More Widgets

You can find some additional widgets in the Developer folder of your HD. They're meant as examples, which means they don't do very much, but they're interesting to look at.

I saw somewhere that someone was indicating Quartz Extreme was not enabled by default in Tiger. I thought that sounded odd, so I dug through the Developer folder and found the Quartz Debug app in Developer/Applications/Performance Tools. Launched Quartz Debug and it reported Quartz Extreme was enabled.

So unless it didn't get enabled until I ran Quartz Debug, it was enabled by default on my install.

Finally, I gather I did an Upgrade install, which is not the same thing as Archive and Install. A&I is normally a "cleaner" install than an upgrade, and so there's less chance of any cruft from the previous install creating a problem in the new one. But so far I have no complaints.

Something I noticed in Finder is that in the Column view, the icons appear to be faded. Switching to list view or icon view shows them in all their normal hues.

TextEdit

TextEdit received some tweaks. Not a whole lot new, but a couple of things worth mentioning. There's a new drop-down list in the tool bar specifically for list styles. So if you're the enumerating type you might appreciate that. The Preferences window now has two tabs rather than a single pane as before. And Properties is now a feature of each document, with the emphasis on meta-data in Tiger. Properties are data about the document:

Sherlock

Sherlock is still present in 10.4. It seems to have received a minor update, listed as version 3.6.1 (176) versus version 3.6 (v168) in 10.3.9 on my iBook. Did you know there was a US Geological Survey Sherlock plug-in? It lists the last 7 days of earthquake activity. Click on one and it opens a pane below with more data from the survey. I hadn't noticed it before. Pretty cool!

Just noticed that Apple's Gadget font is nowhere to be found on my PowerMac, but it is on my iBook. That may have nothing to do with Tiger, but it seems a little odd to me.

Just Glad She's Okay

In a world where too many of these things end otherwise, the runaway bride is actually kind of good news.

The i of the Tiger

Yes, I do apologize for that. Plus, it's the second time I've used it, so that makes me a half-wit.

So far, as the man who fell out of the Empire State Building said as he passed each floor, so good.

As yesterday's little screen shot showed, it's running on my PowerMac G4 MDD. Not exactly the latest and greatest, but still pretty adequate.

I did my usual Archive and Install, though I don't recall that that is what the installation program called it. I think it said something about "upgrade." When the DVD mounted on the desktop and I launched the installer, the first thing it did was shut down and restart the machine from the DVD. I didn't time the installation, nor did I watch the screen because I took a nap in my recliner. (Why do you think they call it Laz-E-Boy?) I was awakened by the sound of the incredibly loud startup chord. I'm going to guess it took about 30 minutes to do the full install, but it's really just a guess.

The first glitch was that Safari wouldn't start. I received an alert from Saft, a Safari utility that adds functionality to the browser, (I just used the word "functionality." I feel like I need to wash my hands.) that it wouldn't work with this version of Safari. Which seemed odd since I thought this was the same version that was released with 10.3.9 a couple of weeks ago. But I didn't check version numbers. Normally you just click a button that says to run without Saft and away you go. Not so this time, I had to force-quit Safari. I launched OmniWeb and downloaded the latest version of Saft I could find, re-installed and had the same problem. So I just removed Saft from the Input Managers folder and Safari works just fine again.

I have Apple's Remote Desktop 1.2, and that doesn't seem compatible with 10.4 either. I'll have to either run it from a Panther partition when I need to work on my parents' machine, or buy the newest version from Apple.

When I tired of playing around with the Mac last night, I tried to put it to sleep and experienced the same problem I had before when the SanDisk media reader was plugged into the USB 2.0 hub; it dimmed the display but the fans kept running and I couldn't wake it from the keyboard. Only this time I had had the presence of mind to disconnect the SanDisk after I used it to grab that picture of the Tiger package, so this is a different, potentially worse, problem. I just shut it down and re-started this morning. Haven't tried to put it to sleep again yet.

Spotlight started indexing all my drives immediately. I headed out to pick up Caitie and go to taekwondo and by the time we returned about three hours later, it had been finished for some time. I have about 180GB of crap on three volumes. I did just a couple of cursory searches, and it seems to work just as well as everyone else is saying. I'll play with it some more and see what I think.

iChat works fine. Haven't had a chance to try the new H.264 codec yet, but I chatted with my parents with no difficulty at all. I don't have a Jabber account and don't know how to get one or why I'd want one, so I can't offer any comments on that. One annoyance was that somehow in the Accessibility system preference the toggle to flash the screen when an alert sounded had been set, and I only noticed it when my son started IM'ing me and the screen kept flashing. I thought it was a preference in iChat, but I sure as hell couldn't find one. Then I recalled the Accessibility control panel and tried that. Sure enough, there it was.

I upgraded QuickTime 7 to QuickTime 7 Pro for the usual $29.00 plus tax. Normally I select Print on the invoice page and then Save as PDF, but there's now a nice PDF button in the Print dialog that includes an option to "Save as PDF to Web Receipts folder" (or words to that effect). I believe this same feature was offered under Panther, but it required some action on my part to activate it and I never did get around to it.

QuickTime 7 Pro offers the ability to record video from any attached DV device (iSight, in my case), directly from QuickTime Player. That works pretty well and I suspect that, along with widespread deployment of the H.264 codec, will hasten the arrival of video-blogging. How long before Apple includes a version of QuickTime in the new iPods with color displays capable of playing back H.264 video - it'll be podcasting with video.

I played with Dashboard a bit. It took me a while to figure out how to change my weather location. There's a little "i" in the lower right corner that you click to flip the widget to change any settings that are user selected. Downloaded the widgets for Delicious Library and Wikipedia, but haven't really done much more with them yet. They sure are pretty though.

I launched the Dictionary app, and that looks pretty nice. I suspect this means I won't be using OmniDictionary anymore, but I haven't made up my mind about that yet. Some time ago, I chose not to keep a local archive of my iDisk permanently on my desktop. I may choose to do that now so Spotlight can index that volume and I'll be able to have Spotlight search all of Groundhog Day, and its predecessor Time's Shadow, at least since it appeared on .Mac in 2002. That'll be pretty nice, in an ego-centric kind of way.

That's where we're at for the moment. I'm going to keep Panther on my iBook for the time being so I have a machine I can easily turn to to run Remote Desktop for my parents. There are plenty of people with better reports about Tiger all over the web. Siracusa's over at Ars Technica made my eyes go into gimbal lock, but you may find his style of writing more scintillating than I do. Gruber over at Daring Fireball will probably have a more easily digested close look at Tiger.

I've got Caitie with me this weekend, and she has a full agenda for us. We've got the usual ball-busting Saturday morning black belt class, which I'm not looking forward to very much since I'm already more sore than usual for some reason; and I stayed up much too late playing with this new OS. Then we're going to a World of Nations festival in downtown Jax. Tomorrow there's a fair being put on by a local Catholic church she wants to go to, along with the usual chores and stuff. So I don't expect I'll be doing anything terribly in-depth on the Mac. Not that that's a bad thing.

More later, maybe.

