Computer Woes

This is a week of big computer overhauls in my household.

First, I have an ancient Mac I brought home from the lab. It is dedicated to writing my Dissertation, so I have stripped it of all the unneccessary stuff. It has Word for writing the thesis. It has Excel for typing in the data and CricketGraph III for graphing the data. It has JMP Start for statistics. It has Adobe Photoshop for making figures. It has PowerPoint also for making figures, but also for the final slide-show for the defense. It has, most importantly, Circadia, a Mac-only piece of software that has not been updated since 1982 but is still by far the bext program for analysis and graphing of time-series data from radiotelemetry experiments. That is the main reason I brought the Mac home. Today, I finally hooked it up online via broadband, so I can access my school e-mail (almost impossible to do via dial-up), as well as the CalcPad website I use for simple stats.

Second, I have nice Gateway PC, about three years old and quite nice, with huge memory. It is also, after four of us used it mainly for Internet browsing, chockful of viruses, adware and such stuff, which made it impossible to install broadband this morning. I have used AOL 5.0 as my browser (and the rest of the family used AOL 8.0) so far, doing all this blogging via dial-up. Today, 5.0 does not workk any more so I am on 8.0. I am busily saving all my files into one big foleder which I will save on a CD tomorrow morning. Once that is saved, I will erase WIN2000Me and install XP. Broadband should work then, and I will download Firefox 2.0 as my browser. I am assuming I will still be able to check my AOL e-mail, but I will gradually move my mail contacts to my new Gmail account.

Of course, I will have to re-install a bunch of stuff, e.g., Hallo/Picassa. I will also see what kind of software I can get from school for free. Hopefully, by Thursday night, this will all be accomplished and I can resume intense blogging, just before the Triangle Bloggers Conference, and before hosting the next Carnival of the Godless.

In the meantime I have added my old blogroll into the template of this blog, but instead of putting all the links here and making it long and slow, I placed a link to an external site where I deposited all the blogroll links. I hope that works. Looking at the blogroll, I realize that it contains blogs I have not visited in months, so I will have to check them out and see if I am still interested in keeping them on the roll. On the other hand I have recently discovered a number of good blogs, mostly related to science and skepticism, that deserve to be included. I will do the big overhaul of the blogroll some time next week, I guess.

Also, I am going to sign up for a couple of afternoon classes on html and website-building in March, so I can understand better what I am doing when I play with the template. Perhaps I can, then, make this blog look better and be more functional than it is now. Same goes for Circadiana.

So, come back in a couple of days and see how I am doing...night-night!

Update:
OK, a day later, nothing happened. After trying several times, I gave up on installing XP and re-installed ME from scratch. Broadband is still not working so this is dial-up AOL again. At least by installing the OS from scratch I got rid of a bunch of unneccessary stuff (and hopefully viruses, adware etc.), but some of the programs I remember having when I first bought the computer are now not on, e.g., MS Office!!! Grrrrrrr!