Dave’s Personal Blog

Tonight I went to Carrabba’s for dinner tonight. I’ve been there a few times before, but not for a while. I had a simple meal, just the Eggplant Parmesan.

All meals are accompanied by fresh bread and olive oil. The bread was hot & fresh.. very nice. It came sliced which was fine, although I prefer it unsliced. The oil they use was nice, slightly spicy.

Salad comes with the meal, I got a Caesar. It was fine.. but I prefer a creamier dressing with less vinegar. It was good, but not great. If you’re a Caesar fan, and would prefer more salad, the Insalata Carrabba’s Caesar with either the grilled chicken or shrimp is a good bet.

The eggplant was fabulous… slightly charred, just enough. Also just a nice amount of cheese and breading. The accompanying Rigatoni Pomadoro was nice: flavourable and cooked nicely.

I’ve had their Lentil & Sausage Soup before, and will have it again. Nice zesty sausage. Their lasagna is on my repeat list as well.

Finally, they have a decent wine list, with some good picks.

I’ve been dabbling with the Lord Of The Rings “strategy battle game” (i.e. toy solders) product from Games Workshop for a couple years and have significant forces built up. My son has been playing their Warhammer product line for longer than that. Now the whole family has jumped in with both feet into the Warhammer world. All of us (Nancy, her son (Thomas), my son (Jason), and myself) have taken up Warhammer. Over the last week or so we went out and bought small armies for everyone:

• Dark Elves for Nancy
• Ogres for Jason
• Dwarfs for Thomas
• Bretonnians for me

When I got the new iBook, I picked up a couple iSights as well… so Nancy & I can video conf when I’m onsite in Detroit.

These things so rock… very sweet.. a run of the mill webcam, they ain’t. Built in dual element noise reducing mic, auto focus, 640×480 resolution, 30 fps video at 24-bit colour, built in image processing, mounts for various applications… cool stuff.

One beef though.. the mount that is for use with a laptop screen (sort of hangs on the top of the screen) takes up a cubic space… think 2 arms that are perpendicular… one across the top of the screen, one sticking back & up on which to mount the camera. This thing does not flat pack! It’s an awkward shape. So i did what any geek would do.. I hacked it. One of the mounts is magnetic with a nice powerful magnet (no.. not got mounting it on the top of a CRT), and it just so happens that on Saturday we bought some super-strong disk magnets.. the same size as the base of the magnetic iSight mount. A couple minutes with a saw, a file, and some superglue and I had McGuyvered the laptop screen mount to use the magnetic mount to hold the camera. Now I have two pieces that will pack flat. Nice. I’ll get a pic of it up here shortly.

My new iBook arrived last week while I was onsite in Detroit. We cracked it open after I got home and transferred the contents of my previous iBook.. everything is good.. Apple has done a great job for people moving to a new Mac.

Sat morning i did a bit more on getting it setup and shut it down. We went out for the afternoon.. when we got home I popped in the 1G ram stick.. put it back together and pressed the power button…

nothing.. nilch.. zip.. nadda…

not so good

strip it, take the ram out, reassemble, power

still nothing

shit

really, really not good

(this is where title comes from).. ok.. i said “near” didn’t I… read on

ok.. gotta call apple… i could use the other iBook.. except that Nancy’s already done a fresh install since the new one was up & running fine already. Anyway… look in the manual at the trouble shooting section first… nothing applies.. they give an URL to Apple’s service site.. try it.. (no.. we’re far from a one computer household) hmm.. “if your iBook won;t power on”.. worth a try… apparently the Power Management Unit can get confused.. perhaps by wome errant static or cosmic ray when I put the ram in?.. press Shift-Control-Option-Power with the computer powered down. Wait 5 sec.. press power.. IT’S ALIVE!!!!

Nice…

So everything is good now.. i’m just in the process of making the final tweaks to the new iBook.

Apple’s article on resetting the PMU

I liked my iBook so much that I got another one

Well.. not exactly.. really

I had a 14″ iBook 60G/1.25G/superdrive/802.11g. My new one is the same except it’s completely loaded… same thing but with an 80G disk and built-in bluetooth. Nancy scoffed at me somewhat … with my gushing Macheadedness… but then we beefed up her old (circa late 2000) iMac with a gig of ram & an 80G disk she started playing around with it. So one thing led to another as they so often do. I bought a second iBook, handed my previous one (only 2 months old) on to Nancy and we’ll ripple laptops (albeit Windows based) through the food chain.

Nancy will be writing about her “Switch” elsewhere. BTW, just so that she is completely clean of the taint of Microsoft, I picked up a Palm Tungsten T5 (like mine) to replace her iPaq PPC. So she’s gone from Linux/PPC to OS X/Palm… though her server farm is still running Debian.

If you’re in the detroit area and are jonesin’ for some Indian Food.. head to Rangoli Indian Cuisine (3055 E. Walton Blvd., Auburn Hills, 248-377-3800).

I’ve been there a few times before.. and dropped in for dinner tonight on my way to my hotel…. service is great and the food is awesome. Be sure to have a dosa while you’re there.