Long time no post but just want to put in a real good quickie. Just about now, a friend of mine was complaining that he’s been having cracks/cricks in his neck, neck muscles tensing leading to headaches and so on. He’s been having these for quite a while and they may be related due to his hours-long work at the computer. So, checking his seating position might help, right?But, what’s a quick and easy way to remind oneself? I suggested that he do up an html document with a reminder in big bold letters and then have his web browsers point to said document saved on his HD. Then, every time he starts up his browser or a window or a tab the document will pop up reminding him to check.Easy-peasy.

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The news that Sam’s Club in Canada was closing down was a bit abrupt but not a surprise to me. I’ve been a member off and on since 2005 and the signs were plain that the venture was in trouble. They never expanded beyond the first six stores and there were never any lineups at the checkout. The selection was ok as was the pricing but nothing like Costco or Club Price.

So, given that I had a $25 gift card in my wallet and a hankering for savings, S and I drove over there this morning to see what there was to see. There was also that feeling of anticipation and excitement that you get when you go to a closing-down sale; what will be there…what sort of bargain…how many other people will I have to beat out and so on? Mmmmm…

Frankly, there was not much beyond the usual assortment of products and the pricing was about the same. S went gaga over a couple of items and I loaded up on chips, Spam meat, and a couple of other odds and ends. The real surprise that made the trip worthwhile was the fact that they gave me back my entire membership fee in the form of another gift card! Cha-ching! Totally taken by surprise. I had expected a pro-rated amount to cover the time left on my membership which I calculated at just enough to do my laundry for next week.

S has vowed to go back in about a week when the real liquidation sale starts and I guess I will be tagging along. I just hope that I don’t end up with $47 worth of Spam.

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As a followup to the New Year’s post and stirred by a friend’s sister’s “deliverance” from what was feared to be terminal cancer, I’d like to post that as of last week, my injured wrist is now deemed to be almost healed! There is still some stiffness and some minor pain but both the physiotherapist and the fracture specialist at St. Mike’s believe that I am good to go. I’ll still need to work it on occasion throughout the day but I really don’t have to see either one of them again.

For those of you who need a good chiropractor/physiotherapist, you can give Dr. Minh Hao of Old Cabbagetown Physiotherapy in downtown Toronto (in Cabbagetown where else?) a call at (416) 972-9997. He’s very well-trained, knowledgeable, and personable. Just make sure that he writes down your progress in terms of measurements both before and after a visit because once or twice we had to guess or had to run back to the filing cabinet. It’s a minor detail but annoying when you can only see him once a week. It’s nothing if you see him every second day.

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A little late but better than never. Best wishes to everyone for the New Year, I realize that in today’s uncertain economic world that everyone is concerned about their finances but I know of friends such as G and K who have undergone episodes of poor health and they are the ones who make me realize how important it is that your health should always come first. Without your health, you can never take care of your finances.

So, I’m hoping that you’ll all concentrate more on being healthy rather than rich in the coming year. Cheers!

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Wow! Last night I attended the taping of the last regularly-scheduled Royal Canadian Air Farce TV show. It’s going off of the air after about 15 years on CBC Television but I don’t know if they are entirely disbanding. A few years back they started to add new faces such as Jessica Holmes and Alan Parks and the former really livened up the series. Truth to tell, I have been watching them less and less over the past couple of years despite those new faces.

When I heard that they were shutting down I almost immediately tried to get tickets and somehow I managed to snag SIX tickets to last night’s taping. Woohoo! It’s rare to be in on historic events and I was pretty stoked about it. I decided to get together a few friends from the old bookstore days and make a night of it.

The lineup for the taping started a lot earlier and seemed much longer than other taping that I’ve been to. I think it was the latter which made the whole production a bit later than normal. The skits weren’t any more funnier than what I have seen in the past and it certainly was not as maudlin as some other TV series’ endings have been with little shedding of tears and just a standing ovation at the end. It was just good times.

Note to self and others, though, make sure to FULLY charge camera batteries before attending any special events! Grrrr…

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Amidst all of the doom and gloom about the global recession, a lot of us have really begun to think about serious tight-beltening. Today, I came across what I think is an incredible bargain for those of us who are looking to give relatively inexpensive gifts to people on our Xmas lists. My local paper, the Globe and Mail (well, there are two more paid ones but the Globe is the only one I actually subscribe to), had an insert/flyer from UNICEF and in it they have a gift of 800 high-energy biscuits for $30!!! I was astounded by this because I’ve always thought that this little wonder food was about a buck each at least since I always had this vision that it was some sort of dehydrated MRE. But, nope, 800 biscuits for $30!

