The Macquarium.

I have never been a huge Mac fan, but I have always been fond of fish and older computer hardware.  As a result, ever since I was a teenager scouring the early days of the World Wide Web I have wanted to build my own Macquarium.  What is a Macquarium, you ask?  Simply put, it is a Mac which has been converted into a fish tank.  I have encountered many different types of Macquariums online, ranging from iMacs to Classics, but given that I am sentimental a Classic IIe has always been my preferred high tech fish bowl of choice.

Several years ago, my significant other and I decided to make this wet Mac dream a reality.  After locating a decent Macquarium shell in the form of a Classic IIe acquired from the Concordia University Journalism department, we then procrastinated for two years and two moves before actually putting our plan into action.  Actually, it wasn’t exactly our plan – we followed the time-honored steps laid out by Andy Ihnatko in his ‘The Original Macquarium Volume Four’ instructions.   All in all, the process took about three weeks from start to finish to complete, although things probably would have taken less time had we not run into a few stumbling blocks along the way.

Getting Started

The first part was the easiest – disassembling the Mac and taking out its digital guts and screen.  Our machine hadn’t been used in years, so there were no worries about charged capacitors lurking inside its silicon innards.  We had actually cleaned out the Mac just prior to our last move in a burst of inspiration that unfortunately didn’t last past the packing and unpacking phase.

With our computer free of actual computing components, we then moved on to shaving down the many mounting points found inside the computer case.  To do this, we used a Dremel tool, which kept snapping cutting discs but still managed to make short work of the old tan plastic.  The discs were especially effective at generating enough heat to create clouds of worrisomely toxic early-90’s plastic smoke, which most likely took a few years off of both of our lives.  We also had to cut an access port off in the top of the tank, and to do this we used a combination of the Dremel and a hacksaw blade.

Glass

I mentioned above that the Macquarium assembly process didn’t go quite as smooth as we had hoped.  The reason for this?  Glass.  In order to make a tank which fits flush against the case’s front opening, preserving the illusion that the computer screen still remains, it is necessary to custom build an angled glass tank that fits inside the unit.  At first, we went to Home Depot to have our glass cut, but while they were happy to do 90 degree corners for us, they refused to do any angled cuts.

This led my partner to buy a glass cutter and attempt to do the cuts on her own.  Given that the angles are shallow, the glass cutter was unable to provide the type of precision required to create the smooth lines needed to join up with the rest of the tank.  After going through several different pieces of glass that each ended up with small, leak-inducing chunks on their edges, we finally located a neighborhood glass and mirror shop.  We then discovered that glass is really cheap – even custom cut glass – and never looked back, having them cut the angles for us.  If anyone reading this is considering following in our footsteps, I cannot stress enough how inexpensive and easy it is to have a pro cut the glass for you.  Don’t do it yourself – it’s not worth it.

Around June, the dust under the screen of my Zune reached the level where it seriously impeded my ability to view video except in low-light conditions.  I called up Microsoft Zune support and after haggling with more than one representative (largely my fault, as I was unaware that dust under the screen was a valid warranty replacement claim), I was told that they would be sending me a box and a shipping label so that I could return my Zune to be serviced.  They also explained that it would most likely be replaced with a refurbished unit instead of actually being disassembled, cleaned and returned to me.

So I waited approximately 5 days, received my box, and then sent the Zune away to wherever Zunes go just before they end up in the big landfill in the sky.  This reset my waiting clock, and it was another 15 days before a shiny, new-to-me Zune was delivered back to my home.  Grumbling a bit, but feeling largely powerless I opened up the box and set about restoring both my music and my beloved Buffy the Vampire Slayer episodes to the unit.

Upon connecting it to the software on my PC, I discovered that the Zune that had been sent back to me was not exactly…fresh.  Browsing through it I discovered that there were a number of video files already sitting there on its hard drive.  Thinking that they were perhaps promotional vids from Microsoft, I simply deleted them and didn’t think too much about it until a few weeks later when I was listening to my music on random.  Suddenly, I was hit with a song that I hadn’t loaded onto the player, by a band I in fact despised.  Surprised, it took me a few seconds to realize that there must have been a number of music tracks also pre-installed on my supposedly refurbished Zune that I just hadn’t noticed when I first booted it up.

