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oagie (my mother) drove me and her back to my childhood home south of Staunton at around noon. After we crossed the Blue Ridge and entered the Shenandoah Valley, I noticed the countryside was mostly covered with snow. The weather is very different in the Valley from the way it is in Charlottesville. It's both colder and dryer.
ack in my Shaque, I set about immediately to install an internal ZIP drive in my mother's Power Macintosh. But wouldn't you know, in amongst all the user-friendly user guides and manuals there wasn't any information at all about how to get into the empty drive bay that sits at the top of the PowerMac 6500 tower (behind a foreheadesque face plate). I'm extremely capable with tools and my hands and can normally find my way into any device no matter how it is put together, but no matter how I attacked that face plate, it would not come loose. I even searched the internet for information about disassembling the Power Macintosh 6500, but of course Apple had no information on the subject. Regarding the Macintosh, Apple Computer still has a trace of its original infuriatingly patronizing "don't worry your pretty little head about the innards" attitude. There's nothing familiar or standard about the Macintosh, and nothing consistent from one model to the next. The Mac is supposedly designed to be easy to use and upgrade, but really it's just one big unpredictable pain in the ass. So I gave up completely on installing the internal ZIP drive and surfed the web instead. The computer was looking like a battle-weary Terminator I. I'd successfully pulled off the lower face plate, revealing metallic innards, but the upper plate, the one over the upper drive bay, stood clutching the rest of the case in bratty defiance. At some point, though, I chanced to look up at the plate and considered what might happen if I slid a little screwdriver under the plate's clenching lip. I tried it and POP!, off it flew! Yay, success! Unfortunately, it turned out that the ZIP drive didn't come with any of the necessary mounting hardware required to install it in a Mac, but I improvised using random bits of metal and foam rubber and managed to get it in the right place. It looks like shit, wiggles around a lot, but it works. When I went to install OS 8 from a CD ROM my mother had received free in the mail, I discovered it had been cracked in transit. If it's not one thing, it's another. The day was full of these sort of technical misadventures.
or dinner, my Dad cooked Harvest Burgers. My parents are deathly afraid of Mad Cow disease.
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