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I'll take a risk
Wednesday, December 29 1999
I spent most of the day taking care of a bunch of needs my parents had accumulated during my year and half long absence. These were mostly related to the computer system in the Shaque. A few years back, Hoagie had bought a modern 233 MHz Macintosh PowerPC so she could get on the 'Net and do all the cool stuff she'd been hearing about. I'd recommended a Mac at the time because it was the machine she was used to and I was around periodically to maintain it. But now that I live a continent away, it's become clear that a Macintosh is not the best computer for my parents. Though Macs are supposedly easier for a novice to use, they are far more prone to crashes, and the crashes often require rebooting the computer. The crashes on my mother's computer have become so frequent that she finds she needs to run Norton Utilities with practically every reboot or else terrible things happen. So I decided to set her up with relatively reliable Windows 98 machine. Several weeks ago I surfed around on the web and picked out the stuff she needed and had it all shipped to her house.
Both last night and today I found myself spending endless hours putting it all together. These things never go as smoothly as they theoretically should. I won't go into all the details, but suffice it to say I couldn't use the motherboard I'd ordered because the only kind of PCI cards it could take were of the super-short variety; both positions were cut off by the placement of the CPU.
My mother and I ended up heading out to Staples to buy some last minute supplies, including a sound card, a ZIP drive and a modem. The Staples sales guy tried to sell us a $100 US Robotics modem instead of a cheap little $30 WinModem. He tried to tell us that modem connections to CFW.com (Hoagie's internet provider) won't work with cheap modems. But I knew better. I didn't bother to tell him my qualifications on the subject, I just said, "Well, I'm going to take a risk on this one and get the cheap $30 modem." And it worked just fine.
I would have thought Kim would have been more upset with me for paying so little attention to her today, but she seemed to be content lounging around on the Shaque couch reading a book her stepmother had bought for her, Memoirs of a Geisha.
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