Later that day, I connected the device back to the software interface in order to delete the offending track.  Unfortunately, according to my PC, the song did not exist on my Zune hardware.  No matter how I searched for it, it just didn’t turn up.  A sinking feeling began to form in the pit of my stomach as it dawned on me that somehow, the OS on the Zune had become corrupted to the point where someone’s old music was now sharing the space with my own – old music that was completely impossible to remove.

One of the biggest challenges in learning to drive my Miata in a competitive setting has been adjusting to the fact that it is much, much smaller and lighter than anything I have ever driven before.  I grew up driving mostly large sedans and pickup trucks, and previous to this my autocrossing and ice racing experience was done behind the wheel of a 1991 BMW 5-Series sedan.  While the E34 is a capable platform, it weighs in the neighborhood of 3,400 lbs, which is a half ton more than my Miata.

The first few autocross events I attended in the new car saw me trying to fight the vehicle around the cones as though it were the same portly beast that I was accustomed to piloting.  My BMW had been all about controllable oversteer, with a lack of rear grip amplified by narrow tires and an abundance of torque from its inline 6.  This led me to develop a driving style that could perhaps best be described as ‘reactive wrestling’, and combined with my propensity to be abrupt rather than smooth with my throttle and steering inputs, I was unsettling the Miata on an almost constant basis.

After attending the 2 day Evolution Performance Driving School held at Devens in Massachusetts, I finally began to see that in order to wring better course times out of the Miata I would have to approach it much more delicately.  The car simply did not possess the power to cover up for my mistakes, and it wasn’t prone to linear oversteer but rather gripped until the last minute until it would abruptly step out of line thanks to the shorter wheelbase and Torsen rear differential.  This meant that I had to maximize my smoothness and maintain as much momentum as possible throughout the course.

The lightness of the car also lent itself to a very different approach when it came to course evaluation.  I found that I was often holding back in terms of acceleration during slaloms and straights instead of pushing the car to a high speed and then slowing down for corner entry.  The lightness continues to surprise me in terms of the vehicle’s overall dynamics.  It also took until very recently for me to trust that I could turn in much quicker than I had in the BMW and still clear the cones – leading to much faster times.

This coming weekend will be my first 2 days on a road course with the Miata, and I expect to learn even more about the vehicle during that time.  Does anyone other there have any tips or stories related to their own track experiences that might be helpful to me as a first-timer?

I just wanted to drop a quick update on my experiences with the Microsoft Zune 120.  Four months later, the amount of dust that has accumulated under the device’s screen has become intolerable, and I have decided to send it in.  Fortunately, Microsoft is willing to replace the unit free of charge because of this dust, and they sent me a packing label so that I could drop it off at the local UPS store, which I did on Monday.  It’s also possible to print the label out online.

It took approximately 10 days for the label to arrive from the date that I made the phone call, so I am wary of the amount of time the actual replacement process is going to take.  I will keep updating as to the speediness and quality of Microsoft’s customer service regarding this issue.  I will also take steps to protect my new Zune from suffering the same dusty fate.

Having abandoned satellite radio and requiring a new form of audio entertainment for my automobile, I decided to finally invest in a sizeable MP3 player. While I had owned a number of 2 gigabyte and smaller devices over the years, I knew that in order to match the depth and breadth of music that XM used to provide me with I would require something with a high capacity hard drive. I briefly investigated in-car storage options, thinking that they would be a more elegant solution than a portable unit, but I quickly discovered that this is one sector of the automotive audio market that seems to have died on the vine.

My remaining big-gig choices were either an iPod, a rather expensive and somewhat sketchy beta-version 100 gig no-name unit or a Microsoft Zune. As I didn’t trust the no-name brand in terms of support and have never been impressed with either iTunes or the interface that comes with an iPod, I made a deal with the corporate devil and embraced the Zune. As an aside, I find it vaguely unsettling that in order to usurp the iPod hegemony it is necessary to go with an ‘outsider’ device produced by probably the most faceless super-corporation of all time. How quickly rebellion has become commoditized, on both sides.