Just Another Cat Post

For Britt Blaser

He's got a good post up. You may recall I mentioned Viktor Frankl in the first iteration of their exchange. Britt's got some excellent quotations in his post. Thought he might appreciate this, vis a vis the lamentable Mr. Jarvis:

Folly, thou conquerest, and I must yield!
Against stupidity the very gods
Themselves contend in vain. Exalted reason,
Resplendent daughter of the head divine,
Wise foundress of the system of the world,
Guide of the stars, who art thou then if thou,
Bound to the tail of folly's uncurbed steed,
Must, vainly shrieking with the drunken crowd,
Eyes open, plunge down headlong in the abyss.
Accursed, who striveth after noble ends,
And with deliberate wisdom forms his plans!
To the fool-king belongs the world.

Friedrich Schiller

The Maid of Orleans, Act iii, Scene 6

Alternatively, a little Heraclitus:

What is not yet known
those blinded by bad faith
can never learn.

Fragment 116, translated by Brooks Haxton.

Not a Morning Person?

Yesterday's was not one of my better posts, though that can probably be said for nearly all of my posts. I get up in the morning, wake up the Mac, and peruse the latest pearls of wisdom that have fallen like dew drops from the fingertips of those who "get it," the daily commuters aboard the "clue-train." And more often than is healthy, the ol' throbbing vein in the temple starts up. (That's only a slight exaggeration.)

Yesterday's included, among others, this Virginia Postrel person's revised opinion of the iPod because of its rechargeable battery. It's a bad design because of the battery! She writes, "They're beyond terrible, and Apple won't replace them." It's clear she didn't even read the FAQ she pointed to, because that's patently false. Apple should sue her! (Doc Searls links to this tripe because Postrel is an A-Lister (and a media elite), and because she offers something disparaging about the iPod, one of Doc's latest pet peeves. "Silos bad. Flat world good.") Of course Postrel is wrong about Apple not replacing the battery, and the video she links to is so last year, in addition to being just wrong. All rechargeable batteries fail eventually. The virtue of rechargeable batteries is that they don't fill up landfills as quickly as disposable ones do. One wonders what Postrel thinks of the design of her vibrator and its disposable batteries? (Am I allowed to say that about an A-lister?) Oh, wait, yeah, she's okay with disposables, as she tells us. What car of the Clue Train™ do you suppose she's riding in?

But I didn't want to complain about the beautiful people talking about themselves and Paris in the Springtime; and I really don't wish to turn them into my own enemy, though I think that probably already happened a long time ago. Instead I wanted to mention something I've noticed lately. Since I started going to TKD classes more frequently at night, I've had less time in the evening to do whatever it is I do here. And I find I also get up later in the morning, often accompanied by various aches and pains that weren't there the previous morning, but that's another story. Plus, I do 20 minutes of sitting every morning, probably to keep my blood pressure under control after reading all the startling revelations the weblog-elites have deigned to grace us with. So I don't have as much time in the morning to do whatever it is I do here either. (Mostly bitching about other people, it appears. Hey, it worked for Jeff Jarvis. Maybe that should be my new tag-line.)

I've considered creating an Applescript that will just write random posts with the appropriate buzzwords in them like tipping point, emergent, disintermediation, long tail, flat world, Clue Train™, smart mob, get it, etc, etc, etc. along with random links to the A-listers, and leave it at that. It'd be just as good as most of the crap that's out there. Remember Strugeon's Law: 90% of everything is crap. Including the iPod.

What's weird is, my brain goes on composing posts as I'm driving to work. I can't claim I'm doing it, mostly I'm just watching my brain do it. Where it comes from, I have no idea. They are some of the best posts I've never written, which is probably the lamest thing I've ever written, but I do think they're quite good. But somehow, by the time I've climbed the stairs to my office, and Windows 2000 has reminded of the day of digital drudgery I have to look forward to, all those wonderful thoughts have evaporated. I've tried to capture them in the iBook while I'm waiting for the interminable log-in to complete, but they're never the same thing.

So, somehow I have to become accustomed to this different routine. I've thought about talking into a voice recorder while driving to work, but I suspect that would interfere with whatever is going on in my head writing these really cool posts about life. Frankly, even the act of typing them into the keyboard gets in the way as part of my brain keeps noticing my typographical errors (except the ones it misses). But the idea of talking to myself in the car while trying to drive just feels too weird.

So, maybe it's all just an illusion anyway, and the crap I compose in my head just sounds great because I'm still half asleep and the only thing it has to compete with are the strings of expletives I imagine shouting out to my fellow commuters and their commendably safe driving habits.

Anyway, if you're wondering why you aren't getting the same level of quality exposition you've been accustomed to here (there's ego for you), this has been part of the reason. I'll try to find a way to do better, so I'm not just bitching about all the idiots who are allowed to have a computer and an internet connection.

And, for the record, no, I'm emphatically not a morning person.

Enemies

In the competition for rank in the hierarchy, cultures often impose social constraints on the acceptable activities one may engage in while seeking advantage over one's fellow. These constraints are only as effective as there are consequences to violating them. Of late, it would appear there are very few actual consequences anymore, apart from outright fraud (and even a good deal of that is tolerated); perhaps because more people perceive the opportunity to advance themselves in the relative disorder of this period of technological transition. As a result, egocentric self-promotion has actually been elevated into something of a desirable skill, and the people who practice it are held in some esteem, perhaps by those who wish to benefit themselves in some reciprocity of relationship.

Nevertheless, the old strategies remain and are often employed to good effect even by those who are shameless in their self-worship. One of the oldest and most universal of these is the identification of enemies to warn against and damn. This one is exploited almost universally in the "blogosphere," where the range of dangerous threats to progress, security, equality, and good taste covers the spectrum of human behavior.

So-called "mainstream media" or "old media" or "journalists" have been a favorite enemy of the attention-seeking, hierarchy-climbers for some time. This was an inspired choice because it allowed the attention seeking to exploit the attention-directing mechanisms of the very thing it railed against to attract more attention to them. But social organisms are learning organisms and many of them have learned, "If you can't beat 'em - join 'em!"

I also wish to point out the strategy of the clever contrarian who takes a popular, successful figure or group and turns it into an enemy. There's something about us that loves heroes; but loves even more believing that all our heroes have feet of clay, or worse, and takes no small measure of delight in having them exposed. In truth, all men have feet of clay. A fact the attention-seeking would probably do well to bear in mind; though I suppose one seldom sees one's feet when one's attention is firmly fixed on one's rightful place above where one happens to be right now, and so one forgets. Out of sight - out of mind.

In any event, this makes the world a confusing place where everything bad is good for you, and everything good is really bad. At least it is if you confuse attention and the attention-seeking with authority. And the attention-seeking will be at pains to explain to you why this state of affairs is a good thing.

Me? I'm not so certain. But then, I'm an authority on nothing and I don't require your attention. Recall too, that the finger is not the moon, and I'm giving you all the finger.

Ego

One of the "blogosphere's" largest egos, the eternally attention-seeking, self-aggrandizing (through feigned self-deprecation) Jeff Jarvis is insulted by a post from Britt Blazer.

Oh happy day.

For my money, Britt Blazer's analysis is spot on. Jarvis knows that whenever he throws red-meat to the hate crowd he gets a big dose of validation and copious amounts of dopamine to flood his eager receptors.

