December 18, 2010 by Tom Malaher.

Cleaning up the office a bit, came across a box full of Mac floppies, left over from my original Mac.

It was a “Fat Mac” Business Bundle, 512K RAM, 2 400K (single sided!) floppy drives, keyboard with numeric keypad (default keyboard had no numeric keypad). At the same time I got Macintosh Pascal and the Macintosh Programming Guidelines book (which was the size of a phone book and printed on similar low-grade thin paper).

Total cost: $3,512.25 in about 1986 (and that was the student discount price!) purchased from the University of Manitoba bookstore.

Here are some of the floppies.

Five of them likely came with the original machine.

The one labelled “Macintosh Plus System Tools” is from later (note that it says “double sided”) after I had upgraded the machine to a Mac Plus (swap out the system board and upgrade the floppies to double sided: 800K!).

Note the handwritten version numbers: Finder 5.1, System 3.0, and DAM 3.0, whatever the heck that was. Some disks were bootable (i.e. they had System and Finder on them) while others were not, so it was important to know which were which (”System and Macwrite Macpaint”) and what version they were (cf. my “NotUpd” notation on the Macwrite/paint disk and my “Upd” notation faintly visible on the Mac Pascal disk).

I wrote my thesis on this machine, using Word 3.0 for the Mac. I have the floppies somewhere, and was able to get the files off them, but I’ve been unable to reconstruct the text of the document, let alone the formatting. Luckily I have a nice hardcover version on the bookshelf.

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May 12, 2008 by Tom Malaher.

We’ve had a very snowy spring.

(This is last Friday, May the 9th!)

Hopefully the worst is over, we can stop snowshoeing…

… and we can get on to more normal spring activities, like watching the crocuses come up.

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April 22, 2007 by Tom Malaher.

One of the other good snowshoe trails in the Spray Valley is Rummel Lake. It’s not as official as the Chester, Sawmill, Burstall ones (yet), but it is very pretty and worthwhile. The view from the top of the second logging cutblock is amazing. At least 200 ° of panorama:

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April 16, 2007 by Tom Malaher.

Linda and I have been wanting to buy one of these from a bakery… then she found a recipe in Canadian Living magazine (source of many good recipes) and it seemed easy so we made it. Not only does it look great, it tastes even better.

And it’s dead easy, because you let the bread machine do the work on the dough. The egg wash makes it turn out a wonderful golden brown.

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April 14, 2007 by Tom Malaher.

This may be our last chance to get out to the mountains and do some activity in the snow. Things are melting pretty quickly. (In fact, it was raining when we got to the parking lot.)

We drove down to Peter Lougheed Provincial Park, and parked on the far side of Upper Kananaskis Lake, then snowshoed along the lake for 1.2 km, and 2.7 from there up to Rawson Lake.

Some people before us had built a little snowman:

Up at Rawson Lake, it was snowing (much better than rain), and the clouds were really low. But we could see little avalanches coming off the rock wall at the far end of the lake:

On the way out, the light changed and we got some great views across Upper Kananaskis Lake:

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March 31, 2007 by Tom Malaher.

There has been quite a bit of snow up in the Spray Lakes area. We decided to try the Chester Lake Snowshoe Trail. It was raining on the drive down Highway 40 towards Kananaskis, but it changed to snow as we started to ascend up the Smith-Dorrien road. By the time we got to the Chester Lake parking lot, it was dumping.

Here’s Linda standing in the snowshoe trail. You can see just how much snow there is piled up on either side:

The clouds parted briefly when we got to the lake, and we could see the surrounding mountains:

Another great day in the mountains!

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March 14, 2007 by Tom Malaher.

Linda and I just returned from a 3 week vacation in South Africa. We’re working on the Photo Album (took nearly 2GB of pictures: 589 in all, and we have to weed out the losers and put some commentary on the winners.)

In the meantime:

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May 22, 2006 by Tom Malaher.

Last fall Linda spent a bunch of time digging up and re-planting the tulip bulbs. This spring they came up…

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