As I’ve noted, I’m a recent convert to the ways of the Mac, and I am becoming increasingly convinced that I waited far too long to join the club.

As I’m using the MBP as the lifeblood of my new law practice, knowing that I need to make sure I have a fall back of some sort in the event that the MBP needs to go into the shop, I’ve obviously been shopping around.

I know I could get a Mac Mini for a not-obscene price that would probably fit the bill, but I’m really trying to keep the cost to an absolute minimum, since the machine is likely to see only very minimal service.

It looks like the iMac I picked up yesterday may be a non-starter, simply due to the overall level of hassle it seems like it will be to get it usable, I’m trying to find another suitable used machine that’s on the relatively cheap.

My plan is to use an external hard drive with a duplicate copy of my MBP hard drive, made with SuperDuper, thanks to Bloy’s recommendation, and to use this alternate machine to continue my work during any absence of the MBP.

I’ve found a PowerMac G4, 500 MHz, 1GB of Ram, with OSX 10.4 for $100. It seems like it could be a viable option, within the price range I’d like, and that it could probably handle all I’d need it to for short periods of time. So, my questions are, 1.) Is it a good deal? and 2.) Is it a solid enough option for what I want it to do?

As always this Mac-neophyte thanks you veterans for your help.

The big moment occurred at 7:28 PM between mileposts 14.4 and 14.5 on I-71 North in Montgomery, Ohio.

Looks like we’ll be getting into Buffalo around 2:00 AM. Oversleeping sucks. :|

Mike Wiser e-mailed me last night with a stargazing query:

I don’t know what sort of view you have of the night sky at the moment, but if you’d got a good view, take a look at this. Jupiter’s bright at the moment. Tracing straight down from it, I hit the alpha star in Scorpius, which is flickering between red and blue, and seems brighter than I’m used to–though, admittedly, I don’t examine the sky often enough to really qualify even as a amateur in this anymore. I didn’t notice any alerts on spaceweather.com or on the near earth objects lists, so I was curious–can you see something unusual going on here, and if so do you have another resource you suggest I check to find out what’s going on? My brother and father say it’s been that way for a few days now, and that it appears to rotate in the night sky with the other stars, which would tend to argue against a comet…

I didn’t get a chance to look at it, as it was overcast last night. But I did do a little research. The alpha star in Scorpius is called Anatres. It’s normally the sixteenth brightest star in the night sky. Antares is classified as an irregular variable star, which means it has “variations in brightness [which] show no regular periodicity,” but I’m not sure if those variations would be substantial enough to explain the phenomenon Mike is describing.

A few days ago, Missouri State professor Jon Nance wrote in a newspaper column:

Antares’ core is hot enough to burn silicon into iron. But iron has the most stable nucleus of any element and is incapable of fueling any additional exothermic reaction. So a mass of inert iron is growing steadily in Antares’ core. Eventually, it must grow so large as to become incapable of supporting its own weight.

When that happens, Antares’ core will collapse in less than one minute into a black hole in space. A shock wave will propagate outward from that collapse and deposit so much energy in the star’s wispy outer layers that they will, for a few brief days, shine brightly enough to rival all other stars in the Milky Way combined. And then Antares will be gone — forever.

Antares’ end must come within the next million years, but we can’t tell when. Maybe it will be tonight.

What Professor Nance is describing is a supernova. If a supernova happens too close to our solar system, it could damage life on Earth — but according to Science News, a potential Antares supernova would be “too far away to harm Earth.” NASA confirms this: “at 500 light years it is a safe distance from Earth.”

Still, it would be close enough to cause an incredibly spectacular sky show. The last supernova in our galaxy, in 1604, caused a “previously unseen star” to suddenly become “brighter than all other stars” in the night sky — and it was 13,000 light-years away. Antares is 26 times closer than that.

Mind you, I’m not predicting that Antares is about to blow. But it sure would be interesting if it did. (Of course, if Antares is “about to blow,” that would actually mean it was about to blow 500 years ago, and only now is the light from that event reaching us.)

Margie Kieper e-mailed me just after noon today, alerting me that, at a press conference this morning about the Minneapolis bridge disaster, NTSB head Mark Rosenker said investigators are seeking “an opportunity to get up close and see how the metal separated… or was cut.” Huh? See for yourself at WCCO, or below:

Oddly, the media isn’t covering the part of Rosenker’s statement where he talked about the metal potentially being “cut.” I’m not sure if he is referring to possible sabotage, or to some sort of construction accident (i.e., accidental “cutting”), but either way, it’s surely newsworthy, no? Yet the articles about the press conference are pretty boilerplate. For example, the Star-Tribune says only:

NTSB investigators today will begin focusing on the north end of the bridge, he said. They have already concluded that the collapse probably did not occur on the south side.

The NTSB us hiring a pilot and helicopter to perform a high-resolution photographic inventory of everything in the area, including vehicles and debris.

Hmm.

How does Larry the Cable Guy get stuck next to the other two?

“I don’t know how to change a tire. Some people consider that a very important skill to have. I consider a AAA card a very important thing to have.” –Becky

After oversleeping a bit this morning (we’re going with “the baby was sleepy” as our excuse, though I think 3am blog debates may have had more to do with it), we’re finally en route to Buffalo, where we’ll visit Shannon, PJ and Logan for a few days before heading to my uncle & aunt’s cabin in the Adirondacks at the end of the week to visit them and my parents, who are driving up from Connecticut.

I guess I never really updated y’all on our summer travel plans, did I? (I’m sure you were all on the edge of your seats, waiting for the update.) Well, after asking for travel suggestions for this period of post-bar-exam freedom, and briefly dreaming about elaborate vacations to Banff, Iceland, New Zealand, etc., we realized we really just couldn’t afford such an expenditure, what with a baby on the way and all. We flirted with the idea of a weekend in Vegas, but we ultimately decided that a week-and-a-half with our friends in Denver, plus a week with friends and family in New York state, was enough of a vacation for now. And then maybe when we have more money someday, we’ll take our kid(s) to Iceland. :)

Anyway… as I mentioned yesterday, Becky’s car will hit 100,000 miles today. Looks like it’ll happen on I-71, somewhere on the northeastern suburbs of Cincinnati. This will actually be the second time I’ve been in a car that’s crossed the 100,000-mile barrier in Ohio: my parents’ old Dodge Aries hit 100,000 on I-40 in New Paris, OH, en route back from a family vacation to Illinois in 1992. (Yes, I’m bizarrely obsessed with arbitrary milestones like odometers rolling over to 100,000.)

Warning: contains vulgarity.

I figured it was timely. :)