I chose the 120 gig version of the Zune, which came in black monolithic form from my local Best Buy, along with a charger and a docking kit. The screen is sufficiently large – 3.2 inches – and it weighs just under 5 ounces. I have no trouble slipping the unit in my pocket at the gym or placing it on a no-slip mat on the console of my car. The Zune uses a small, circular up / down / left / right pad at its base in order to navigate through onscreen menus, and a back and play / pause button are provided on either side.

For someone like me, one of the most crucial aspects of an mp3 player is just how easy it is to load music onto it. I would have preferred a simple drag-and-drop interface from Windows Explorer, similar to a portable hard drive. Unfortunately, Microsoft has not enabled the Zune with this type of functionality and forces users to go through their proprietary software interface. Basically, you configure it to look at where your mp3’s are stored on your hard drive and it loads them into its music manager. From there you can add albums and tracks from their online store and transfer all of your music to the device itself.

I quickly discovered that even loading a list of your tracks into the Zune software would alter the files on your hard drive, most irritatingly their ‘last modified on’ date, making them impossible to sort chronologically in Explorer from that point onward. To get around this, I created a specific folder where I kept the music I intended to transfer to the device, resulting in a temporary duplication of my music collection but keeping the source files safe from MS tampering.

Naturally, given the low-rent characteristics of the vehicle – it had been purchased as cheap winter transportation, although it was later converted into a fire-breathing sleeper-mobile – I was reluctant to invest too much money into a stereo system.

At first I made do with a portable MP3 player and a terribly inaccurate FM transmitter, but this was stolen during a smash and grab whilst the car was parked outside of my loft. Forced into reviewing my musical options, I made the plunge into the shiny new world of satellite radio.

In Canada, where I was living at the time, satellite radio had not yet been approved by our regulatory agency, the CRTC, which controls all television and radio broadcasts within the country. This meant that I had to make use of my American address to avail myself of a gray market XM account. The slick little device clipped onto my heater vent and used a powerful built-in transmitter to link up with my early 80’s FM head unit.

It didn’t take long for me to fall in love. XM had dedicated DJ’s who labored tirelessly, putting together excellent sets filled with tracks that were rarely if ever played on the tired terrestrial radio formats that had caused me to give up on that form of broadcasting. As someone who had been very active in college radio, I could appreciate the deep playlists, as well as the specialty channels devoted to old school hip hop and trance. That the entire thing was also commercial-free was a definite plus, and the monthly fee was low enough to be almost negligible.

There was simply no way to duplicate the breadth of musical offerings provided by my XM account, and I became an overnight evangelist for satellite radio. Soon enough, my friends and family were the recipients of accounts for birthdays and Christmas, and I spent many a happy road trip flipping back and forth between excellent tunes and NHL play-by-play.

It was with great sadness this past Fall that I received notification via email that what I had long feared as a result of the XM / Sirius merger had finally come to pass. Sirius took the lead role in the combined company’s programming and overnight 80% of my favorite musical channels had been wiped off the digital dial. Most of these had no replacement, with electronic music and hip hop suffering the most.

A few new rock stations appeared, but after a week of listening it became clear that the new entity that had absorbed both satellite competitors could not match the depth of XM’s previous playlists. Repeats abounded, as did single-artist channels that played nothing but AC/DC, Metallica, or Led Zeppelin 24 hours a day – kind of like a CD changer stuck on repeat.

There was of course an uproar amongst subscribers, but with little other option than to cancel our accounts, our hands were tied. XM and Sirius had made their decision to homogenize a large portion of their content in an effort to entice a demographic that was far more similar to listeners standard terrestrial services than the eclectic mix that had attracted me in the first place. That their executives talked openly of this decision and derided special interest ‘music snobs’ in the media only served to rub salt in the wound.

After careful consideration I decided that I wasn’t interested in paying for what essentially amounted to format-driven radio that I could get for free over the airwaves. I canceled my account and decided to move to an all-MP3 car stereo setup. After about a month of research, I ended up moving to the dark side and purchase a Microsoft Zune. I’ve detailed my experiences with the Zune in another post.

I regret no longer having access to the vast musical world that XM once offered me, and I pine for the chance to hear my favorite hockey announcers call a game while I am driving somewhere late at night. However, I know that what I really miss is something that I can never have again, as the XM that I knew and loved has been put out to pasture.

Has anyone else experienced the same sad satellite radio withdrawal that I have?