The last two days have been nonstop flurries of pedagogical/administrative activity, as I sat through a four-hour faculty meeting yesterday morning, two-hour classes both yesterday afternoon and this afternoon, prepared papers and handouts for those classes and the classes I’ll be missing while I’m in Denver (thanks, Trevor!) for DIDW, packing for the trip, and last of all installing an AirPort card in my laptop.
I had been using a third-party wireless card that the laptop inherited from my previous machine (which could’nt use an AirPort card); it was functional, but had some kinks (though its open-source driver was in almost every respect amazingly good) that AirPort itself finesses.
The only problem was that the card installs differently on my PowerBook than on my wife’s iBook. On hers, it just pops into a friendly little slot under the keyboard; on mine, one has to unscrew the bottom plate. Unscrew, that is, with a Torx T-8 screwdriver. I used to have one of those till I absent-mindedly tried to take it through a security checkpoint. (Idle fantasy thought: “If you don’t yield control of the plane to me, I’ll install 512 megs of RAM into the nearest laptop.” Okay, I’m sure that a Torx driver could be used as a lethal weapon in a pinch, but mercy, it dosen’t even have an edge to speak of.)
Does anyone I know have a Torx driver that they can lend me tonight? Three Mac geeks at Seabury; three no’s. Dashing to the office, I printed off handouts for tomorrow’s class. I casually glance into my desk drawer (translation: “I rummage furiously through my desk drawer in desperation”) when—surprise!—there’s my trusty Torx. It was some other screwdriver that security nabbed.
AirPort installed, Torx coming with me to Denver just in case (in checked baggage), time to pack my bags and go to sleep.
Posted by AKMA at October 8, 2002 09:35 PM