 |
 |
 |
|
Translation: "We're toast." This press release is the towell Yahoo just threw in. Amazing hair-restoration discovery! Well, damn. Among old boxes in the catacombs under the house I just found one filled with nothing but AC adapters and their various loose parts. I poked at them with a flashlight and found one that said it put out 12 volts DC. It also featured one of those female ends that lets you add a male plug that matches the female power socket in your power-needy device. So I came back upstairs with the adapter and a zip-loc baggie filled with an assortment of little plugs, found one that fit the back of the drive, tested the voltage (13.5), plugged it in, and:
It works. The bastard was right. As usual. Now he should go write up that dream. Mine is fulfilled: the files are moving as we speak. If I had more hair, I'd pull some out Still gotta do a piece for LJ and wrap another job this afternoon, amidst the blooming boxes. Meanwhile the new ultraslim VST 30mb firewire drive I just got doesn't seem to work, and I need it to carry the contents of another PC along with me. Turns out my Mac G3/400 doesn't put out power to Firewire devices through the Firewire PCMCIA card. So I need an adapter. The drive doesn't come with one. The VST site doesn't tell you what kind of adapter to use. The drive itself says "8-30VDC," which I take to mean anywhere from eight to thirty volts will do (never saw that before, but hey). I'm supplying it 10.4 volts (my meter measures) form a 9 volt adapter. The green light on the front glows brightly. It makes little doing-something sounds. But the VST driver doesn't detect a drive. Is it because the VST installer over-wrote the drive software that came with the card, which is a Keyspan? I have no idea. I can't get VST tech support on the phone, and the message I left with Tech Support there hasn't been returned. Nor has the email I sent. I could buy their adapter for $19.95 and have it shipped overnight. But I just went all the way through the purchase mill only to find that the shipping is thirty-some dollars. (Why do you have to go all the way through the ordering process to discover these kinds of facts?) I'm not gonna do that. Last night Craig called to tell me about an amazing dream he had (which I hope he shares on his blog) but found me in the midst of pulling my hair out over this thing. So I enlisted him as tech support. First he showed me how to get the PCMCIA card out with two needle-nosed pliers (the eject button broke off a while back), and told me he was sure the card itself wasn't the problem. He thought I needed a power supply with more voltage. Here's hoping one turns up while I go trough boxes in the garage today. Living on reds, vitamin C and cocaine Or if you give me weed, whites and wine... Just playing some truckin' music on one of the other PCs while we pack for the move to We're testing the waters for six months. If we like it, we stay. If we don't, we come back here. That's the current plan, anyway. Gotta go get the U-Haul.
|
Santa Barbara