You can read what the pissing contest is about yourself, if you're so inclined. I wouldn't blame you if you felt it wasn't worth your time, because it really isn't.

Jarvis fails to realize that by indulging his hatred he comes ever closer to becoming a part of the very thing he hates. He may not board a plane and commit mass murder with it, but his ceaseless exultation of his hatred and his relentless efforts in self-justification and rationalization helps others to hate as well; and one day, some of them may commit mass murder because of it. Nothing good ever comes of hate. But there are plenty of people who don't, or won't, believe that. More, it seems, every day.

No one needs to humanize the terrorists. We need to understand that they already are.

Jarvis, the supposedly Christian religious person, ought to review that part about loving thy enemies. At the very least, he might read Viktor Frankl and find out how a Jew and a survivor of the Holocaust could find it within him not to hate his enemies.

If nothing else, he might consider Britt's post a manifestation of the self-correcting nature of the blogosphere:

"Did some people have to say they were wrong? Yes, they did. And if they didn't, they'll have credibility problems the next time they go berserk on something. I do believe it's self-correcting."

Sucking Up

Tell me Business Week doesn't know how to stroke the titanic egos of bloggers.

Why they chose to do so is left as an exercise for the non-self-deluded.

The Cat's Out of the Bag

I'm sure someone has already used it, but it was the best non-explicitly "Tiger" reference to the release of Mac OS 10.4 I could think of just now. Damien Barrett brilliantly referenced Calvin and Hobbes. I'm angrily envious.

Reports are flowing in from around the world that Tiger has shipped. I received word in this morning in coded message, "The rabbit has lost his spectacles. The rabbit has lost his spectacles."

I ordered my copy today from the Apple Store. I could have gone with Amazon and done the rebate thing, but screw it. I also note that the Education Store still has the good deal discount of $69.00!

Now I'm thinking about what new piece of hardware I want to get so I can use all the bells and whistles. I went ahead and ordered the OS because I can't afford a new machine right now, but perhaps soon. For now, I want to try out the H264 codec. That will require someone else who has Tiger and an iSight as well ( *cough* Mark *cough*). It'll be a little while before we can get it onto Mom and Dad's eMac.

I eagerly await its arrival. I'll be listening to Survivor's The i of the Tiger all week.

Employees Meeting

One of my other brothers, Eric, the rocket scientist, also alerted me by means of electronic mail that Bruce Springsteen will be appearing on VH-1 tomorrow night at 10:00 PM EDT in an edition of their Storytellers series.

The CNN report is here. An excerpt:

His story of Spring-zophrenia -- how the "holier-than-thou" Bruce, the blue-collar patron saint of the downtrodden, must co-exist with the guy who enjoys a few drinks in roadside strip joints -- was worthy of an HBO comedy special.

"Bruce does not even know I'm missing," he assured them. "He is at home right now, doing good deeds."

I know it makes me sound terribly unenlightened, but that's my kind of guy. This will be one of those occasions when I will wish I had a Tivo.

Middle Names

My brother Mark, ever alert and faithful reader that he is, notified me by means of electronic mail that there is indeed support for a middle initial in Address Book! One simply has to look under the Card menu, and select the Add Field menu item, where one finds a Middle Initial option.

I am relieved and pleased.

But I went ahead and rebuilt the database anyway, just because I'm stubborn. Part of the problem was making text more readable for my dad. I should have explored this from the beginning instead of simply relying on Helvetica and then having Dad change the size and make it bold. This time around I settled on Gadget 12, which is big enough and bold enough to be easily readable for him.

No Middle Name

I did a little research trying to resolve the AppleWorks database flakiness my dad's WW II veterans database is exhibiting, and discovered this is not an unheard-of problem in AppleWorks. Rather than try to continue screwing around with AppleWorks weirdness, I figured I'd just use Palm Desktop to manage the list of names. Well, guess why that won't work? It doesn't support middle names or middle initials.

In fact, neither does Address Book or Entourage or any of the other apps I downloaded via Version Tracker. I guess middle initials are deprecated in this release of Identity 1.x. They're kind of important because it distinguishes between John P. Doe and John Q. Doe when you're trying to make sure everyone gets the recognition they deserve on the memorial.

Which points out another bothersome fact: There are no simple flat-file database applications for Mac OS X anymore (if there ever were). I don't need something like FileMaker with its multi-hundred dollar, fully-relational price tag. I need something like QuickFile on the old Apple II, which I think was even the antecedent to what eventually became AppleWorks.

Sure, we can use a spreadsheet, but we need to export the list to a text file that resembles what a printed name would look like, which means moving each text field to the left to create a full name. Plus sorting can really mangle your data if you're not careful in a spreadsheet. I can think of a half a dozen other solutions as well, but this needs to be something simple so my father can use it, and something I can throw together in an hour, so it's not going to be something I create in Tinderbox or with MySQL, or SuperCard, or Real Basic, even if I owned the last two, or grokked the second one.

I guess I'm going to go back and try to re-create the database in AppleWorks. I think that I can avoid whatever introduced the corruption by building it from the ground up with what we eventually came to as defaults for fonts, styles, reports and column positions, over a number of iterations in the original database. I suspect somewhere in changing a font, a style or a size, or the position of a column in List view, we introduced some corruption. Hopefully that can be avoided if I can create the database with the appropriate formatting, so all we're doing is adding and deleting records, sorting and printing reports.

But it seems to me there's a small market opportunity for a competent flat-file database application for people who want to manage lists with flexible reporting capabilities.

Attention-Seeking Behavior

Maybe she should have just started a weblog...

Name Dropping

While I can't compete with the likes of Robert Scoble in the intense online competition for name-dropping, I think this makes for a moderately amusing anecdote with a big name attached to it.

As regular readers may know (insert obligatory reference: "...all x of you..."), I grew up in a small town in upstate New York called Canastota. We had a pretty small high school, there were about 150 people in my graduating class, so it's pretty safe to say everyone pretty much knew everyone else in high school, regardless of your grade.

The other day I was chatting with my parents and they mentioned that they happened to run into someone at the doctor's office who asked about me. Turns out it was Barb Giambastiani. I have to admit I was rather tickled to hear that she remembered me, because I certainly remember her! She was a year ahead of me, but she was quite attractive and the object of my attention for a while. Nothing ever came of it, which is pretty much the story of my entire high school experience vis a vis, objects of my attention. So I hope you can appreciate how flattered I was that she remembered me!

Her father was a ham radio operator, and he administered one of my tests for my Novice Class license. I want to say it was the code test, but I seem to recall we drove somewhere to take that one. It may have been the written portion, or maybe it was just a practice test. My Uncle Bob was helping me get my license and he brought me down to the village to meet with Mr. Giambastiani one evening.

So, what's the "big name" I can drop in all this? Well, Barb has two older brothers, neither of whom I ever really knew, but both of whom, like me, attended the Naval Academy.

One of them is Admiral Ed Giambastiani. You can read about him here. Needless to say, his navy career went quite a bit further than mine. Like all Canastotans though, I'm quite proud of him. That's about as big a name as I can drop these days. And while I think it's very cool that Ed's gone so far in his career, I think it's far cooler that his sister remembered me!

Prolific

Sailor Jack (aka "Dad") is quite the prolific old 'blogger. And he's done it for the last couple of days without any help from me! He's quite the wit, too!

