hardware

February 22, 2002

Today's Reading
The Birds of Heaven: Travels with Cranes by Peter Matthiessen

This Year's Reading
2002 Book List

The new printer came but I can't connect it. In my haze and dementia I failed to realize that new printers offer only two flavors of connectivity: USB or parallel. Macintosh serial port? You've got to be kidding!

So guess what else plugs into the Macintosh serial port? You guessed it. Modem. Not that I have a phone jack to plug the modem into if I did have a modem. The phone jack remains dead and the nearest phone jack to the computer in the office is too far for a reasonable phone cord to reach. This is why g*d made laptops, right?

Alas, the bright shiny new lapi with its fully functional internal modem is running Mac OS 9.1 and my ISP's little whiz bang fill in the settings scripts don't support 9.1. I can login and browse the web though and fetch my email using hotmail's ability to retrieve pop mail. Else I can use telnet to login to the UNIX shell and read mail with pine. The olden days of computing are still the golden days I guess.

The dude at the brightly lit, snow white Apple store in the mall says nobody makes/sells new modems that connect to the serial port. Basically nobody makes anything that connects to the PowerMac 7600 anymore. So all my peripherals are dead - well that's not true, the external disk drive and the scanner work fine cuz they're SCSI - and I can't connect new ones but the PowerMac 7600 just keeps going and going and going ... If g*d intended us to replace our computers every 18 months, why oh why did he create them good enough to last 7 years?