McUpdate

The subprime mortgage crisis hits close to home today as default loans cause low quality icing to be used in the creation of the Gingerbread house resulting in the roof collapsing.

Got my car back. Will and Mary drove it back up on Thursday. They even got it cleaned. It's cleaner now that I suspect it's ever been since I first took over driving it. In fact, it's so clean at the moment that I almost feel bad when I just toss some trash over into the passenger seat. Mind you, it doesn't stop me from doing it, but I feel bad about it ever so briefly.

We got Ginger's computer online via the wireless network. Had to go out and buy a new network adapter from Best Buy that had a mac logo on it (so it cost about twice as much as the other adapters). We had tried going to the Apple store to get a Apple brand card for it, but the model that we have is apparently odd in that no one at the Apple store knew exactly what it would take to get it online. We got suggestions of buying and Airport Extreme card, and then having to possible purchase an antenna which we wouldn't be allowed to install, but then they said they weren't sure that would even work. So I eventually flat out asked what could I buy that I would be assured would connect it to the network, and no one knew. Lovely. Once we got the card getting it on the network was a pain since the wireless router is downstairs connected to my dead computer. And I have the thing locked down so that only specified mac addresses can connect and no changes can be made to the router wirelessly. So I ended up having to move that up to the laptop, then spend a couple minutes trying to guess how to log onto it and what password I would have used. Eventually I got in though and configured it to accept the Mac, and while I was there I configured it so the Wii could connect too. Although having the Will online is significantly less exciting than I thought it would be.

Once we got everything networked the next task was consolidating all the iTunes libraries Ginger has on the computers in the house onto the Mac. I think that task is done. And we moved over all her data from the old computer, so now she has almost no space left on her drive (she still has 17 Gig free, but considering we started with a 160 Gig drive it didn't take us long to get down to only 10% left).

I will admit that even though the folks at the Apple store were at a loss for my particular problem, the couple of people we talked to in the store were very knowledgeable. We even got an answer as to why the tape player interface we have for the iPod in the car results in massive feedback from our cell phones when they're communicating with the cell towers (at least I think we got an answer, I won't know for sure until we test it out and it actually works).