I've still got to get him a better application. Site Studio has been behaving in ways I don't understand, and not always consistently at that. Pascale has recommended Blogger, but I can't find a great deal of information on the web from people using Blogger with .Mac, and I'm loath to register with some site just to see if their application will do what I want. I may take another look at Radio, as that would be a more familiar environment for my father and it may afford him some other features he's looking for. I hope to get through a more thorough review over the weekend.

I'm also investigating some strange behavior in the AppleWorks database I set up for him. Very frustrating because I've never had any problems from AppleWorks before. It's always "just worked." This is a formatting issue in List view. I can make text in one field bold, but when I click out of the field it reverts to plain. Dad likes it bold because it's easier to see. If nothing else, I'll export the database to text and try to re-import it in a new database. It's been a while since I've used the database function in AW, but I wrote a pretty cool checkbook application in it once upon a time, so it's not like I'm unfamiliar with it.

It's kind of fun to try to figure these things out, but it can get a little frustrating when somebody else is kind of counting on these things to work, and then then don't.

Not Paying Attention

Sometimes you know when your life needs to change. Change comes from within. Change is hard. Change involves "loss" (of what was before), so we sometimes get stuck in denial.

Check out this search result.

I know, I should mind my own business.

The question is: What would you be willing to live for?

From time to time, the question comes up, "What would you be willing to die for?" as a means of taking stock of your life. As questions go, it's not particularly helpful. Everybody gets to die. Living is the hard part.

As answers go, you'd have a hard time finding a better one than this.

But It's a "Smart" Mob

"There's a whole group of them who think the way to get attention is to attack people who work for the big papers."

Why not? Worked for Jeff Jarvis. Who, to his everlasting delight I'm sure, is also quoted in the piece:

"Did some people go too far? Yes, they did," says veteran magazine journalist Jeff Jarvis, who blogs at BuzzMachine.com. "Did some people have to say they were wrong? Yes, they did. And if they didn't, they'll have credibility problems the next time they go berserk on something. I do believe it's self-correcting."

What was that part about credibility problems again?

Unwilling to Learn 2

Another facet of the role ego plays in learning from consequences is that it quite readily ascribes all positive consequences to its own actions. Everything "good" that happens is a result of some effort on our part. We "deserve" the good things that happen to us because we "earned" them.

Ego does not recognize the role of luck or good fortune. Ego does not acknowledge a random outcome of a disparate series of events. Ego is the master of its fate, the captain of its soul.

As a result, ego feels especially deserving of its "good" outcomes, and undeserving of its "bad" ones. It is the unique blindness of ego that turns that around for most "others," observing that "bad" outcomes for others are due to their lack of effort or lack of talent and ability, or unique insight; and that their good ones are the result of some rare luck, or other undeserved advantage.

Listen for this when you hear people describing those who "get it," and those who don't. And always wonder what it is those who "get it" may not be getting themselves.

Sensitivity Training

Being "sensitive" to an issue does not mean that you feel any criticism of you with respect to that issue is an unwarranted attack. Being "sensitive" to an issue, at least when it's being offered as a response to such criticism, usually means exhibiting empathy and understanding, and proactively addressing the potential pain you might inflict through your choices and actions. Acting in a way that demonstrates you are aware of how others feel, and that you respect them enough to acknowledge their feelings even as you do something that may arouse them.

Additionally, being "sensitive" to others does not require that you agree, endorse or otherwise subscribe to the reasons for others' feelings. No one else is responsible for my feelings.

Some people are "sensitive" only to the extent that they're acutely aware of their own feelings, not those of others.

Unwilling to Learn

Many was the time when I would say to my counselor, "If only someone had told me this a long time ago!"

To which she would only smile and ask, "Would you have listened?"

While it's difficult to be certain of such things, I happen to think I probably wouldn't have listened.

We all have problems with authority. Well, authority we don't recognize anyway. We have plenty of authorities we recognize, many of them unconsciously. But if someone tried to tell us something that was inconsistent with our beliefs about ourselves or the world, we'd probably reject that information. Most of the time, this is perfectly appropriate. Most of the time, people are trying to influence us with information to promote their own agendas. Sometimes we reject information because it may include an implicit message that we're not "okay," or that we're doing something "wrong." These are judgments, and we're even more inclined to reject those, especially from people we don't recognize as some kind of authority, and often even from those that we do.

Here is one of the most difficult lessons I still haven't learned as a parent. Somewhere in my belief system, a conditioned, habituated way of looking at and orienting myself toward the world, is some elevated belief in "reason," or "discourse." When my children would do something I didn't want them to do, I would usually get angry, yell at them, and then go into some lengthy lecture on why they shouldn't do what they did. I believed, and often act as though I still do, that all I had to do was simply explain to them why they shouldn't do what they did, and they'd learn and not repeat that behavior. It doesn't work that way. My kids are good kids, and they love me. They'd listen and they'd nod their heads and they'd even repeat back to me the phrases I was looking for to indicate they had gotten the message. But some time later, usually not very much later, they'd exhibit the same behavior. And so would I. Except I'd get a little madder.

Kids need explanations, but they don't learn from them. What kids learn from are consequences. So, as a parent, in order to help my children learn from their behavior, I had to learn to impose consequences. And boy is that a hard job! It's a lot of work enforcing those consequences, and it kind of goes against my image of myself as a "nice" guy.

Well, it turns out that as adults, we're not that much different from children. We can learn some abstract things through reason and discourse, but learning new behavior always involves dealing with consequences. The problem is, as adults, we're much more sophisticated in our beliefs and we go to great lengths to disguise the nature of consequences to ourselves.

Almost all negative consequences involve some form of loss, whether it's loss of money, loss of a job, loss of affection, loss of status, loss of health or loss of trust. We generally exhibit the same behavioral response to loss, and it closely follows the five stages of grief. The first stage is denial, and for many negative consequences, we simply engage in denial. We generally see the problem as residing in someone or something else, and not in ourselves. Sometimes if denial isn't enough, we'll indulge in anger or bargaining. We'll attack the person who is withholding what we want as a consequence of something we've done. Or we'll plead with them, promising to make changes, though we really won't. Why change if pleading works? We're very slow to change because we rely on habituated and conditioned behaviors to function in our very busy, complex lives. It's not because we're "bad" people, or stupid. We're merely ignorant, and not especially disposed to fully mindful, cognitively volitional behavior.

If our behavior is deficient enough in some particular way, the negative consequences will increase in number and frequency until they begin to overwhelm our capacity to cope with them through denial, anger and bargaining, which often leads to depression or despair. This is not to suggest that depression is the result of some behavioral deficiency; there are many causes of depression, only some of them are directly related to behavior. At least, that's what I believe based on what I've read.

But it's in this worst phase of coping with negative consequences where the opportunity for real change appears. Depression is where the ego is failing, and so it's possible for us to hear messages that ego kept us from hearing before. Where we begin to connect our behavior to its consequences. It's painful, but that's temporary. Then lots of new insights occur, and we may say things like, "I wish someone had told me this a long time ago!"

To which a wise teacher may only reply, "But would you have listened?"

