Tornado & iMac death

[RogerAS]

Greetings all,

Well our 1999 model iMac died from apparent motherboard failure last week. Luckily the hard drive survived, and is in a new external enclosure. We bought a G4 iBook 14" to replace it (iMac) off eBay. The ad promised it was like new, and it looks it, but the ethernet port is fried and we now have to use a wireless router to hook up to the wildblue sattelite modem. I just thought it was slow and glitchy before! Yuck!

On top of all the other crap there was a real serious event here a week ago Tuesday. An F4 tornado came through the town where I work, Mountain View, AR, and destroyed a good deal of stuff. The power was off for a week+ so I haven't worked at all. Oh yeah, it took all cell service with it too.

The tornado was the second longest tracked ever for Arkansas, only surpassed by one in 1950, staying on the ground for 123 miles and claiming 15 lives.

Below are pictures I took the morning after, and it was SNOWING. It had been 75° F the afternoon before.

I now have the flu and can't even keep wood in the furnace, much less go back to work. I just keeps gettin' better and better.

[Nil]

Hi Roger,

Those pics make me grateful I live in the middle of nowhere(TM), not even tornadoes come around. I've never seen one and don't mind keeping it that way.

You've probably thought of this, if the Mac has spare USB ports you could run a USB-Ethernet adapter. Just a thought anyway.

Good luck with getting your town back together.

[RogerAS]

Hey Nil,

Yep I have thought of the USB to ethernet adaptor. I'll get one in a day or two and try it out. I also have open firewire ports. Like I said, I'm home sick as a dog right now.

This tornado was a real oddity in may ways. The extremely long track and the speed it traveled. It sustained 60+ MPH over its life. There was bloody little time to take protective measures. The pictures above are of the medical complex, local hospital, 2 clinics and the chevy dealership. This was on the east end of town. Had it been just a little more west the death toll would have been much higher. I have video that I can't get into the computer just yet, which shows the damage much better. It's amazing more people were not killed. Only one of the fatalities was here in Mountain View.

I stood outside and watched the cloud, which was about 7 miles west of where I live. One could see the rotation of the entire cloud and the distictive "wall" characteristic of a supercell. The frequency of lightening was awesome. I estimate more than one strike per second. The effect of a quick strobe. I could feel the barometeric pressure drop. Our 2 cats left the house and didn't come home until the next morning. Count yourself lucky that you do not live where these things happen!

[wooferhound]

The same storm system eventually came through Alabama which killed 4 and injured 130 only 30 miles from here. Plus my XP operating system is not working like it used to and will probably need the drive wiped and a new installation of windows. Maybe it's time to try Linux, again? I tried Linux 10 years ago.

[pepa]

hi Rodger, thanks for posting the pictures. hope you get well soon. pepa

[Bruce S]

Roger;

 Home town is Poplar Bluff, Mo , wife's is Pocahontas,AR so we here in St.L were keeping a close eye ALL of that.

Sorry for the loss for those and hope you feel better soon.

Bruce s

 

[donald77777]

Man your lucky. When I was living in the country we had 4 tornados touch down for 5 minutes about 10 miles away from my house, and one was starting to form right over my house. Lucky the wind started to blow really hard and nothing formed.

[Mary B]

Mepis is a good linux distro. Mimics Windows somewhat.

[MattM]

You should try creating a new account on the machine and see if that clears it up first.  Malware digs deep into a machine and likes to live in a user's profile.  Once you figure out the places it hides you can keep it pretty well free of the crap, well except for boot sector stealth root kits.  But those are entirely different animals.  Reinstalling Windows doesn't even touch them...

[Bruce S]

MaryAlana;

  You are so correct :-) it will also reading the data on the XP partion :-)

works pretty good on older laptops too.

Cheers

Bruce S

[richhagen]

Roger, glad you are mostly OK except for the flu and computer problems - I've got computer issues too, I upgraded to Vista and have compatibility issues.  Thanks for sharing the photos, it looks like its going to take a bit of effort to get things cleaned up and put back together.  When I was a kid we had tornadoes come through the town I grew up in, terribly destructive storms, but now I live in the middle of a big city and we don't seem to get any too near here.  Rich

[elvin1949]

Rich

 Watch out for Murphy's law.

later

Elvin