically, it did have built-in networking.

LocalTalk (or, when run over twisted pair, PhoneNet).

230kbps, not exactly fast networking, but hey.

If you'd just asked me...

[marykaykare.livejournal.com]

Jordin here, actually.

....I could have given you a Mac keyboard. And a copy of 9.1. And probably a better machine than the Performa (I think I still have that PowerPC 7200/120 sitting around somewhere; I know I've got a G3 Powerbook with a busted screen that works fine with an external monitor). But I know, I know... that would have taken all the fun out of it.

(I did get rid of the Quadra 605 I used to have -- I picked up the motherboard at a flea market for $5. This was long enough ago that any Quadra was actually still a fairly valuable machine, so I mounted the motherboard on a piece of particleboard, added a PC-XT power supply with a hacked-on connector, and a floppy and hard disk just sort of hanging by their cables.... But it worked, and I used it for years for testing monitors.)

Re: If you'd just asked me...

[hal-obrien.livejournal.com]

Well, I didn't know I wanted to ask, until I saw the poor lil' thing in the parking lot. :)

But thank you for the very kind offers. In fact... What model Powerbook is it? Will it take a Wintel/VGA monitor, or does it need something Apple-specific? Is there a way to persuade it to do WiFi/Airport? I wouldn't mind having that can run OS X, and even in the most extreme scenarios, the machine I have now won't do that.

Back in the days of BBSes, there was an offline mail reader called SLMR, or "Slimer", for Silly Little Mail Reader. The guys who wrote it were up in Victoria, and I remember their distribution BBS ran on a system that was mostly attached to a plywood board, and hanged on a wall. They called it something witty, "The {something} Board", but I'm growing old enough to have forgotten, and Google only comes up with few hits (none relevant). But it turns out (on further noodling) Greg Hewgill, the guy who wrote SLMR, has an LJ -- ghewgill. Maybe I'll ask him. :)