Springsteen DVD

The Boss' 1992 MTV Unplugged concert is out on DVD and I picked it up yesterday as Caitie and I were out browsing and people-watching. I also happened to pick up Tina Turner's All the Best DVD of live performances. Caitie's no fan of either Bruce or Tina, but she let me watch three songs from Bruce. I'm looking forward to watching the whole thing when I get the chance.

There are several songs on the DVD that aren't on the CD from the same show. They are Local Hero, Growin' Up, The Big Muddy, 57 Channels (and Nothin' On), Glory Days and Roll of the Dice. I watched Roll of the Dice, and it was a good performance of a song I've never heard live before, but I think the audio could have been better. I'll give it another listen when I can crank it up a bit. Roll of the Dice has been one of the songs I turn to from time to time when I need a little Springsteen therapy, and this one will be a nice session when I need it.

10.3.9

Latest Panther update installed. No problems noted yet.

Flatland

Hierarchy is an inevitable consequence of different individuals having to work together in order to survive. Democracy is just a different form of hierarchy where something called "the majority" is given greater deference than "the minority."

There is no special virtue to "flatness," as any engineer (the kind that works with atoms, not bits) can tell you, it's all relative. Depending on the scale you're looking at, something can appear perfectly smooth, or like a craggy, pitted moonscape. It all depends on what you're looking for at the scale you're working in.

It's not that hierarchy is bad, but the competition for rank in the hierarchy is what seems to bring out the worst in us, or cause the greatest suffering.

This post is just a reaction to something Doc Searls has written about Tom Friedman's new book, The World is Flat, A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century. Flat world or not, I think it's instructive to note that a significant point in Doc's essay is that the Open Source and Free Software movements don't get enough credit from Friedman, with regard to being somehow responsible for this new, "flatter," century. Itself, this is a contention related to hierarchy. I suspect the irony is lost on nearly everyone. "Credit," is the idea that one is recognized for one's achievements, to which some authority is attached, and authority is how rank is determined in the hierarchy. This notion of insufficient "credit" being given to Doc's "group," was illuminating to me because I hadn't made the explicit connection between "credit," authority and hierarchy before; even though I did grasp the connection between money or wealth as liquid forms of authority, and the connection between "credit" and "money," is almost too obvious too miss.

Before anyone gets too excited or overheated about the discovery of "flatness," perhaps one should recall the virtues of all the previous achievements in "flatness," to include the United States of America, and all the communist states. Or perhaps we ought to just read Animal Farm again.

This is not to say that the "flattening" of the world Doc says Friedman describes is a "bad thing." It's neither good nor bad, it's just a consequence of many different contributing factors, and the ceaseless competition for rank in the hierarchy. The effort to take "credit" for some of those factors is just part of the same competition.

Personally, I won't get excited until we discover some way to flatten the hierarchy between "self" and "other" in the human soul.

Tiger Thoughts

I was kind of daydreaming today (probably some sort of self-soothing therapy in response to filling out tax forms) about what I might be able to do with Mac OS 10.4.

One thing that came to mind was kind of in the vein of the whole intimate planet conceit. With iChat AV's ability to support a 10-way full-duplex audio chat, together with some fancy use of the web, those of us poor, benighted souls who are locked into Apple's trunk or silo, whichever one traumatized you as a child, could have kind of a virtual conference! We could invite only 10 people, and they'd have to be Mac users of course. This would make us tres exclusive. Of course, that got me wondering if I knew five women Mac users... Let's see, Shelley, and Pascale, and... uh-oh! So we could even have an argument about gender balance!

Of course, we wouldn't be able to blog about the shitty way the airlines treated us, or airport security, or our fellow passengers (we're all for intimacy, just not too much intimacy, if you know what I mean) or how our hotel rooms sucked for lack of wi-fi, or, worse, charging for it!

We could offer snarky presentations, and comment on people who, unlike us, "don't get it." We could mention things like "the long tail," and "re-mix culture," and "disintermediation," and "tagging," and "authenticity" and be all... ooooh, shiny.... where was I? ...you know, emergent and shit. Blink! and there you are, we're having a conference! Just like all the really cool and important people.

And we could record the whole thing and release it as a podcast! Except if we did that, then maybe we might accomplish something, and what kind of a conference would that be? So maybe we nix the podcast idea.

And I hope someone steals my idea.

Because I really want to bitch about that too.

Death and Taxes...

Of the only two certain things in life, one is done for another year.

I don't mind paying taxes. It's the paperwork that makes me nuts.

This is another instance, though, when Mac OS X's ability to Save as PDF from the print dialog comes in very handy.

PalmOne Tungsten E2

The Palm Tungsten E2 is looking like a nice handheld. They're using flash memory now, so if your battery dies, you don't lose the contents of your PDA. It only took them 10 years to copy that feature of the Newton. But really, it's a nice safety feature.

The perfect PDA, for me, has yet to be built though many of Sony's Cliés came close. I'd like to see a 320x480 screen, audio record capability in addition to the feature set of the E2. If they could somehow graft the Newton's "charm" into such a device, I think it'd be just about perfect.

I've become better accommodated to my Clié TG50. I've learned to use the software Graffiti input area when I'm writing down appointments, and that's made it much more usable when I have one hand on the telephone.

Keep Those Cards and Letters Coming

Thanks to all the nice folks who sent my dad an e-mail on the return of Jack's Sea Cabin. He's tickled by the attention. We've been having our share of bumps in the road getting his new "workflow" ironed out. Not the least of which has been squirrelly behavior by OS X and the iDisk. Truthfully, I don't really understand how Site Studio uses the iDisk, so I don't know if it's more advantageous, or less, to create a local copy of the iDisk. When I had created one, I set it to sync manually but it somehow kept changing the setting to sync automatically. Then Finder wouldn't mount the damn thing, while Goliath had no problem doing so. It's probably like a new neural synapse, it takes a while before it's a reliable connection. (Of course it's not, but whatever.) Although I hated to do it, a restart restored the connection.

10.4

Like many Mac users, I'm looking forward to installing Mac OS 10.4 when it is officially available to users at large on the 29th of this month. One surprise already is that the formerly generous discount offered to government employees is significantly less generous this time. Whereas I was able to buy both Jaguar and Panther from the Federal Employee Store at about a 50% discount when they were released, Tiger is discounted less than 10%. At $107.10 from Apple, it's actually cheaper to buy it from Amazon (after the rebate), because Apple will charge sales tax. Other World Computing has a special offer for pre-orders of $95.00 without having to submit a rebate, but I haven't checked to see if they'll charge sales tax and shipping as well. Any way you slice it, it's going to cost about $30.00 more to upgrade this time around. Fortunately, I believe it's well worth the extra money.

Before leaving the subject of cost, I also note that less than two weeks after I bought my parents a .Mac account, Apple is offering a significant discount at the Apple Store: $69.00 instead of the usual $99.00. I realize I could have gone the Amazon route and saved the same amount of money, but I was paying a premium for instant gratification. So it goes in the era of digital consumerism.

Perhaps the most exciting new feature to me will be the H264 video codec available in iChat AV. Looking over the material at the Apple web site, it seems that my parents' 800MHz eMac will be able to take advantage of the higher quality video stream in our one-to-one chats, which will be very welcome. Neither I, nor my brother Mark have hardware sufficient to host a three or four-way video chat, and my parents' eMac isn't sufficient even as a participant. Sooooo... I guess there's another hardware upgrade I'll be able to rationalize. In the near term, though, the prospect of seeing my parents' faces more clearly is enough to get me excited about Tiger.

