Category: Mozilla

7

I was tagged by Benjamin and Marcio.

Rules

  1. Link back to your original tagger and list the rules in your post.
  2. Share seven facts about yourself.
  3. Tag some people by leaving names and links to their blogs.
  4. Let them know they’ve been tagged.

7 bc

  1. I am 50 years old. To put it in perspective for all of you young whipper-snappers out there, when I was born Eisenhower was President of the United States and NASA didn’t yet exist. Like my sister and brother, I was born on a U.S. Army base although unlike them I wasn’t an Army brat since my parents separated when I was an infant and I didn’t spend my childhood moving from one base to another.

  2. I used to think I might be related to the Clary’s Grove Boys, until I found out that my paternal great-grandfather came to America from Ireland during the Potato famine. My maternal great-grandmother was a Lilly from Kentucky. Perhaps John and I are distant cousins.

  3. When I was young, I spent several summers on a ranch in south-west Texas riding horses and having a great time pretending to be a cowboy.

  4. My first programming experience was in 1976 writing ALGOL programs on punch-cards for the Univac 1108 at Case Western University.

  5. While I was hitching around the western U.S in the summer of 1978, I hopped Burlington Northern freight trains from Casper Wyoming to Spokane Washington. It wasn’t the safest thing to do then and the times have changed. I don’t recommend this to anyone.

  6. I attended two of the Grateful Dead 15th anniversary concerts at the Warfield Theater in San Francisco. I still miss Jerry.

  7. I planted flowers for Sissy Spacek and drank beer with Sam Shepard.

Tags

  • I’ll end it here.

Dell Precision 650, October 2003 – January 2008

Miss Kitty After a great week in Mountain View with the rest of team I returned to find that not all was well.

When I tried to boot my trusty Dell Precision, nothing happened. Upon inspection, I found the video card had been pushed in and “bent”. I have been assured that no unauthorized vacuuming occurred during my absence, which leaves Miss Kitty as the likely suspect. I tried to re-seat the card to no avail. I think Miss Kitty actually did me a favor since I found a number of capacitors on the motherboard are bulging with “crap” coming out of their tops. I guess I am reaping what I sowed in my last post.

On Monday, I’ll try to find someone who might be able to replace the motherboard and possibly video card for a reasonable price but it looks like I’ll be needing a replacement for my personal computing soon.

PS. If you wish to comment, don’t forget to answer the challenge-response question!


Are Macs a ripoff ?

I sit here typing this on a 4+ year old Dell Precision while my trusty 3+ year old IBM Thinkpad stands by waiting for me to hit the road. The Dell has never needed a repair while the Thinkpad has been to the shop once. I like the Thinkpad so much, I even went for the extended warranty when the original 3 year warranty expired.

I’ve been jealous of the really sweet MacBook Pros that I’ve seen other mozillian’s packing and was planning on upgrading both my workstation and laptop to some really killer Macs sometime in the first half of next year. However, I am having second thoughts after seeing the kind of experience others are having.

Norm Walsh has been having problems recently that raised my concerns a bit.
Dave Winer has also been experiencing his share of the pain, but his experience with the Apple Store has left me flabbergasted.

What other choices for a really fast workstation and laptop do I have? For what its worth, I’m running Fedora on both my workstation and laptop and don’t want Windows on either machine. Suggestions very much appreciated.