My Little World

Ah the fine art of typesetting. Since the government needed to take even more cash away from me this month I decided to throw my arms up in the air and forget about saving money. I bought a nice boxed set on typesetting with LaTeX at Borders today. It was on sale for 40% off, which made it cheaper than even the used version on Amazon. It was nice and I was inspired and motivated to work on my ideas for a paper on reflection anisotropy spectroscopy. I gave a presentation on the subject last week but was severly pissed off that I didn't have a successful application of the technique. I wanted to have a working model for the data I collected for RAS but there was too much optical noise in the bulk sample so I couldn't see the effect of the surface treatment another grad student did for me.

In other news I've been continuing to collect ancient machines to satisfy my curiosity in computer history. Last week I bought two LaserJet 1100's that I want to restore. It will be a cheaper laser printer than anything on sale right now and MUCH cheaper in price per page since I can order refurbished or knockoff toner for ~$20 bucks. Plus it's old enough to run on my ancient Macs, Linux, and Win32. I bought two for future spare parts. I want them to last forever.

I also bought a Power Macintosh 7500/100 plus Mac OS System 7.6.1 last week. The 7500 came with Mac OS System 8.6 which I kept installed. I'm writing this blog entry with it using MacSSH in fact. It's pretty impressive considering how slow the processor is and it only has 64 MB of RAM installed. Yet the OS only takes up 10 MB most of the time and all the software I've been downloading is really tiny as well. It only has 1.3 GB of hard disk space yet it seems to be plenty despite my installation of word processors, several old web browsers, LaTeX, a C compiler, and some math software. Pretty nice little box. I like playing with it and trying to get some useful software installed on it.

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