After the H264 video codec, the next "must-have" feature for me will be Spotlight. I'm a digital pack-rat, and anything the OS can do to help me make better use of all the data I've collected on various topics is welcome. The fact that it's available across the OS and in any application that uses the API means that it should be a consistent, easily mastered user interface - which means I'll be more likely to use it. Doesn't look great for my favorite utility LaunchBar, since Spotlight seems to be a superset of its features; but we'll see what Objective Development comes up with in response.

Automater is probably the next most intriguing new feature to me. I'll be anxious to see what I can make it do for me. Since my Macs are mostly hobby machines and not used in any sort of a "production" environment, I'm not sure I'll be able to make a great deal of use of it, but it appeals to my inner geek the way that all AppleScript utilities do.

There have been a number of reports of benchmark tests of various beta versions of 10.4 indicating that, once again, we should see a relative speed increase in overall system performance. That is to say, Apple's developers will once again be wringing more performance out of the hardware in addition to adding features to the OS. That's a pretty rare achievement in modern operating systems, but I think its a reflection of the advantages that accrue to Apple by having control over both the hardware and the software.

Dashboard looks cool. I may take a stab at creating a widget of my own at some point. It seems more like a bit of eye-candy than anything really essential to improving the platform. On the other hand, if it turns out that Dashboard is as useful and accessible as Hypercard was, I may get more excited about it. We'll see.

The improvements in Safari and Mail and the other installed apps will be welcome, and there's usually a small surprise here and there that makes playing with a new OS X release a fun experience. I rather expect we won't see another significant upgrade for at least two years or more. Apple has been able to take advantage of a lot of "low hanging fruit" in the transition from Puma to Tiger, along with a lot of focus on optimizing the various components of the OS for the PPC G4 and G5 processors. I'm not sure they'll be able to maintain that pace of improvement going forward, which is probably okay in a lot of respects. I'm sure Apple would like to continue the revenue stream from annual or 18 month OS releases, but I think that's going to be difficult while still delivering compelling new features. We shall see.

Hell is Other People

Nothing makes that sentiment clearer than airline travel. The deregulated airlines are compelled by free market forces to cram as many human bodies as they can possibly fit into the fuselage in order to try to make a profit and remain in business.

Americans are busy, important people with a lot of terribly important conferences to attend, and lots of work to do either on the way there or on the way back.

Airlines always lose your luggage.

So there's a recipe for suffering.

Because airlines always lose your luggage, the terribly important people always have a sensibly sized carry-on bag that, when suitably pounded, will fit in the overhead compartment above somebody else's seat, not their own. Because above their seat, they've stowed their electronic appendage, their laptop computer, for ready access to accomplish all the terribly important work they simply have to do during the flight.

So if you're one of the poor saps who gets to board the plane near the end, and you have a small backpack with your shaving gear and a change of clean underwear, a couple of magazines, a GameBoy and an iPod or CD player, you get to shove your bag under the seat in front of you because all the terribly important people who can't risk checking their luggage have occupied all the overhead bins with bags large enough to comfortably house a family of four. So your knees get to remain in their full upright and locked position for the duration of the flight because of the irksome behavior of all the self-evidently, self-important people who boarded before you.

And for God's sake! Don't you dare recline your seat back! You'll be invading the next passenger's space! Space they paid for! That whole reclining function? It's been deprecated in this release of Air Travel '05, so don't use it. Your seat must remain in the full upright and locked position along with your knees, so the terribly important people can accomplish their terribly important work; or enjoy the "space" they've rented for the duration of the flight. And if you do, well, then that person will just be burdened and suffering the whole time and will just have to come home and blog about your lack of consideration!

Personally, I'd like to require everyone to hold their breath for the duration of the flight. I really have no interest in sharing air molecules with that many people. That's to say nothing of people who are allowed to fly who aren't in perfect health or who don't have a 34-inch waist. And don't get me started on kids! They really ought to tighten up that whole no-fly list thing.

And by all means, be assertive! Be loud and obnoxious! Talk to yourself in a loud voice so everyone around you can hear you and wonder if you're off your meds today.

Airlines should be reserved for just the terribly important people who have terribly important conferences to attend where terribly important things are (not) accomplished (but talked about unto death), as they breathlessly relate in their terribly important weblogs, in between bitching about airport security, the flight, the passengers, the rental car or the lack of wi-fi in the hotel room.

The rest of you all can damn well ride the bus!

Yes, hell is other people.

In a bit of serendipitous coincidence, CNN ran a story about a survey of flyer attitudes, and one thing that irked many travelers is the amount of carry-on baggage carried on by their fellow travelers.

"It's not a bug. It's a feature!"

Tax day is this week and, procrastinator that I am, I am doing mine. I'm using TaxCut from H&R Block for the Mac. For reasons that have little to do with the main point of this story, I was doing the interview portion that determines if you're able to claim a child who doesn't live with you as a dependent. I answered all the questions truthfully, and at the end of the interview the program told me my child didn't qualify as my dependent. When I clicked the Next button to go to the next section of the program, it had my son listed as my dependent. This was very confusing.

So I called H&R Block yesterday to ask about this and to suggest it was a bug. If I didn't manually remove my son by selecting his name and hitting "Delete," it would compute my tax as if he were qualified to be my dependent, and that would be an incorrect result.

The TaxCut people told me it wasn't a bug, it just wasn't clear. I couldn't understand what wasn't clear, because, to me, it was clearly a bug.

Well, this morning, after sleeping on it, I think I understand that the interview is meant to answer the question for you whether your child can be claimed as a dependent, but then you are expected to use that information to delete your son manually, the program won't discount your child automatically. So, yeah, that wasn't very clear.

I wonder what other things the program expects me to do, apart from answering the questions on the interview?

Sounds

The first leg of my bike ride last Sunday was against the wind and the predominant sound was that of the wind in my ears. I could hear people and radios and engines and such, but the wind set the threshold below which I heard nothing.

On the way back, with the wind, I heard dozens and dozens of wind chimes.

Ride

Went on a bit of bike ride this morning. It was a beautiful morning for one. The air was cool, with a stiff breeze. The sun was warm and the cloudless sky was blue enough to break your heart.

Nothing

One of the few uses I make of my Newton MP 130 is a daily one. I use the timer to mark the end of my meditation. So every morning I turn it on and set the timer and then sit.

Well, the other morning I turned it on and was greeted with the little eclipse animation and, sure enough, we had an eclipse that day. I didn't see the eclipse, but it was a pleasant reminder of what a unique and charming device the Newton was, and still remains to many.

Fragments

Returned the Belkin USB 2.0 PCI card to Office Depot. Bought an Orange card for less money. The Orange people put their logo on a sticker over the controller, so I don't know whose it is. It works though. I also discovered that it might have been the SanDisk 8in1 media card reader that kept the computer from sleeping properly. If I leave that plugged into the Kensington hub, the computer goes into a persistent vegetative state (screen is dark, but fans keep turning, unresponsive to keyboard input) from which no recovery is possible, short of pulling the plug. (Tasteless, I know. But it's about all I'm going to offer about the recent national stupidity.) If I disconnect the media reader, sleep works as usual.

