While using Finder in Leopard today, I couldn’t help but notice the variation in the icons. I’d noticed before that older iMacs have white screen edges, and Windows machines look older, but it just struck me this afternoon that the icon for Windows machines shows a classic Blue Screen of Death. It seems like an Apple icon designer was poking fun at the PC on this one.

Ironically, Leopard was incorrectly identifying our Apple Airport Extreme as a PC in the network list with this icon.

The president of my company leaves for Tortola (in the British Virgin Islands) for 5 months every year. In order to enable his continued participation in our meetings, I decided to put together an iChat Appliance (we’re all-mac in the office) for the conference room.

I began with a graphite Power Mac with a 533 MHz cpu, since we had 3 unused and laying around. I harvested more SDRAM (for a total of 1 GB) and an Airport card from other machines and added them to the 533 with the best graphics card (tied to the Motherboard). This machine now lives in the corner of the conference room on a shelf held up by old beige macs. A FireWire iSight is mounted above the office’s projection screen and is aimed at the conference room table. Under Panther, this worked perfectly, but I couldn’t share documents or take advantage of any of Leopard’s other new features. So I installed Leopard!

…which requires an 867 or higher cpu! Curses…

Happily, I found a post on MacRumors detailing how to modify the installation image, lowering the required MHz. Instead of burning it to a DVD-DL, I used Disk Utility to “restore” the sparseimage to a partition on a Firewire drive. I then booted the Graphite system from this drive, and installation went perfectly. I booted the system, fired up iChat AV and prepared to test the system. Instead of the usual Video preview in iChat AV’s setup, I saw a blank grey window stating:

“This computer does not support video conferencing.”

Nevermind the fact that while running 10.3 I could video conference perfectly. 10.5 and its new version of iChat didn’t believe I had the power. Apparently this happened to other people with real supported systems, so I found a thread and was lead to Apple’s official solution and poof, I can video conference again!

The downside is that now that it’s finished and working, I can’t shake the feeling that I’m a government official in V for Vendetta, being stared down on by the power-hungry Supreme Chancellor. A Supreme Chancellor in a floral print shirt.

I guess I’m just in tune with the electromagnetic forces around me. Maybe I’m due for membership in the Brotherhood of the Twisted Pair. We’re having trouble with our DSL in the office, and the AT&T tech said that it was flickering on and off every 30 seconds from the moment I left the office yesterday until I got here this morning and rebooted the server. Not the modem. The server. The modem isn’t supposed to care what the server is doing, but there you have it. The modem missed me. We’ve replaced it now, so I get to watch it and decide if the modem was really the problem of if there’s something wrong with the brand new Mac Pro server. I’ve made myself a necklace of dsl filters and cat3 couplers. I’m in tune with the unnatural world.

I think I’m a consultant right now. That’s the only word for it. A small non-profit has hired me for two weeks to help them decide what to do with old computers, set up a network, help them plan a game they’re designing, and automate their backup system.

This temporary position happened to coincide with the host of their external sites, ValueWeb, merging with Hostway and moving their servers to a different city… and they claimed the machines would only be down 12-15 hours. It turned out to be over 3 days with no external site or company e-mail, but what’s the difference, really? I’m glad I’m not hosting a business with them, I’ll say that much.

While some of it’s frustrating at times, I’m getting to muck around with Applescript. Oh, and it pays the rent too!

I saw Transformers today. I went in expecting to barely tolerate it and I was really pleasantly surprised. The robot characters were pretty well done, and the humans were almost good too.

I’ll happily admit that I got pretty choked up when Optimus Prime was introduced. Lots of old memories and feelings came flooding back, mostly connected to his death in the 80′s movie. I was too young when it was in theaters, but I watched a whole lot of reruns and VHS a few years later, and I was asking for an Optimus Prime toy before I could properly pronounce his name. Odimus Pry could, to my mother’s frustration, potentially refer to Optimus or Rodimus.

Michael Bay’s movie did justice to my Transformers memories, and that gives me a warm and fuzzy feeling inside. It kept surprisingly close to canon and closed in a way that could either open it up for a sequel or simply tie it in as an alternate opening for the mythology. I do hope to see a sequel, perhaps with Leonard Nimoy returning to reprise his role as Galvatron. If not, I’ll still be adding this one to my DVD collection.

P.S. Ratatouille is awesome. See it. SEE IT.