Melodie's House » iMac

That's not a mouth and you don't feed it!

melodieshouse — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 22:06:41 +0000

I stepped away from my computer for a few minutes this earlier this afternoon and didn’t lock my bedroom door. While I was downstairs, Angela, one of my 3-yr-old twins, got busy. I came back upstairs and ran her out of the master bathroom and sat back down at the computer. My computer, an iMac G5, had the “You’ve inserted a blank CD” window up asking what to do. I thought, “What’s that about?” and noticed a blank CD was missing off my desk and then saw a thumb drive volume mounted on my desktop. I removed the thumb drive, and pressed the Eject key. A CD tried to come out but went back in after only coming out about a half inch. I pressed Eject again and the disk came out a little more, I grasped it and saw a dime emerge at the lower end of the drive slot. That’s when I looked down at my table and noticed a handful of change I put there was missing too! I pressed the Eject key several times while grasping the CD until it finally came out. I turned off the iMac, tipped it on its side, and out dropped 2 quarters, another dime and 2 pennies. I turned the iMac on and the drive made a sound like it was trying to eject something. I tipped the computer again and nothing else came out, neither did anything rattle or clink inside. I slowly inserted the CD and it wouldn’t go all the way in, after about halfway it stopped on something toward the lower end of the drive. Drat! There’s obviously still something in there! Now I have to open up the iMac, remove the CD drive (actually it’s a Superdrive), and see if i can shake anything else out. I pray the drive mechanism isn’t damaged which would call for a replacement.

When I was 3 years old I stuffed bobby pins one at a time into an 8-track tape player. My parents chuckled and ribbed me about that for years afterward.

In honor of Angela, I’m posting courtesy of YouTube an American Express commercial from the ’80s featuring a toddler boy, a brand-new VCR, and oatmeal. My dad used to get a real kick out of it every time it came on, and of course it reminded my parents of the 8-track.

Up and Running Again

melodieshouse — Fri, 29 May 2009 20:59:53 +0000

Finally, 5-1/2 weeks after the power supply failed on my iMac G5 *again*, and almost a month after I sent in a defective power supply for a warranty replacement, I received the new part today and I’m happily working on my iMac G5 again. Due to poor communication on the part of the company I purchased the power supply from, I will no longer be doing business with them (my husband and I have purchased Mac parts from them several times for clients as well as ourselves). So we have to find another supplier of new parts for out-of-warranty Macs. Oh well. But I’m very happy to have my iMac back up and running, because that lil’ ‘ol G4 iMac is getting rather long in the tooth and it was neither powerful nor fast enough for me to efficiently get my work done.

DOH!

melodieshouse — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 05:44:50 +0000

Would you believe while I whined about missing my iMac I forgot there was an iMac G4 (yes, the little half basketball) 2 feet over on the next counter playing a photo slideshow that I could use? That’s what having 4 kids in 3-1/2 yrs will do to your mind.

I suppose I should tell another “Doh!” story now. When I was pregnant with the twins in 2006, I had a serious case of preggo brain. One day I was packing up my other 2 little ones in the van to go somewhere and I was yacking on my cell phone with my husband before leaving. In the middle of our phone conversation I stopped and frantically asked my husband, “Honey, where’s my phone?!” because I was looking and feeling around on the passenger-side seat and floor and couldn’t find it. David says back to me, “You tell me, where *IS* your phone!” I asked and he answered at least 2 more times before I finally got it.

And here’s another: during my previous pregnancy with my son, I was also about to go somewhere, so I slung my purse over my shoulder, grabbed my keys and cell phone, and before going out the door asked my husband, “Where’s my purse?” He asked me the same question, and even asked my then 2yo daughter, before letting me off the hook.

