BilikFamily.com

Photo Album - Since leaving for vacation, I've accumulated more pictures than I can handle. I could spend a week of evenings going through them all. Taking my first stab at tackling the backlog, I started work on an album with all the pictures in my camera since "family photo day" on Sunday, August 31st. Included among these are pictures at Trumble Park in River Grove, pictures of the girls visiting Grandpa Bilik and Maria, and pictures of the kids at the TransDimension summer outing. I have a bunch of other cool shots waiting in the wings, but I just need to the time to get through them. Let me know what you think of the trick photography of picture #16.

Roan Inish - At the recommendation of NH Catholic mother and author Danielle Bean, this weekend Claire, Michelle, and I watched "The Secret of Roan Inish". Since Danielle also uses Netflix, who knows, maybe we watched the exact same DVD she did last month. It was a good family movie for older kids. I highly recommend it to the Tarpeys for its basis in Irish folklore and legends. Because of the accents, we found it helpful to turn on the English subtitles while watching the movie.

Work - Life at the office has been a bit busy for Will and I this week. The third person in customer engineering support has been unavailable for a bit now and it's catching up with us. What I find is that the more you feel overwhelmed, the more you make careless mistakes, which in turn puts you further behind.

Home - I got a call late Friday afternoon that a "new" CD-ROM edutainment game wouldn't play on our Mac at home. Based on the warning she was getting, I told Michelle I'd have to take a look at it after I got home from work. Once I got home, I was feeling mentally burned out and was reluctant to look at it. Alas, after having dinner I decided to put Abby first and look into the issue.

I put "new" in quotes because it wasn't really new. When our third engineering support person moved back to Ireland last week, she gave us a bunch of her older CD-ROMs from when her daughter was younger. Many of them were originally purchased when Apple's Mac OS X wasn't around. As I looked into the error message this game was giving (thank you Google), it noted that the game will not run under OS X.

This is where the stupidity on my part comes in. "Oh," I thought, "I'll just reboot into OS 9..." Think of it like using Windows XP on a daily basis but still having a copy of Windows 98 around for some of those old games that require it. I instructed the computer to reboot into OS 9 and within a minute I was feeling a sense of déjà vu looking at the older style operating system.

I got ready to install the software when I soon realize the mouse wasn't moving. Then the stupidity hits me. About a year or so ago, I transitioned the iMac to a wireless (Bluetooth) keyboard and mouse. We did this so that we could a) reduce cable clutter but more importantly b) move the keyboard and mouse out of Timothy's reach when they're not in use. (Click here to see the mouse) Well, OS 9 has no clue about this keyboard and mouse. They only run on later versions of OS X.

Soon I'm thinking, "where's the old keyboard and mouse?" I recalled last fall the local scouts had a recycling drive/fundraiser for old electronics. Among the things I donated was the old keyboard and mouse, which up to that time were just collecting dust. If we were the packrat types, we'd probably still have them, but we like to reduce unnecessary clutter where possible by donating what we don't use.

So there we were with the iMac that I couldn't even shut off (aside from pulling the plug). I put it to sleep until I could stop at the office to "borrow" a USB keyboard and mouse. I consoled Abby that she wouldn't be able to play this particular game. I also had to tell her that she wouldn't be able to use the computer at all until I could get another keyboard and mouse to reboot the computer back into OS X.

In the end the iMac was saved by our neighbor. I asked him on Saturday morning if he had a spare USB mouse I could borrow for about 10 minutes. The Mac immediatedly recognized it, I set it up to reboot into OS X as the default, and restarted. “And there was much rejoicing...”