Mighty fine music

A couple months ago a friend left me a pair of Apple ProSpeakers, those little softball-sized clear plastic globe kinds The catch is, the speaker plug doesn't fit into the iBook's speaker plug. spaceroo believes there's an adaptor I need to plug it in, and since I don't know where the one which presumably came with the speakers might be, I went to an Apple reseller in Funan to buy one. After getting past the thick cluster of people -- a bank set up a deal where signing up for some financial services gets one an iBook, and there were a lot of people milling around picking up their computers and looking for accessories -- I found a clerk. I started to say, ``I got, from a friend, a pair of ProSpeakers --''

He said, ``And you have an older iBook or PowerBook you want to connect them to? You need an adaptor ... '' and he dashed off from behind the counter to find it. I suppose I'm not the first to have this problem. A woman took his place behind the sales counter, and after he spent a few minutes looking he came around to the front of the counter, and asked the woman who'd taken his place where to find it. Somehow that dance entertains me.

They determined they were out of the adaptor I needed, and the adaptor was more expensive than I'm willing to pay. If you want to get more than about US$10 out of me for a piece of boring plastic, it has to be a lot of boring plastic. A thingy to go from a USB port to a speaker plug won't cut it. The first clerk noted all that was really needed was some re-wiring of the plugs and while they couldn't do it there, there were, surely, other places even in the mall where you could get the wires re-jiggered cheap. I wasn't expecting that sort of talk from a store clerk. I also think I'm going to re-search the apartment and office for the piece that's missing, which shows what a low level of tolerance I have for fiddling around with cables, or hiring other people to do it.

Thinking about the ThunderCats DVDs -- which I didn't buy, preferring instead the first season of Land of the Lost -- do you suppose Wil Wheaton thought Snarf was annoying? I liked Snarf, but then I also liked Wesley Crusher. Snarfer, though, everybody found annoying, so there's no sense wondering about him.

Trivia: When Frederick Henry Harvey (of ``Harvey Girls'' fame) died in 1901, he and the Santa Fe Railroad owned and operated 15 hotels, 47 restaurants, and 30 dining cars. Source: The Story of American Railroads, Stewart H Holbrook.

Currently Reading: The Second Trip, Robert Silverberg. 1972 and does it ever show; a synthetic personality replacing that of a mindwiped artistic genius criminal has boring sex until traces of the wiped mind re-emerge and the story spirals into internal dialogues. Alarmingly, I can think of someone I used to know who reminds me of the mindwiped genius/criminal.