printers

Sometimes I wonder if I haven't got an overdeveloped sense of "caveat emptor". I've finally decided that although having a printer that fits on my desk is nice, and having gotten the thing for free is nice too, it doesn't really win out over the $35 I have to spend every time I need new ink cartridges and the fact that when it's out of ink, it simply won't print at all (no error messages or anything) and then it has fits for about ten minutes before it gets around to actually printing when I replace the cartridges. On top of which, it would be nice not to have to think about whether anything I've printed is going to get wet and run when it rains.

So this morning, having discovered that lo, the printer's out of ink again, I went looking around for a used laser printer. Ebay had a used LaserJet 6P, which is the printer I had at Tufts and got along very well with, going for $55. My immediate reaction was "Wow, I can even afford that!", but then almost instantly I started thinking "All right, what's wrong with it?" The blurb didn't say there was anything wrong with it, but I still didn't trust it enough to actually bid on the thing. (Aside from that, I'm not sure I trust PayPal anyway, but that's another story.) I went off to Kinko's and spent $35 on ink cartridges and decided that I want to be able to actually lay my hands on any used laser printer I'm thinking about buying.

So I think tomorrow, I'll go to the local computer repair/used computer shops and see if either of them has refurbished laser printers. I suspect I won't be able to beat $55 plus shipping, but at least I'll be able to actually see the thing before I buy it. Besides, now I've got at least a couple of months before I need to buy ink cartridges again, so it's not like I desperately need to buy a laser printer tomorrow if not sooner.

If I do finally buy a laser printer, I'm going to have to rearrange my living room a bit. The only problem with laser printers is that they all seem to be modeled after Sherman tanks.

part GROWF and part good stuff

I think I need a new CD drive, or at the very least a new driver for the existing drive. The one I've got is officially upgefuckt. About every other time I try to rip a CD, the drive hangs, which hangs iTunes, and then proceeds to hang the entire system if I try to do anything else while iTunes is giving me the Spinning Beachball of Death. I have to force restart the computer in order to get it un-hung, and then I have to restart it again to get it to recognize the CD drive. On top of that, every time I try to burn a CD, it gets about halfway through and then spits the CD out and tells me there was an error and it can't burn the CD. This means I can't back anything up either, because it won't burn backup CDs. ARGH.

On a more cheerful note, since I spent Friday completely unable to get anything done (and feeling fairly awful besides), I've spent large chunks of this weekend doing academic things, to wit:

Draft version of this week's translation and final version of last week's. Anybody out there know anything about shallow well jet pump systems? I'm trying to decide whether there's a typo in the original text or not. It starts talking about multiple motors at one point, but as far as I can tell, there's only one motor in the system, and that's the one in the pump. The only thing I can think of is that it's a generalization, and it's saying "make sure the supply voltage to the motor doesn't exceed its capacity, and make sure any motors you use are properly grounded".

I also got a LOT of composition exercises done. This week we had 90 we don't have to hand in (we go through them in class), and 80 we do have to hand in. Fortunately this week we're messing around with adverbs, so the sentences are shorter and it isn't as much work as it has been messing around with verbs. The undergrads only have to do the odd-numbered exercises to hand in, so they only have 40 to do. I also still have to do two rewrites of the composition I wrote two weeks ago, from two different perspectives. That's not quite as screamingly urgent; I can do one tomorrow and one on Tuesday. (The general rule of thumb for this course is, if I spend more than 7 1/2 hours per week on it, I'm doing too much work. I don't think I've gotten there yet, but sometimes it feels like it.)

On top of all that stuff, I saved my refrigerator from a possible biological experiment and used up some vegetables making chicken soup. It turned out to have too many onions in it, but I got around that. I left the onion bits large enough to pick out, because with me and onions I either have to be able to eat around them, or I have to cut them up small enough that I don't notice them. I like the flavor in other things, but I can't stand actual onions. So anyway, I picked most of the onions out of the soup and froze half of it. It remains to be seen whether I'll remember I have it in the freezer the next time I'm starving and don't want to cook anything.

I seem to want to go to bed, and it's only 9:30. My brain aches and my back aches. Harumpf.