iWanna Tell Ya

[Bill Raffensperger]

As my iBook 600 approaches the end of my 3 years of Apple Care 
(12-14-04), I can happily report I never had to send it to Houston. But 
I did finagle a new battery out of them about a year ago. I understand 
Apple won't do that anymore, oh well. Now the "new" battery is 
experiencing shorter life, so I find I need to plug in as I move around 
the house. One thing I find invaluable is the tiny Madsonline adapter 
that enables the old yoyo power supply to plug into my ibook. I have a 
couple of the yoyos around the house, so there is power handy wherever 
I happen to be.

I have been using a 25 foot wire to plug my iBook into the back of my 
stereo to pipe my iTunes thru the house. This week the AirPort Express 
showed up, and now that wire has been retired. I'm still tethered to 
power, but is nice to get rid of that  black wire snaking over to the 
receiver. We also stuck a printer there by the stereo, so now there is 
a network printer upstairs and downstairs.

I do a newsletter for the scouts. Created in AppleWorks, posted as a 
pdf online. You can look for it on my iDisk - dowhatyoulike. Whenever I 
put pictures in it, the file would get huge, over a meg, which for the 
dial-up folks was too big. My solution had been to make the newsletter 
on my old desktop Mac in Mac OS 9.1, then open the file on the iBook. 
This kept the pdf around 150K. My old Mac won't boot, for reasons I 
haven't figured out yet, so I had to make the newsletter on my iBook 
last weekend. I used PDFshrink to reduce the size of the file 90%. Very 
cool drag and drop program. Likely will end up buying it.

And lastly, we made it to MacWorld Boston, last week. Read about it 
here: <http://www.hersheyapplecore.com/forum/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgi>, 
click on News, then MacWorld Boston. The Hershey Apple Core has a nice 
forum, but it's kind of underutilized.

I got two bumper stickers on my minivan: BUSH IS A LIAR and DEFEND 
AMERICA - DEFEAT BUSH. I figure it is time to commit to defend our 
democracy, which is at greater risk than ever before. Looks like the 
bump from the convention might be an insurmountable obstacle for the 
Bushies. But watch out folks, they will do almost anything as 
desperation sets in. Mark my word, they are going down. It might even 
be a landslide refutation of the entire mess they have created. 
Wouldn't that be sweet.