It's a Cleveland thing.

When you live in a part of the country that has lots of gray, cloudy days, you come to appreciate the sunshine. This may seem odd if you live in California, Arizona, etc.... you take sunshine for granted. But around here it's a precious commodity a good part of the year. In May we're still shifting out of winter mode, so we want to savor it. Once we hit June and July it will seem pretty normal even here on the North Coast.

So we set up our chairs outside so they face directly into the sun for maximum absorption of the warm rays. The chair on the right is set for the morning sun, right about when the picture was taken (look at the shadows). In fact a few minutes later I was sitting in the chair reading and drinking coffee.

Next door my neighbor Jim has his chair facing a different direction, set up for later in the day probably when he gets home from work.

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I can't stand it anymore

I try to not buy a lot of stuff, really I do. So despite the fact that it's just about five years old I've been relatively satisfied with my G4 Macintosh. I've resisted the temptation to get something faster and better in the many ways that a new computer is better than a five-year-old one.

Today, though, was the last straw. I had to constantly restart my computer when my Internet connection would stop working, courtesy of the crappy add-on wireless adapter I've been using. The gizmo works fine when the weather is cool, but once the temperatures get above 70°F it just stops working after some period of time—somethimes a half hour, sometimes ten or fifteen minutes.

Today was a disaaster. I couldn't work for more than fifteen minutes without a restart.

It's some issue related to the USB wireless device. If I pull it out of its socket, the mouse & keyboard (also USB) freeze up. So I'm dead in the water at that  point.

As I was writing the paragraph above the problem escalated to the screen shown here, a sign of the charmingly-titled "kernel panic" that the Mac OS is prone to every now & then.

Since this happened (for about the 20th time) at 11:30 pm, I just shut things down and went to bed.

I'm finishing this on Saturday afternoon, after restarting several more times and rebuilding my disk directory with DiskWarrior. It's been close to a half hour without a problem, so I'm feeling pretty edgy. I'm going to save and upload this, then take a break.

I'll talk about the new computer tomorrow. Maybe.

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