Various personal notes
First of all, I was hoping I still have at least one reader out there who's still Mac-oriented enough to help me with a problem: My iMac is having trouble with its internal CD/DVD drive, and has been for some time now. When I put in a disc it tends to make noises which vary from a sort of repeated hiccup to a genuine out-and-out "hee-haw." While doing so it will hang for long (but not indefinite) periods of time; it seems to be trying too hard to read the disc, or something like. What this puts me in mind of is the "click of death" that older ZIP drives had problems with.

Can anyone out there tell me if this is the kind of thing which is a driver conflict, or some other internal thing, or whether this really is it for the old bag and I ought to give her up for a new machine? (I was hoping to trade her in against a laptop... oh well.) It's been making it hard to upgrade, as I can't get her to start off a disc on my external Que drive.

In other news, I was accepted to UC Riverside's dance history PhD. One down, five (UCLA, UC Berkeley, Harvard, and Teacher's College in education, UMass Amherst in communications) to go. FBAEW.

Update: I have to some extent overcome the CD problem and have finally (! how many years too late?!) joined the modern world-- I succeeded in installing OS X on my machine. I swear it runs slower than 8.6 is running on the old Performa I'm trying to soup up. I hate all the animation, and I don't particularly appreciate the fact that my computer is now better than me at chess, either. I would love to get a tutorial on accessing all the UNIX goodies from anyone who has a moment, though. Posted by Gus at February 23, 2003 04:18 PM