Red Leather Rust

A beautifully windy 30°C day here in Donut Rock City. Went with the boss here at HPL Central Spec. Colls. to the extra archival storage deep in the International Style bowels of the venerable Canadian Football Hall of Fame. There lie, with but only the mildest dirt of the ages on the acid free wrappings, but a few archives of the Olde Barton Township and a collection left in trust to the city by the Hendrie family. By the end of the haul I was covered in the removable marks of red leather rust from old bindings. That shit really dries out a girl's tenderly moisturized hands.

The Hendrie family house is now a day spa outside the hospital called "Mercedes Day Spa". It's as faux chic-chic as you'd imagine. Despite how hot and bothered your copy of Azure or WallPaper^{superscript-ampersand} makes you for greened-up International Stylized shit of today. Might I remind you of this: all it takes is a quick jaunt to your local broke-ass public building to see how gracelessly the style tends to age. Wood panels buckle, old window casings get leaky, installation clocks stop working and tiled everything tends to un-tile with time and abuse.

My boss and I moved exactly 52 shelves of books, of which one edition we found obviously within the prerogative of our collections. Or more specifically our grants. Afterwards we stopped for bottles of water and watched the Peregrine falcon "Madam X" on camera with her freshly hatched chicks. There high above the Brutalist Cold War Urban Redevelopment Bunker we call Jackson Square, home of the library and market amongst other things, a lineage of falcons has returned to rear their young for quite some years. Whereas before during the recession in the late 80s they were but a single hope for the steel town now they are just another brief pre-occupation downtown. Somewhat ironically the tower they rear upon was designed to tastefully rust a bright blue-green colour as it was constructed of a specific kind of Stelco® steel that did not interact well with the soot filled air of the past. It remains an innocuous grey-black. People don't really care anymore though.

Thank goodness.

I bought some shirts today. One looks like Victorian wall-paper and the other was lame because it was 2-for-1 at Trashy Club Scum Planet. I was covered in leather rust and sweat and I needed to be around the ladies I work with all day for a couple more hours. Yes, if I were going to the gayz bar I'd covet that shit like a free pass to the Steamworks between paydays. I am now part of Trashy Club Scum Planet's UP club because I bought t-shirts! Bitch (admittedly nice and even legitimately naturally pretty) only took my first name. If they market to me based on that I will fuck their shit into privacy suit heaven.

Sorry, I can't come up with a classy denouement today. Help control the pet population. Get your pet spayed or neutered.

Cube Farming

Came home and worked my G4 Cube Mac restore magic.. or at least attempted. David graciously transferred it from precious homewares and linen storage space remover to my willing hands when he invested in a Mac Mini some time ago. Since then it has been in my Mom's domain operating as her computer for email, banking, cute shortbread receipts and the such.

Despite its beauty and influence upon more successful Apple products, like the Mac Mini, the cube is like a Mac born with Cystic Fibrosis or severe scoliosis of the back. Once it hits its 30 and 40s in computer years it starts to take a much anticipated nose dive. The power tends to conk out with larger rattles of its deliciously cubic chassis. The DVD drive prefers not to eject disks as beautifully presented slices of toast as before. The USB powered speakers tend to clip and surge the entire system power with loud music and high volume levels. But you can still remove the guts from the case with the sexy industrial push-and-pull rod. It still purrs and pulses the display and system light in perfect time over the much forgotten ADC display port.

I originally conceived it for Mom's 50-something empty nester lifestyle with her kitten Lucy.. but they likely were not a good home for this special computer. I have a suspicion the cat was laying on top of the cube's convection cooled top. Causing much havoc with the computer's boot process, starting and stopping any number of times. As a result the hard drive is all but a completely random algorithmic slurry of aborted sector writes.

I took the scenic route and tried to repair it with Disk Utility on my other Mac. But despite a promising log file it did indeed not correct the problem. Now I'm re-installing and trying a fresh install. Barring that I look into replacing the 40gb PATA IDE drive with something more spacious. What's that gonna cost? $70? Yay for commodity parts.