Jo’s did.
The call came early this morning. It was Jo, at the radio station.
“I was working on invoices on my Mac,” she told me. “And my mouse just died. Do you have a spare one?”
Jo’s Mac is a Mac IIci. We’re talking a circa 1989 computer. She still uses it every day, with an Apple laser printer that’s equally ancient, to do the radio station’s invoicing.
Yes, that’s right: she’s using an 18-year-old computer daily to manage a radio station’s accounting.
We discussed the mouse’s problem. It was the clicker. It wasn’t clicking anymore. Not bad when you consider that she’s been clicking with it for 18 years.
I think she got her money’s worth.
Oddly enough, she didn’t buy the computer brand new. She used it when she worked at the local newspaper. They’d bought it brand new for their layout folks. As the layout folks got new computers, the old ones were shifted to other employees. Jo worked at the front desk and got this Mac IIci. When she retired, they sold it to her for a nominal price. So this is the computer’s third mission in its life.
I refuse to touch the computer. I figure that it’s lasted so long because no one has messed with it.
There’s an eMac with a G4 processor in the same room — I loaned it to them and installed it to do their WebCam and Internet broadcasting. She won’t touch it other than to periodically restart it when it gets confused and stops broadcasting.
The mouse she needed was an ADB mouse. ADB stands for Apple Desktop Bus. It’s the old interface for Apple computer mice and keyboards before Apple adopted the more universally used USB connections. Apple hasn’t made an ADB mouse for at least 10 years, so it wasn’t likely that she’d find one at Best Buys or Frys or even the Apple Store — all of which are in Phoenix, 40+ minutes away by car.
But Jo called the right person. You see, I’m one of those crazy people who keeps all that old computer stuff. I still own two SE/30s — one of which is in perfect working condition. Those computers use the same mice as Jo’s Mac IIci. So I opened up my big plastic storage box of old computer equipment, dug around for about three minutes, and pulled the mouse she needed out by its tail.
A half hour later, she was at my door, checking the clicker.
“Yes, this one still clicks,” she confirmed. She hugged me, then said quickly, “I don’t usually hug people, but I’m very happy about this.”
I was just happy that she’d come to pick it up and that I didn’t have to drive into town.
I took this shot on the first glacier. It’s a huge boulder — probably 8 feet long by 6 feet wide by 3 feet tall — and it’s being held horizontally off the surface of the glacier by a column of ice. The ice, of course, is melting — not from global warming but by summer warmth — and I suspect this boulder is now lying elsewhere on the surface of the glacier, a bit downstream as it moves with the flow of the ice. Perhaps it’s sitting in a similarly awkward position and another tourist has snapped a shot of it — maybe with his wife or kid sitting or standing on it! That’s the weird thing about glaciers: they’re always changing, always moving. The rocks and boulders on their surface are just along for the ride.
The subject of diet and eating habits came up in our conversation. I told her that we eat pretty well — perhaps too well. Our diet consists primarily of fresh food prepared at home. We don’t eat a lot of prepared foods at all. While we haven’t bought into the organic thing yet — mostly because it defeats part of the purpose when those organic foods are shipped 2,000 miles to get to our store — we do eat a lot of fresh vegetables. And since I’m one of those people who won’t eat fresh food after it’s been sitting in the fridge for a few days, we hit the local supermarket once every day or so to get a few things for our next few meals.
I just popped into my Mac OS X Dashboard to check the definition of a word and, while I was there, got this peek at the Weather widget for this week.