Whoops…looking back at that paragraph it seems that the recipient will receive 800 biscuits but in actual fact you are giving a gift in the person’s name. They do NOT end up with 800 biscuits on their doorstep. The 800 biscuits are purchased and sent to a needy child elsewhere.

I just came across something else called a “therapeutic spread”, which is something akin to peanut butter but is a lot more nutritious and is more easily digestible by children suffering from malnutrition. 25 sachets for $13! Geeze!

The big surprise is how inexpensive this life-saving food is and as I flip through the flyer there are other bargains to be had when you weigh them against the cost of a human life. So, I am going to urge you to have a look at the UNICEF website and see what you can give this year. Cheers!

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Whew! Just about done, I think. Yesterday morning, I decided to finally start setting up the little guy and proceeded to open up his guts in order to install 2 sticks of 2 gig ram I had picked up on sale at Best Buy. Unfortunately, it seems that Apple really really tightens the screws holding down the faceplate over the memory slots. I tried using a straight-blade screwdriver from an eyeglass repair kit but the tip snapped off.

Geeze! Ok, a setback but not that big of a deal. Ran over to Canadian Tire a few hours later to get a Phillips #00 screwdriver and after much hemming and hawing picked up a large screwdriver set for a very good price. From the looks of it, I can now work assemble anything and everything that Ikea has. Ran home, opened up the MBP’s guts and installed the ram. Decided to let it charge for several hours before going any further.

After dinner, I decided to start the process of moving everything over and letting Setup Assistant do its magic while I slept. I figured that it would need at least two hours to move everything over using FW400. The MBP has FW800 but my G4 only has FW400. I am very happy that LaCie included all sorts of cables with the Quadra drive so it was a simple matter of unplugging and replugging.

Setback when I pressed the power button on the MBP and it started making a series of three loud and long beeps! Uh oh. Panic time. I immediately looked online for suggestions and it seemed to be either bad ram or bad logic board. Uh oh. I popped in the old Apple ram and I still got the same result! Thinking it’s time for another shower. I checked again and discovered that the ram might not be seated properly. I also discovered that if you did NOT seat and tighten very well the faceplate, the battery might not flip up enough when you unclip it to take it out. You need to have it flip up enough to lever it out of its groove. Grrr..after much pushing down and massaging the plate, I got the battery out and reinstalled the memory. Turn it back on…

Yay! I get the multilingual Welcome scene. Soon after it’s time to enter Target Disk Mode so that I can use Setup Assistant to move everything over from the old computer to the new MBP. Oops…another setback. You’re supposed to restart the old machine and hold down the “T” key while doing so. Unfortunately, because I am using an Apple Extended II keyboard hooked up to the G4’s old USB keyboard, the G4 did not recognize the “T” signal and so it just went on to the log-in screen. More puzzlement this time around than panic. More searching on the Apple support pages before figuring out that the Extended II might be the problem and it was.

So, TDM and the transfer was on! The MBP indicated that it would take over two hours so I decided to just let it run, shower and crash since all of this was making serious inroads to my sleep-time.

I’d like to say that I was woken up by the dawn’s lengthening rays but the truth was it was a hungry cat pawing at my face. Ok, after feeding the felines, I shut down the MBP and flipped it over for more surgery. Reinstalled the new 2 gig sticks and, with some trepidation, hit the Power button. Success! Oh wait…setback…the Apple Extended II keyboard was not recognized right off the bat but the OS had me pressing a couple of keys on it before it finally decided it was some sort of generic 101-key keyboard. How ironic..you’d think that Apple would have its OS recognize one of its most popular keyboards!

Next step was to set up the Boot Camp partition so I can install Windows XP or Vista or whatever in the future. Since I had no clue as to how big of a partition I would need I simply went with the 32 gigs that Boot Camp suggested. This was probably the easiest thing done throughout this whole episode. I then proceeded to hook up various peripherals to the MBP which right now means about seven items - one power cord, two mice, one SD card reader, monitor, keyboard, headphones, and a LaCie Quadra HD. The MBP looks more like a hub than it does a laptop.

Ok, now, getting on to the Internet in order to download updates for the system. Checking Network under System Preferences shows that Airport does not seem to detect my wireless network although the laptop is almost sitting on top of the wireless LAN router. This is a good thing because it means that the router’s wireless SSID is not being broadcasted. I also see at least half a dozen other wireless networks around the place which is down from the dozen that my Thinkpad had detected a couple of years ago. The most likely explanation for this is that the MBP’s aluminum skin is impeding it from detecting more signals. Another thing to note is that all of the other wireless networks are now locked down; two to three years ago, this was not the case.

