Tales Of Brave Ulysses

So a faulty breaker in Agaña caused last night’s power outage. At least the power was on in Yoña when I got home around ten o’clock.

In other Yoña related news, GWA crews tore open a big hole in the fresh asphalt along Route 4 today, trying to repair a busted water main. I guess we got a brand new nasty-ass pothole to avoid on Guam’s highways now, because one thing GWA does not do is repair their damage to Guam’s roads.

Emphasis Strong and the ever popular hyperlinked text among other abilities.

Well, it looks like Textile is working. That was painless.

So Jimbo, did they interview you for this article? You gonna go rat hunting with your commando knife after the storm? Hell, remember when I tried to stab you with my bowie knife after the earthquake back in ‘93?

Feed your need to know: DAILY ROTATION is a pretty cool site – sort of a spin free Drudge Report, covering politics, science and tech headlines. Since Corante switched from headline aggregation to weblog soapbox, this site’s become one of my first stops, along with Google News, My Yahoo, and of course my Bloglines RSS reader.

So I stumbled on some interesting links this week, all about prefab buildings, and the current popularity of modernist designs. I have to admit, I am a sucker for modern architecture. And these prefabs are not your average trailer park material. The are designed by prominent architects, and are available in a variety of shapes and sizes.

The picture above is a prefab cabin marketed by BlueskyMod. Here’s a longer story about the company and its plans for prefab housing.

For the truly adventurous, I also dug up a variety of sites offering plans and prefab kits for geodesic dome homes, including this one from American Ingenuity that offers concrete geodesics. Very interesting, and not nearly as crazy as I used to think. And they look so damn cool…

I haven’t made much noise about it, but I went on a bender at Christmas, purchasing a couple Apple computers and an iPod. I’m writing this on my iBook G4, an excellent laptop that is quickly becoming indispensable to me. But I went a little crazy when I saw those beautiful iMac G5’s at the Apple Store in West County Shopping Mall at Christmas. It was easy to convince myself I need one; since my Dell PC was dead and my aging PowerMac G3 was on it’s last legs, I needed a new desktop computer. Why not go a little crazy and actually buy a new, worry free computer instead of my usual route of eBay castoffs and obsolete models. So I drank the Kool-Aid and bought a 20’ iMac G5.

Well, I started hearing rumors about how the iMac’s were prone to problems, overheating and bad power supplies being the most common. Sour grapes I thought. On Tuesday I was watching a bit of Quicktime video (no, not porno – the entire NOVA special The Elegant Universe is available online) when the iMac just switched itself off. Whump – game over man. Every attempt to turn it back on since then has been met with failure. It comes on for a couple seconds, starts the familar Apple ‘bong’ startup chord, then it stops. Tried Apple tech support chat, and it looks like I need a new midplane (logic board) or maybe a power supply.

You know, I just realized I never posted this story about the iMac G5. Well, the short story is – I got it working again, though it took several months. It was the power supply, and it only took about three days to fix. Regrettably I waited from April until August to get the computer repaired. Thankfully it was still under warrranty. In fact, just about the time I took it into the Apple Store in St. Louis, I got an email announcing the extension of the warranty program for the iMac G5 because of problems with the power supplies.

Why did I wait so long to get this computer, my pride and joy, repaired? Because I wasn’t about to pay to FedEx the computer back to the States for repairs. I checked it as luggage when I went back in August for a family wedding. So let this be a lesson to Guamanians that want a Macintosh; be prepared for troubles when the machine breaks.