Mac Withdrawal

melodieshouse — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 16:18:34 +0000

I’m suffering from full-blown Mac withdrawal :’( . On Monday evening my iMac G5 started emitting that burning smell again, and it seems the power supply, which is only 3 months old and replaced one which went the same way, is defective. So I’m working from a Linux (!) workstation, my trusty Sony VAIO which formerly ran Vista, since there’s not an extra Windows box up and running around the house right now. Fortunately the Mac’s power supply is still under warranty and I’m able to get it replaced free, but I’ve got to be without it a few days more while I wait for the replacement. Linux is neat and all that (though still not as neat as a Mac running OS X) and this computer I’m working from still has some configuration issues - I can’t access the rest of the computers on our LAN nor is it visible to the others even though I turned that capability on (Samba). I have to manually edit a file and I really don’t have time for that mess, but I’m running on only two cylinders here, KWIM?

At least I have Gmail and webmail access to all my other email accounts.

Smoke Happens

melodieshouse — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 05:35:10 +0000

Well, the power supply went bad on my G5 on Wed, after having it for only 10 days! I was sitting here at the computer using it while a burning smell permeated out into the room but I couldn’t smell it at my desk. My 5yo smelled it though and made a big deal of it. Then my husband came home and immediately came upstairs and smelled it. I was still happily computing away, typing e-mails. So I got up and walked around and caught the smell, sniffed around the computer but couldn’t really smell anything, felt all around it and the screen felt unusually warm. So I saved my e-mail that I was composing and shut down. My husband opened up the computer and took the power supply out. Lo and behold there was a scorched spot on the housing. He then opened up the power supply and found a transformer that had overheated to the point of becoming brittle and turning the copper wire around it black. I should have snapped a pic but didn’t think to.

The 20″ iMac G5 was subject to a warranty extension due to a known issue with bad power supplies and logic board components. The warranty was extended from 1 to 2 yrs specifically for those components only. However this Mac is over 3-1/2 yrs old, so we had to eat this one. Happily, I was able to get a new after-market power supply from DV Warehouse (great source for after-market Mac parts) for $119 (yes, that’s fairly cheap for a Mac power supply, I know you can get a PC power supply for $40 but we’re talking apples and oranges here, pun intended). I had it Fed-Ex’ed and we got it before noon the next day (Thu). Took my hubby 5 min. to put back in and get my Mac fired up and running (as opposed to fired up and burning). I was so happy! I suffer major withdrawal if I don’t have access to a computer for a day, so to get by I used my VAIO with Linux on it for an evening, thank God for webmail!

I shudder to think how much damage could have been done if I’d kept on working, oblivious to the smell, until my computer stopped working. If the logic board had been taken out we’d have been in for a very expensive repair. I was also out of town last weekend for 3 days and left my Mac on unattended so I could access it remotely if need be. What if the power supply burned up then?

Beside Myself Because I Finally Made the Switch

melodieshouse — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 04:21:00 +0000

I’ve been beside myself with joy today, because my DH acquired an iMac for me. It’s a used G5, but it leaves my former Sony VAIO Pentium 4 in the dust. My ol’ VAIO had been upgraded to Windows Vista, and it actually handled it pretty well, without any noticeable bugs, but it was getting slow and it was quickly proving itself insufficient for web development. Suffice it to say I was over it. I’ve been a fan of Macs for 14 yrs, having worked with them in a previous job for 5-1/2 yrs, but family economics hasn’t allowed us the luxury of a new Mac yet, and the bulk of our computer business is working on Windows systems, so we’ve been content with keeping PC’s in front of us. This isn’t my first Mac though. I actually had an old beige G3 that I got off Ebay that was my personal email and browsing machine back in 02-03. The logic board went out on it, but it was fun while it lasted. I also had an old blueberry iBook G3 that we replaced the logic board on (also courtesy of Ebay) that I used a lot when my oldest dd was a baby in ’03-’04 and when I was pregnant with my son in ’05 (I used it mostly in bed when I was cuddling with my baby dd or when I needed to be off my feet when I was preggo).

What of the VAIO? I’m trying to install Linux as a server on it because I need to test a CRM/ERP software suite for a business client. For you non-techie readers (I admit it, I’m a geek girl) that’s Customer Relationship Management/Enterprise Resource Planning, i.e. a suite that covers practically all the back-office for a retail/service business. In this case, I’m testing a solution for a business that has two restaurants and food markets that also produces foods and distributes them to grocers and sells online.