I decided to plug in an Ethernet cable instead of futzing around with Airport for now and was able to get on to the Internet within seconds. I was not absolutely positive that Airport’s not-detecting my WLAN was the result of the wireless SSID not being broadcasted. The fact that I could get on to the Internet so quickly with the Ethernet was very reassuring since it also meant that once Airport picked up my WLAN I really shouldn’t have any further difficulties getting online. I looked into how to mirror the MBP on to my widescreen LCD and then looked up how to use it while the MBP had its lid down. Very nice once I fiddled around with the display settings but the entire process is also awkward enough that I am loathe to disconnect the MBP now. You have to follow the steps precisely or you’d end up fruitlessly clicking away at the mouse or keyboard trying to wake the laptop.

Ok, so, time to try the Airport connection once again. I typed in the name and password of the wireless network into the Network setting and, I have to admit I was really hoping it would work since I could not tell if my wireless LAN was actually running or not. But, I was online once again in seconds. I later decided to have the router’s wireless SSID be broadcasted in case any friends come over with a laptop and needed connectivity. Highly unlikely but you never know. So, Airport was running and it was time to run Software Update which entailed downloading a couple of hundred megs of updates. Time for breakfast.

Updates went really well afterwards but this entire process took a good five hours of futzing around. Of course, now that I know what to do I’m pretty sure that I can get it down to less than half the time. The real stumbling block here was the mucked-up memory installation which made me sweat for a bit with visions of fighting the crowd over at the Apple Genius Bar but that’s all.

System is VERY fast and it’s a grand to see in Activity Monitor that there are no Page Ins/Page Outs at all, courtesy of the memory upgrade.

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A brand new matte 2.5GHz MacBook Pro! Yes! With last week’s introduction of the new all-aluminum unibody MBPs, every Apple dealer is trying to get rid of the Penryn models that were introduced early this year. The University of Toronto’s computer store were blowing these hot little babies out for C$1649 plus tax while everyone else was blowing them out for substantially more; Future Shop has them for about C1899 and the online Apple store has them as refurbs (if you can get them) for C$1599. Woohoo! I really scored thanks to likeminded pennypinchers on the RedFlagDeals’ website.

The old PowerMac G4 933 is now well over six years old and is showing its age. It currently runs the Panther version of OS X well enough but to upgrade to the latest 10.5 would probably not be cost-effective. It can do it but other factors such as portability and the ability to run the occasional Windows’ game along with a lowish price makes this the best time to move on over to a MBP.

The only problem is that I am going to be extremely busy for the next month or so so I don’t know when I will even be able to open it up.

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About three weeks ago, given that my right wrist was still stiffish and in a bit of pain, I decided to head on over to a walk-in clinic whereupon they referred me to an x-ray clinic. Now, no news is good news so the call the next day was bad news. It turns out that there is a break and the walk-in clinic decided to send me to a specialist. After a week of waiting, they came back with an appt for Feb. 20th. This is AFTER they deemed the situation to be “urgent”.

Thanks to urging of friends and several RFD members, I headed back down to St. Michael’s Hospital’s emergency ward with the x-ray film whereupon they informed me that, a. my first x-ray should have been followed up by a radiologist the next day and, b. yes, there is a break and they tried to get me in to see a specialist that same day. Unfortunately, they were all booked up and all they could offer was a splint. I waved away their? offer with my gimpy arm saying that I lasted this long I could last a few more days.

Reaching home, I called their Fracture Clinic who made an appt for me the following week (this past Tuesday), which was incredibly quick considering the four month wait that attended the first appt made! So, saw the specialist who said that there clearly was a break but it’s a squished-in sort of break where the bone(s?) broke but they ground together. Nothing moved out of place and it’s one of the better breaks to have according to the physiotherapist who I am going to see later this afternoon.

So, a followup appt was booked and I will see a PT for a couple of sessions. The PT says that he can most likely try to get the remaining swelling down, which if he does so I will certainly be posting his info on here! If not, I may still post his info on here! Ha!

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Today is the day of our latest Federal election and like any good citizen who believes in a modicum of democracy I ran down to the local polling station to submit my ballot. A new way for someone to vote in their riding if they don’t have proof of address is to have someone (in the same riding) vouch for them and that is what I did today.

At the polling booth, the elderly gentleman just ahead of me had his health card, his SIN card, his birth certificate, his rental receipt but no proof of address. I overheard him saying that he lived at so-and-so address which happened to be just two buildings down from my place and is a rooming house for what looks like a bunch of elderly, penniless men. I asked him if he knew “Buzz” and he said that he did and described him perfectly so I then volunteered to vouch for him.

The kicker is that “Buzz” happens to be large 7 or 8 kg tuxedo cat who wanders up and down a small stretch of my street in search of trouble and attention. He loves going to the rooming house because he gets a ton of attention and, from the looks of it, a portion of their food.?

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