But in happier news...
my weekend has been fairly productive. Yesterday I ran around doing a few errands - picked up some pellets for the baby bunnies, picked up our reel lawnmower for my wife, grabbed some old SCSI gear from Cal's Computer Warehouse. Set the deck height on the mower so that it might work in our bumpy yard, and went to an art show to hear my old piano teacher play (who i haven't seen in about 10 years). It was good times, and the art was pretty cool, too.
Today I slept in. My wife and I went for a long walk and had a nice time. We then relaxed for a bit before heading out to buy a pair of lounge chairs for our deck. Came back, had some food, and we brought the baby bunnies out into the yard while she cleaned their area inside. They had a great time, nibbling on the grass and bouncing around. The mother bunny even started digging a very nice burrow into the ground, but ran out of time before it started raining and we all headed back inside. Good times were had by all.
The trip to Cal's Discount Computer Warehouse was amusing. It's a weird place full of old computer crap. At first I managed to find a PCI narrow SCSI adapter (Adaptec AHA-2940U) for $12.95 (the warranty is "if it doesn't work, bring it back and we probably have another one that you can try), but couldn't find any cables. Well, they had an entire floor up a barely noticable staircase with all kinds of junk up there. I found some external enclosures - while I'm trying to get a custom internal-SCSI cable from E-mu (or rather, the company that they sold their old stock to), I will need to have my Zip drive somewhere - but they all had ratty old tape drives, and were both too tall and too expensive. Tucked away in a corner full of old CD-ROM drives, I noticed a nice external 3.5" SCSI enclosure, with a Jaz drive in it, to boot - for only $9. Who knows if the Jaz drive works - their used disks were $14 each, and I knew that I had a working Zip drive with some disks at home. Added an external 50-pin centronics cable for another $6, and they threw it all together for $20 for me (woo, saved $8!).
Still needed some extra bits - I couldn't find one or two cables, and I wouldn't mind an internal HD, so I ordered a few things from a Calgary company that also carries old SCSI junk, and that should arrive in mid-week. But I took that Jaz drive out, threw the Zip in, and hooked it up to the ESI-2000. It detected it, formatted it, and it seems to be working great! Hooray for obsolete technology!
Today I slept in. My wife and I went for a long walk and had a nice time. We then relaxed for a bit before heading out to buy a pair of lounge chairs for our deck. Came back, had some food, and we brought the baby bunnies out into the yard while she cleaned their area inside. They had a great time, nibbling on the grass and bouncing around. The mother bunny even started digging a very nice burrow into the ground, but ran out of time before it started raining and we all headed back inside. Good times were had by all.
The trip to Cal's Discount Computer Warehouse was amusing. It's a weird place full of old computer crap. At first I managed to find a PCI narrow SCSI adapter (Adaptec AHA-2940U) for $12.95 (the warranty is "if it doesn't work, bring it back and we probably have another one that you can try), but couldn't find any cables. Well, they had an entire floor up a barely noticable staircase with all kinds of junk up there. I found some external enclosures - while I'm trying to get a custom internal-SCSI cable from E-mu (or rather, the company that they sold their old stock to), I will need to have my Zip drive somewhere - but they all had ratty old tape drives, and were both too tall and too expensive. Tucked away in a corner full of old CD-ROM drives, I noticed a nice external 3.5" SCSI enclosure, with a Jaz drive in it, to boot - for only $9. Who knows if the Jaz drive works - their used disks were $14 each, and I knew that I had a working Zip drive with some disks at home. Added an external 50-pin centronics cable for another $6, and they threw it all together for $20 for me (woo, saved $8!).
Still needed some extra bits - I couldn't find one or two cables, and I wouldn't mind an internal HD, so I ordered a few things from a Calgary company that also carries old SCSI junk, and that should arrive in mid-week. But I took that Jaz drive out, threw the Zip in, and hooked it up to the ESI-2000. It detected it, formatted it, and it seems to be working great! Hooray for obsolete technology!