Journal of a Sabbatical

April 13, 2001

a glossary of obsolete laptops

National Poetry Month Poet of the Day:
James Merrill

Today's Reading: A Visit to India, China, and Japan in the Year 1853 by Bayard Taylor, Unbeaten Tracks in Japan by Isabela Bird

Yesterday' Starting Pitcher:
Tomo Ohka
Today's Starting Pitcher:
Paxton Crawford vs. El Duque (oh, and Kevin has tickets for it - I am soooo jealous) -- Whoohoo! Manny Ramirez Rules! Way to win a ballgame and beat the evil empire. I listened to the end of the game on the car radio on the way home. You could probably hear me cheering the entire length of Rt. 128.

Yesterday's plover warden shift was rained/fogged out. No need for plover wardens when no one in his/her right mind would be on the beach. Last week all the plover warden shifts were canceled because there was no law enforcement coverage available. Not that there were any people or piping plovers around... although I did see one report on massbird of a single piping plover at Sandy Point (I tend to refer to the whole State Reservation as "Sandy Point" but I guess the beach part is named "Sandy Beach" and the drumlin is named something else that I should look up.) My next scheduled shift is April 19, so weather and law enforcement schedule permitting, I should have something more to say about these little peeps then.

Meanwhile, here in the land of obsolete laptops, wrong SCSI cards, and missing tab keys the adventure continues. It's tough to keep track of all these quirky little treasures so I have come up with a glossary of obsolete laptops:

dusty laptop

The Fujitsu donated to the cat shelter. I am trying to get it to retrieve MRFRS' email, not as easy as one might think when the disk is completely full.

lapi

Zsolt's WinBook 95, a sturdy serviceable obsolete laptop, which I used successfully for creating my magnum opus, the CD of the type collection of the National Herbarium in Beijing. To be replaced with a brand new laptop from either Toshiba or Compaq with 20 Gig of hard disk, a built in CD-RW (which Zsolt finally learned not to pronounce as "RV" when I explained that we really don't want them to sell us a Winnebego).

Pista lapi

István's Toshiba laptop so obsolete that 9 out of 10 Toshiba customer service reps have never heard of it. Just try and get add-on memory or a spare battery, just try. This lapi is older than dirt or at least the dirt on it is the oldest dirt in the world. This is the one that had the troubled relationship with the extension cord in the Beijing herbarium, resulting in my now valuable knowledge of the Toshiba repair places in Beijing, kind of like my once valuable knowledge of the closest bathrooms to the T-ball field in Groton.

By the time I met Mark for dinner tonight I wasn't sure myself which laptop was which. Fortunately, the new laptop will replace lapi and lapi will replace Pista lapi and the dirt itself will be able to retire. Now for that dusty one...