Procrastinet

What the Kids are Into These Days

filed under: Dadditudes

A long overdue update about the boys:

First of all, look at these likely lookin' fellas...

Max has formally decided to grow his hair out. Miyu gave it a trim (first big-boy haircut at Mudhoney, with no lesser personality than Sebastian Bach at the next chair) but he's getting good and shaggy. Charlie has yet to go under the scissors, because Procrastiwife can't part with his little curls yet, no matter how much they start to look like peyis.

Charlie's two month affair with Elmo is over and he's back to Yo Gabba Gabba - so much so that we bought exorbitantly priced tickets to the YGG live show at the Beacon in November. All for an event that he won't remember. They'd better let us take good pictures...

Charlie's vocabulary is growing but he still uses the word "Ba-ba" for about a dozen different meanings, differentiating between them all with subtle changes of inflection. It's like Mandarin. For instance:

Ba-bah - "Bo Bo", binkie, pacifier

Ba-buwh - bubbles, specifically the hippo bubble dispenser

BAH-ba - his brother, Max; also shortened to "Ba"

Bahbah - Yo Gabba Gabba; see above

Max is into marine biology, specifically sharks and whales. He has recently become enthralled with YouTube videos of prehistoric sea animals, taken from the "Walking with Dinosaurs" series. Here's one we watch a lot, which I have come to find strangely compelling:

It's kind of amazing to watch him watch this - not only does he rock out to the Drowning Pool song that underscores it, but he shouts the names of all the creatures like they're sports heros. "Dunkleosteus!" he'll shout. "Daddy! Stethocanthus!!! MEGALODON!!!"

It also amazes me that people out there collect these random things into video compilations and post them on YouTube - and they find an audience, to the tune of tens of thousands of views! Here's another of his favorites (although he strenuously contests the order of the listings):

And, finally, an obsession both boys share - subway cars. Specifically, the Red Bird subway cars. Specifically, the Red Bird subway cars being decommissioned and thrown into the ocean to make an artificial reef (at which Charlie gets very excited and shouts "WA-WA! WA-WA!"):

The Weekly WANT IT Blows it, Stalls for Time, Fixes It

filed under: The Weekly WANT IT

Back in June, there was a very rare occurrence - I fell in love with a purchasable object, found it at a reasonable price, talked myself into buying it, and then didn't buy it.

That's because I discovered that, rather than spend $1500+ on a new MacBook Pro, I could upgrade the overstuffed hard drive on my PowerBook myself. I jotted down a smug, self-congratulatory blog post, rushed out to buy the necessary parts, rolled up my sleeves and cracked open my computer.

And promptly f*cked it right up.

All was going well - I took off the plate over the RAM:

I got the keyboard unit lifted up:

And then got the keyboard unit detached:

And then unscrewed the first of the three screws that hold the bracket that holds the hard drive:

And then STRIPPED THE OTHER TWO SCREWS.

Oh yeah. What was once a #0 sized Phillips screwdriver slot (tiny) is now an almost smooth cone. Helpful.

It happened so gradually - I thought I was being careful. I'd try to turn it, it would lose grip, I'd look at the slot to make sure I wasn't stripping it, I'd try again... and then suddenly I had tried it like four dozen times and the screws were totally stripped.

So I did what any sensible person would do at this point - I set it aside and sulked about it for almost two months.

Then, two months later, I needed to build a sound cue for a show - and I needed Garage Band, on my computer, to do it. So, refreshed from my extended pout, I set back to work.

This time I brought a sharp utility knife, and scratched and scratched at the stripped remnants of the grooves until I had dug out a decent flat-head-friendly channel. Then I tried to turn it with a tiny flathead. It didn't work.

I scraped it some more and tried again. It didn't work. And again, and it didn't work.

At this point I may have started to lose my temper. I sort of yanked on the top of the bracket, where I had managed to get the first screw out, and twisted it and bent it and tried in general to either sort of break it off or at least bend it out of the way so I could jimmy the hard drive out.

NONE OF THIS IS A GOOD IDEA.

I got control of myself before I did any lasting harm, and took some deep calming breaths. Walked around the room a few times. Went and got a drink of water.

Then I sat back down, tried the flathead screwdriver again, and with a mild crack the top screw came right out.

And then the second did the same.

Apparently my snit fit, and specifically yanking on the recalcitrant bracket, actually got the screws free from the Apple-applied adhesive on their threads (don't tell me it's not there, it totally is because Apple HATES when you work on your own computer rather than paying them to do it), and all was well.

I swapped in the cloned hard drive, screwed it back in (using my well-grooved, newly flatheaded screws), put the rest back together, and turned it on. And sure enough, it was my computer again, just with 320GB of storage now. The thing works like a dream.

So kids, the moral of the story is: go ahead and lose your sh*t in the face of stubborn technology, but only enough to be useful.