The Bleat.

Friday! May 29

If I had time for retweet theater, I’d use this:  ”Breathes there a man who, against his better judgment and prior experience, has not attempted to adjust a lawn sprinkler while it’s running?”  (exactly 140 characters, too!) Yet we try, over and over again, thinking we will outrun the sprinkler, or avoid a spritz in the puss. This is why men identify with the Coyote, not the Roadrunner. And well we should; a canine’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s an ACME catalog for? The Coyote paid sales tax on those items, I’d wager; the Roadrunner paid no taxes for the highways he used.  

At least the coyote tried to solve a problem with technology instead of running around all day like an idiot.

Speaking of which:

 

Another day, another giant software bundle. It’s always a pleasure to download the apps, install your serial number, load them up, try them out, and forget them forevermore. Not entirely true – some of these bundles yield things I use often, and if they toss in chaff, fine. I’d been thinking of getting Parallels - 

Well, therein lies a tale. Ready?

I wanted to play SimCity Societies. For one thing, its price volatility was a certain guarantee of quality:

 

It reminded me of SimsVille, a game Maxis killed before it was released. SimCity at the micro level. You can build small towns, float over your creations like a god, watching your sims leave their house, walk to a coffee shop. It looked charming. I don’t care about the strategy aspects; I don’t want to win. I just want to channel my inner Robert Moses and build cities to my exacting specifications. SimCity 4 wasn’t any fun, for reasons I can’t recall, and SimCity Societies isn’t designed by Maxis. But who cares: sandbox option! Build with no regard to the rules set down by The Man, man. 

But it’s Windows only. 

So: let’s install Windows on the Mac, then. That’s easy. Done it a few times. Haven’t wanted to, because it always leaves a dull hard-drive icon on the desktop I can’t recall, and I am fussy particular about my HD icons. 

 

See? All circles! They MUST be all circles, or I cannot sleep.  

So: why not remove all the HD icons from the desktop? I’ve been meaning to switch over to Quicksilver as an app launcher, anyway. So. I downloaded that, and prepared to swap out the 500GB drive for a 1 TB I bought on sale. I backed up the 500, pulled it out of the machine, and discovered I’d stripped a screw attaching the drive to the bracket.

Hmm. Damn. Called the Apple Store to see if they had a replacement; they did not. Online cost for the bracket: $40. No one seems to have just the screw, possibly because it’s a special Apple screw personally approved by Steve Jobs. (That’s what I love about Macs – even the things inside the machine you never see look cool.) I could go with three screws, but having dealt with unbalanced drives – tickety tickety tickety -  I decided against it. So: let’s swap out the 500GB drive in bay #3. Problem: it contains 300GB of raw video data, including the unfinished family movies from the last few weeks. Solution: finish the movies, back up the data, and then swap it out. Problem: the family movie for the spring always concludes with the last day of school, with Natalie getting off the bus. That’s in June. But let’s get a head start, eh? I spent a few rare spare hours getting those movies into shape, backing up all the other files. But I wasn’t any closer to playing the game. 

So . . . let’s download a trial of a program that lets you run Windows in a Virtual environment. This I do. Windows installation is painless, but Windows  XP itself is the same old same – the session begins with a little balloon telling me my computer may be at risk. Click on the balloon to learn more, unless you want to click on the balloon to close the balloon, in which case click on the X part of the balloon. I dismiss it. Then a balloon telling me I have to activate Windows, a concept foreign to those of us in the Mac land. Click to dismiss. It’s like going to work and finding a clown in your cubicle, and you have to prick his balloons before you can sit down. 

Ah! An alert: I am eligible for a free year of anti-virus programs. I install this, and while it downloads I am treated to pictures of people enjoying MacAfee products. They’re all over 40, smiling at their computer, because presumably it doesn’t run like a turtle in syrup, and no longer redirects their searches to Hungarian warez sites loaded with links to trannygranny.com. I’d smile too. The software requires me to restart; I do. When the desktop reappears (quickly, I might add; no complaints there) the balloon telling me my computer might be at risk is hiding the button I should click to activate my anti-virus software. I know, I know – just a side-effect of the OS running in a small window, but it’s still amusing. I load SimCity Societies. Utter hash. Redraw problems, indicating some problem with the video card drivers; can’t blame anyone for that. So many variables. 

Hmm. What now? Well, I do have an old Mac in the basement, saved for future use as a  server. Perhaps it could be turned entirely to the Dark Side, and be used as a Windows machine. I could run all sorts of games. 

I got it out, opened it up. I’d removed the hard drives and set them aside, each containing big archives of movies and pictures, but since the drives were dupes, I could spare one. Alas: the screws used to put them into the drive bays (a different configuration than the other Mac, of course) were gone, so the drive wouldn’t go in. I actually remembered throwing away the screws. Idiot. 

But: might there be screws in box of the aforementioned unused 1 TB drive? 

THERE BE SCREWS, CAP’N. I attached them to the drive, put the drive in the old Mac, but didn’t drag it upstairs. For once let’s think beyond the next step, okay?How to connect the old Mac to the monitors? Well with a cord duh, you say, but it’s not that simple. Everything in my studio is threaded though little holes in the desk. There are few visible cords. There’s no hole that would let me thread the monitor cable to the place where I’d put the Mac-Windows machine. So: extension cords. Right? Right. Unfortunately, Mac displays have their own funky pin array, possibly based on numbers in a Zen pun.  But! I have an adapter. But! It doesn’t reach. But! In my bin of cords I found a cable that would do the tricks  . . . except it was Male-Male. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But I needed a gender switcher. So: the other day when we were heading to piano, I stopped at Radio Shack. They didn’t have a gender switcher. They had a cord that would do the trick, though. 

Forty bucks. 

The cost of the bracket. If I’d just bought the bracket, I’d be playing SimCity Societies by now. 

At this point I abandoned the Mac-Windows machine idea. 

So along comes this bundle with a copy of Parallels, which is a different Windows emulator than the one I used. The price of the bundle was $50, and it had all sorts of other toys. I bought it, installed it, installed Windows, and installed SimCity Societies. 

Ran like a dream. 

It’s not that great a game. 

Wife tonight: “Why is there a computer sitting in the furnace room?”

Me: “Long story.” 

–

Interesting day ahead. I guarantee nothing except 100 Mysteries, which is already half-done – but it will be late. I can bounce every other recurring feature, except this one. See you soon!

This entry was posted on Friday, May 29th, 2009 at 12:46 am. It is filed under Computers, Domestic Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.