I've been helping my dad get back on the web with his own weblog again. Some of you may recall, he had one a few years ago at editthispage.com. But this time, I wanted to get him going again on something I felt a little more comfortable supporting. So I purchased a dot Mac account for him, and then I had to find a software application that would be simple to use, yet meet most of his needs. I think I may have found that, but I must say, there is nothing out there that is really simple to use.

He's using a Mac shareware application called Site Studio. If you google Site Studio, you'll find a lot of products with similar names, so I'm not sure this application will remain long with this appellation. (Sorry, I just couldn't resist. I suppose I could have done better, though.) Site Studio has no documentation, and while it is somewhat intuitive, it took a lot of time banging away on it trying to figure out how to make it work. But I think I've managed to figure out the major pieces, enough to get Dad back on the air. It doesn't support permalinks, that I can tell, so that's a deficiency. There may be a way around it, as I seem to recall reading somewhere in the support forum where there's something someone referred to as a two page weblog. I might guess that means a main index page where old entries scroll off, and an archival page where the permalinked entries remain. We'll keep playing with this. Since we're on dot Mac, if I ever find anything easier to use, it shouldn't be very difficult to transition to a different application. He's 78 years old, by the way. He's probably not the oldest blogger out there, but he's probably near the top of that list.

I took some time a couple of weekends ago to try to get my calendars and address books all in sync again. Somehow iSync, iCal and Address Book were managing to duplicate entries and to corrupt some Address Book entries, which is simply unsat. I used the iBook to clean up the Address Book and iCal, and then reset iSync by sync'ing everything to the iBook. So far, so good.

One of the problems was with iCal itself, and the ability to have different calendars. No mobile device that I possess supports multiple calendars, or even categories for different events. So I suspect an event would get sync'ed to a mobile device (either my phone or my Clié), but it would have no corresponding category to the one it came from in iCal. As a result, on the next sync, iCal would see the event on the handheld and think it was a new event and would sync it to the Home calendar which is where all events created on the handheld get sent to, unless you specify otherwise, thus duplicating the event in iCal. Since the Home calendar entry was now associated with the handheld entry, on the next sync, iCal would note the corresponding Home and handheld entries for a given event, but not associate them with the original calendar (not Home) the event started in, so it would then sync that event back to the handheld device - thus duplicating it on the handheld. On the next sync, I would have two events on the handheld, but only one associated with an event in Home in iCal, so another instance would be sync'ed back to iCal, creating three instances (two in Home and the original), and so on and so forth. On some events, especially birthdays, I would have eight or nine instances of the event both in iCal and on the handhelds!

The solution was to get rid of all the extraneous duplicate entries. The easiest way I found to do that, short of just starting over, is to click on the Show or Hide Search Results button at the bottom of iCal. With no search terms listed in the search field, it is simply a list of all the events in the calendar, regardless of which calendar they're technically "in." After scrubbing all the duplicates, I then changed all calendar entries to be just Home events, effectively giving me only one Calendar. Since the point of being able to snyc is to have all of one's schedule on one's handheld, and since the handheld doesn't support categories or different calendars for particular events, you effectively have only one calendar anyway. So far, over three or four sync evolutions, I haven't duplicated an event, except Mother's Day was duplicated on my Nokia. I'm not sure why yet, I'll have to keep an eye on it though. I don't know if my phone automatically "subscribes" to holidays over the air somehow. I don't think so, but I'm not sure what's going on yet. (Update: I just figured it out. In the iSync settings for the Nokia, I had it set to sync with every calendar in iCal, including US Holidays and that seems to be what is responsible for the duplication. I just unchecked that setting and that should be the end of that.)

Don't rely too much on my explanation for duplicate entries in iCal if you're having that problem. I may not have a clear idea of how the process works, but I could find no explanation anywhere else that accounted for the duplicated entries.

The problem I was having in Address Book was that sometimes the names of companies would become associated with individuals that had no affiliation with those companies. How that happens, I have no idea. I'm going to try and note when it happens again and see if I can't figure out what's going on. Right now it's clean, and it seems to have stayed that way over the last few syncs.

I also got Salling Clicker installed back on my Nokia and my Sony, and my Bluetooth module is now a permanent feature of my G4 MDD so I can control iTunes from anywhere in the apartment with either my phone or the Clié. The Clié is cool because it also has Sony's universal IR remote control software installed, so I can control the TV and iTunes with the Clié. Not so cool when you consider the fact that I watch very little television, but it is kind of fun to play with.

Kensington got back to me on the LEDs not lighting on the USB 2.0 hub, and they recommended I just return it to the store I bought it from. But since I bought it from Amazon months ago, and didn't bother to test it until recently, I'm not sure that's possible. Again, it seems to work, apart from the LEDs not lighting, so I'm not sure how inclined I am to pursue a warranty claim.

In other news, my brother the rocket scientist just got a nice promotion. Congratulations, Eric! (He's not really a rocket scientist. He's the technician that does the real grunt work that keeps the rocket scientists out of trouble. When they listen to him anyway. Lately he's been working on the ISS life support system, I hear.)

Sideways

Watched Sideways tonight. I'm sure it's some deficiency on my part, but why this movie garnered so much praise is a little bit beyond me. Virginia Madsen was the only redeeming feature. The best scene in the movie is the one between Giamatti and Madsen where he describes why he's so into Pinot Noir, and she explains what she finds in wine. I didn't expect a trite coupling after that, but the promise was never realized. I understand that's what the end of the movie is about, but how relentlessly downbeat can a comedy be? I mean if anti-depressants and counseling and fine wine aren't helping, what hope is there for the love of a good woman?

St. Johns Town Center

The St. Johns Town Center is some kind of consumer Mecca erected in St. Johns County, within easy driving distance of the more populated Duval County, but still conveniently located for the demographically wealthier residents of St Johns County.

I haven't done any research, but this thing looks a hell of a lot like a much smaller version I've been to in Virginia Beach. One of the laments I sometimes heard when I lived in Virginia Beach was that it didn't have a metropolitan "downtown" area. The area around Pembroke Mall, at the intersection of Virginia Beach Boulevard and Independence, was often considered to be the "notional" downtown. That intersection is famed as an example of really poor city planning. Acres and acres of nothing but unrelieved concrete and asphalt as far as the eye can see. Anyway, some developer came along and erected a hotel, parking garage, and a bunch of upscale stores and restaurants, and it's now "downtown" or "town center" for Virginia Beach.

Well, St Johns county has a lot in common with Princess Anne county, which is where Virginia Beach is. It's mostly a suburban "bedroom" and resort area, though St Johns is probably a lot more upscale than Princess Anne. But it doesn't, or didn't, have a "downtown" area either. Some kind of "urban-envy" I guess, being adjacent to genuine metropolitan urban centers like Jacksonville or Norfolk.

Well, I've been to St Johns Town Center twice now, and I'm pretty sure I'm never going back. If I do, I'm confident in saying it will be infrequently or under duress. As far as I'm concerned, the place is an unmitigated disaster. It's a monument to excessive American consumerism. Parking is a disaster, and they're probably going to have to build another road into the place. ("If you build it, they will add the infrastructure.")

