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i drove to belmont to get my father's macintosh so i could upgrade the processor. my sister was home, we discussed thanksgiving plans briefly, before i left with the machine. i first had to upgrade the ROM, but the cd that had the software that came with the new upgrade card was defective. i was only able to read the disc from OS 9, copied the dmg file containing the upgrade application. i then opened up the machine and swapped out the CPU, removing the heat sink clips and taking out 3 screws. upgrading the processor is actually pretty easy, easier than adding another hard drive i think. after i screwed everything down, i closed up the box and restarted the machine. to be honest, i was expecting the computer to be a lot faster. i'm upgrading an AGP sawtooth 400mhz G4 to a 1600mhz G4 processor, so i expected a 4x speed improvement. i ran a few simple tests: i was able to run a 700mb movie file without skipping any frames (not the case on a 400mhz machine, which is the machine that i still have), and it cataloged 300+ photos a lot faster than my machine. scrolling through those photos took 6+ seconds while on the new machine it took just 4 seconds. bottomline is for $280, i think it's a good investment to extend the life of a macintosh. now that i see it's a pretty reliable card, i might get one for myself.

the rest of my day saw very little action. i decided that today would be my day off so i didn't do any work. the weather was nice but cold, but i didn't bother going out. i fell asleep on the couch for a few hours, then a mixture of television (biographies on bambi bembenek, mary letourneau, and the women of the manson family) and food (jalapeno poppers and french bread pizza). before going to bed, i watched an MSNBC investigation on defrocked needham priest james foley, who had a decade-long affair with an emotionally unstable married woman, even fathering two of her children (now adults, who only discovered recently the truth), and left her to die when she overdosed on drugs in a fit of depression. probably one of the most awful things was after returning to MA (he left originally just to distance himself from the relationship), he actually called her up, and she couldn't remember him anymore due to a recent lobotomy in an attempt to cure her depression, so he started the relationship back up. i wish more people could've seen the report, but it was on at 4am in the morning.