Krishen Greenwell

  • Busy Weekend

    Wow, what a weekend it’s been. Friday, I helped Patricia look for a car; we started at 8am and finished by 6pm. It was an exhausting process. She’s detailed it out here (link poorly translated from Portuguese thanks to Google).

    The red one is hers. As a means to relax we were going to hit the beach Saturday morning, but on the way there, I realized the Famer’s Market was going on downtown, so we decided to check that out instead:




    That was a lot of fun; it’s neat to get out and see what the community is part of. While I was there I took a pamplet from the Sierra Club — they go on hikes around the area, which I think would be fun to take part in.
    After the Farmer’s Market, we stopped by Whole Foods and had a chance to take refuge from the sun, which was out in full force. Shortly after arriving back home at 1pm, Nkosi called; he was in town from St. Pete for a party in Sarasota that night and was curious if I’d be up for coming with him. Unfortunately I had a party in St. Pete to go to! Don’t think our timing could have been any worse, but we made the best of it and watched Koyaanisqatsi (similar to, but predating Baraka, if you’ve seen that: a visual narrative on the earth) before heading our separate ways.
    Finally — that party I went to in St. Pete? It was Eric and Sonia‘s housewarming. So much fun. I am really torn about living here in Sarasota. It’s close to work, but there are so many more people I can identify with (read: young people) in St. Pete. But is it worth replacing my 8 minute commute with a 50 minute one? I’m not so sure.








  • Bought new DVD drive: Pioneer DVR-110D-BK and CPU upgrade: PowerLogix dual-G4 1.6 GHz 7447A

    I think my computer’s optical drive (the same one from when I got the compuer in 2001, a MATSHITA CD-RW CW-8571 Apple-certified “Combo” drive) finally bit the dust. As far as I know it still reads CDs okay, but has a hell of a time trying to read DVDs. It just sits there and spins, but the disc never seems to mount. It’s been exhibiting some form of this behaviour for at least a year, but it wasn’t until last night that I tried successive DVDs and they all didn’t work.
    As I regularly do, I checked out Other World Computing‘s newsletter (if you’re a Mac user and aren’t subscribed to it, you really should — they’ve got some great deals and they know their stuff) to see if they had any CD/DVD drives worth checking out. I’ve already watched their video on how to upgrade a CPU, and it was great, and I know they’ve got a similar one on how to upgrade your optical drive. About half a year ago I was pretty close to buying one, but at that time, drive prices were about $100 for something that could burn DVDs at 8x. So, you can probably understand how happy I was to see a drive that could burn a DVD at 16x, for $52. That’s a big price drop; and it’s also twice as fast as my current drive can burn CDs! So, I plunked down the cash. Now it’s just a waiting game. *thumb twiddle*
    Oh yeah, I don’t think I mentioned it here yet, since my blog was down at the time: in December, I upgraded my Power Mac’s single processor PowerPC G4 733MHz to a Dual G4 1.6 GHz via the PowerLogix PowerForce G4 7447A CPU upgrade card (see reviews at the always-excellent xlr8yourmac.com) — and I cannot put into words how happy I am. My machine boots faster, browses faster, rips music faster, boots my email program faster, shuts down quicker, sleeps faster, and is STABLE (not that it wasn’t before). So excited about that. The only downside is that it’s a little bit noiser due to now having an extra fan, but I’m making up for that by putting my machine to sleep at night (yes, it’s within earshot of my bed).
    Anyway, that’s all the tech-geekery from me for now 🙂

Krishen Greenwell