The thing is enormous. They are erecting a hotel there, and some kind of housing development. I'm sure there are plans for more "stuff." But to visit the Apple Store, I had to park over a mile away from where the store is located near the "center" of Town Center. And did I mention the parking lots are a disaster? Nobody wants to park two miles from the center of the place, so everybody cruises the closer lots waiting for someone to leave, and it's a joke, or potentially an accident waiting to happen. Not a very "fun" experience. Just to avoid the whole throbbing vein the temple thing, I headed for the hinterlands. That pretty much ruled out getting my old iMac DV in to be repaired. It's got a video problem that will probably cost more to repair than the thing is worth, but I'm an irrational sentimentalist, what can I say? But the damn thing is pretty heavy and I wasn't going to lug it all the way to the Apple Store from a parking lot a bazillion miles away.

The store itself was packed, it was amazing. And LOUD! Too damn loud. Lots of staff on hand too. Didn't see anyone walk out with a CPU after being there for nearly an hour, but there sure were lots of people looking. I bought my cable and browsed, while Caitie played a game on an iMac at the kids' table.

I can get everything I need from a computer store online, and at less cost and far less inconvenience. I'll take the iMac to either Computer Kingdom or CompUSA to get repaired. And I'm going to steer well clear of the latest example of materialist excess that is the St Johns Town Center.

Spring Forward

"We need more power, Mr. Scott!"

Unfortunately, in addition to commanding my own imaginary starship, I am its chief engineer as well, I don't have some surly subservient mechanical genius to cater to my every whim; and there's just no easy way to re-route power from something as nonessential as life support, to the PowerMac G4. Such is the lot of an engineer: An endless stream of less than satisfying kludges and hacks, all to keep egotistical alpha-males in electrons.

I was trying to solve a number of issues this weekend, and as it turns out, none of the solutions quite solves anything, and some bring issues of their own. I now own a number of USB 2.0 peripherals. USB 2.0 is better than USB 1.1 by virtue of the mathematical fact that 2.0 > 1.1, and conventionally, we equate "greater" with "better," QED. Okay, a better reason is because USB 2.0 moves up to 480 million ethereal bits per second, which is quite a few more than USB 1.1's 12 million bits per second. This makes a few minutes difference when moving a few billion bits into something like my iPod Shuffle. My SanDisk ImageMate 8in1 card reader is USB 2.0 as well, so importing pictures into iPhoto will go more quickly. I know they're not great pictures, but at least I'm not wasting as much time! My 1GB Lexar JumpDrive Sport is a USB 2.0 device. And I have a Western Digital 160GB external HD that is USB 2.0. Finally, I have a Kensington USB 2.0 7-port hub, shaped like a silver dome. Kind of cool, guess. Up to now, the only computer I have that has USB 2.0 ports is my iBook, but I normally don't like to hang lots of things off of it, though I have been using those 2.0 devices on it enough to appreciate the utility of USB 2.0.

So the other night I made an impulse buy from the clearance shelf at Office Depot and paid too much for a Belkin USB 2.0 PCI card, which I've installed in my PowerMac G4. I also dropped by the Apple Store and bought a USB 2.0 cable for my iPod dock. I have to do some ridiculous cable shuffle when I want to sync the iPod with my iTunes library on the PowerMac, because iPods and iSight cameras don't seem to get along. I suspect there's "not enough power."

With all the pieces in hand, I set about making the PowerMac G4 MDD 867/DP a USB 2.0 machine. The Belkin card went in with no trouble. The first thing I connected was the iPod dock. The iPod sync'ed with iTunes just fine, but as I suspected, my 3G iPod does not recharge over USB 2.0. USB power is 5vdc, while Firewire is 12vdc. I could have bought one of those ugly USB 2.0/Firewire cables and tried to use the FW pigtail connected to the iPod's power adapter, but that would have been ugly, and it poses a power management issue of its own, as I'll get to later. But at least I can update the iPod's library without the hassle of unplugging the iSight. If I want to use it as an external HD, I'll just unplug the iSight and use the Firewire cable. Again, a kludge.

I plugged the Kensington hub into the other port, and then encountered the power problem. It's a powered hub, so it has its own brick that needs an outlet, and I had no more outlets in my surge suppressor, power-strip beneath the $30.00 folding table that passes as chic computing furniture at Dave Cave III. Using both hands, I counted the number of devices that already wanted a plug and came up with the number nine (Whew!). Counting the number of available outlets using the wall outlet and the surge suppressor revealed that number was nine as well. Hence, my dilemma.

Well, as it happens, there is another outlet in the adjacent wall to this corner of the cave. (You didn't know caves had corners? Learn something new every day, don't you?) It is conveniently located behind the little particle board and wood-grain paper artifact that passes for chic media shelving here in Dave Cave III. I relocated the brick for the Lexmark Z52 antique inkjet printer into that outlet, giving me one free plug on the surge supressor, into which I could insert the brick for the Kensington hub.

Now, I have a cheapo (Picking up a theme here, yet?) Belkin 7-port USB 1.1 hub that has served most of my USB needs, and it has seven little green LEDs that light up when its power adapter is connected. The Kensington hub has seven little rectangular "windows" in the "front" that seem to suggest they are there to allow LEDs to shine through. When I plugged in the power adapter, I got no glow. Bummer. Half the fun of owning electronics is the warm, empowering glow of a green LED. Right now I count fifteen green LEDs (sixteen when the iSight is on), two amber, one blue and one red on the desk in front of me. And that's without the Kensington trackball that's still awaiting its repair. So I plugged my iPod Shuffle in to see if it would work. Sure enough iTunes noted the presence of the Shuffle, but still no LED on the hub. I unplugged the power from the hub and the Shuffle stopped charging so I know the brick was providing power. So it appears I have a defective dome, at least in the pretty lights department. Sigh. I sent a note to Kensington, we'll see what, if anything, they have to say.

Putting the SanDisk media reader on the USB 2.0 bus allowed me to plug my Logitech 510MX mouse into the USB 1.1 hub, which allowed me to move the Belkin Bluetooth adapter to the right side of the keyboard hub, which allowed me to plug back in my Griffin PowerMate cool aluminum knobby thing, complete with pulsating blue LED. One last important thing to note, boys and girls: You don't want to mix your USB 2.0 and 1.1 devices on the same bus. That would force everybody to move at the speed of the 1.1 bus, negating the utility of 2.0.

Net-net, I think I would be somewhat ahead at this point, though I can't use the 160GB external HD without crawling beneath the $30.00 folding-table-cum-chic-computer-furniture to unplug, say, my Clié dock from the power strip. But I may just retire the dock anyway as I'm doing all my sync'ing to the iBook now, and I just use the dock to charge the Clié, which I can do using the sync cable connected to the iBook just as easily.

I would be somewhat ahead, except for one last little detail. With this Belkin USB 2.0 card installed, I can't put the computer to sleep. The screen dims, but the fans stay running, and then I can't wake the thing up. Apparently there are USB 2.0 chipsets that will allow sleep to work on a G4 MDD, this just doesn't happen to be one of them. So it's going back to Office Depot. There are kludges, and then there are things that just don't work.