t
o
n
y
a
n
g
'
s
 
w
e
b
l
o
g


klea was back in town for the weekend (living out in sudbury) and i walked with her and julie to christopher's in porter square for brunch. back in the days, klea and i used to be cubicle buddies at the boston design center, sharing a pod, conspiring against the company. after i got laid off, we still kept in touch, occasionally meeting up for long lunch breaks in chinatown. in one of life's little ironies, later klea ended up doing some freelance work for the company that hired me after i got laid off. the last time i met klea was more than 3 years ago, when she came over to my place on a night when julie and i were making dinner. since she had sold her place last year, it seemed there'd be less occasions for her to visit so this weekend meeting was a rare treat. living in new york all these years, klea filled us in on all her adventures: finally getting engaged, living in a vermin-infested apartment, chipping all her front teeth (then getting da vinci veneers), going to fashion school, raising clown loaches, and all the travel she'd been doing (barcelona, prague, england).

after we finished eating we moseyed down to harvard square. julie was having woman issues and kept on ducking into bathrooms. we browsed a few stores and everybody got tea-to-go (there was no place to sit anyway) at tealuxe (i had the ginseng ginger chai, and despite the massive amount of liquid sugar i squirted into my cup, it still wasn't sweet enough for me). after we walked back to my place (where i noticed somebody had stolen one of the copper caps on my staircase), we continued chatting for a little bit longer before klea had to return to sudbury to make dinner for her bf-now-fiancé, giving julie a ride home as well.

earlier manny had contacted me about dropping off his used motorola SB5100 cablemodem since he too was back in town temporarily. unfortunately i wasn't home at the time and asked if he could just leave it on my back porch. i didn't even check and i when i called him to let him know i was back at home, he told me he'd already dropped off the modem. those of you who have cablemodem internet may not know this (i didn't know this until recently) but you don't have to rent your cablemodem from the cable company (which charges me $3/month to lease their outdated modem). you can just as easily buy your own and not put more money into the pockets of the cable monopoly. so it was with great excitement that i plugged in the new modem. all the lights seemed to be on but the modem just wouldn't work. so in the end i had to call comcast technical support, who told me that they just needed to register the MAC number of the cablemodem and then it'd work. i waited for them to add the number to their database and in a matter of minutes i was back online.

my parents got out of work early, closing the cafe for a few days to have their wooden floors retreated. along with my sister they came over to my place and we had dinner across the street at zoe's. it was around 7:30pm by the time we got there and the restaurant was completely empty. but just as soon as we arrived, people started showing up, and by the time we left, the restaurant was near capacity.

my evening of technical wrangling wasn't quite over yet. earlier this morning my father came by to drop off my OS 10.4 dvd so i could finally install a copy of the system on the 300gb drive. it then took another 30 minutes to migrate all my pre-existing data. so later this evening, i got around to finally swapping out my old 60gb drive and replacing it with the supersized 300gb drive. with this action it also marks the end of my love affair with OS 9. on one of the partitions on the 60gb drive was the last remnants of my old system. i haven't used it in a long time, and the last time i tried i couldn't even get it to boot anymore. i did burn everything onto a dvd, more for posterity than anything else.

i tried installing the 60gb as a second drive in my $300 dell desktop machine but without a secondary bracket it was no go. after i put everything back, i spent some time vacuuming up all the dust around my desk and trying to unclutter the mess of power cords.