Competing Messages: Voices in the Wilderness

I've been catching up with my RSS feeds in between doing chores and helping my neighbor.

Although I don't always agree with his analysis, and sometimes I'm a little put off by his style (Like that never happens to people who read GHD), I think John Robb remains one of the more realistic and lucid voices in assessing the course of international events.

Of course, John's analysis isn't terribly "optimistic," which doesn't sit well with the "shiny happy people."

Cheese Sandwich: Too Trivial?

Al Hawkins asks the question, "Is anything is too trivial for a blog post?" While I suppose it's possible that there are some things too trival, I haven't actually read any yet. He mentions yours truly as an example. I was impressed with Al's screencast Tinderbox tutorial. I had tried doing something similar some time ago for my father, but I found that the resulting movie essentially squeezed the entire screen into a small window, effectively making everything unreadable.

Well, different people have different approaches to using software, or different experiences as they use it. In my case, I had a biased belief that I understood how the software worked, so I just tried to use it the way I understood it, and the result was unsatisfactory. Al had a different understanding, and one that yielded a much better result. I suppose if I had RTFM (read the frickin' manual), I might have twigged to fixing the "camera" on a smaller portion of the screen. But why read the manual when I "know" how it's supposed to work!

For the record, I have a long history of knowing things that turn out to be completely wrong. Except everything I know right now, of course. ;~)

So, no, nothing is too trivial to write about. Not everything is going to be an epiphany for everyone, but that doesn't matter. Sometimes it's just enough to know you're not the only one trying to figure this thing out. Whether it's Snapz Pro (where's the Universal version?!), or Tinderbox (Universal version will happen, works great under Rosetta), or this mystery we take for granted called life.

Cheese Sandwich: Travel Notes

A few observations regarding my latest little adventure:

Virginia is a tobacco state. Hence, they still allow smoking in bars and restaurants, albeit in separate sections in the latter. I note this, not because I'm an anti-smoking, anti-smoker zealot, just because I felt surprised when I noticed the difference. I can sit next to someone who's smoking in a bar and carry on a pleasant conversation with them. I don't like the way my clothes smell the next morning, but my eyes don't water, and I don't gasp for breath like some people seem to do.

I used to think Japan forgot more about making quality automobiles than Detroit ever knew, but I may have to re-think that. The "mid-size" automobile Hertz rented me was a Mazda MPV. It has the shift on the steering column, which, ordinarily, is no big deal. But they designed it so that when the vehicle is in Drive, the handle is right in front of the volume control of the radio. Now, it's possible that I simply wasn't paying attention, and maybe one of those buttons on the steering wheel controlled the volume. But if not, it was a pretty brain-dead design decision. Plus, the car just felt "mushy," and the seats were too soft. I really enjoyed driving my Montero Sport when I got back, after five days in an MPV.

Hertz pretty much sucks as a car rental agency. Very surly counter attendant. They put some hold charge on your credit card that neither of the two previous car rental agencies I've used this year did. The surly attendant claimed, "We all do it." I think not. They told me the gas tank would be full and I was expected to return it that way. Well, it wasn't quite "full" when I got it. I took a picture of the gas gauge with my mobile phone in case I wanted to argue about it. As it turns out, I didn't have the time.

Norfolk International Airport pretty much sucks as an airport. Sucks out loud, actually.

I stayed at a Crowne Plaza hotel, which seems to place great marketing emphasis on sleep quality. Great bed. Incredibly noisy air conditioner. Go figure.

Nice bartender though.

Free wireless internet access was nice too. I was pretty busy most of the time, but I answered a couple of e-mails and did a video chat with my parents, so that was cool.

I do not miss at all the daily commute on I-264/I-64. Everyone thinks they're on the NASCAR circuit. I'm not a slow driver by any means, and those people scared me. I suppose any statistical analysis would probably show no greater percentage of vehicle accidents per mile of interstate between Jacksonville and Norfolk, but there always seemed to be a wreck of some kind every time I drove on 64/264.

The Tidewater Tides are now the Norfolk Tides and they play in a really sweet new ballpark down at the waterfront in downtown Norfolk. Easy access from I-264, apart from the wreck I encountered on the way there, and the construction delays I hit on the way back. As a "mandatory fun" exercise (It wasn't really. It was more just a good idea from one of our group), the ball game was a real treat, even though the Tides lost.

I had a fried Twinkie at the ball game. It seems you can't actually deep-fry a Twinkie. I'm told it simply disintegrates in the hot oil. The trick is to freeze it, put a stick in it, dip it in funnel cake batter, and deep fry that. A little powered sugar, and you're one delicious step closer to the grave!

I think the air quality is better here than there. It may have just been my proximity to the interstate.

While I'm typically an early riser, my normally sunny disposition doesn't usually make its appearance until after I've had a couple of diet cokes. I had a 7:00 a.m. flight out of Norfolk, so I was checking in at 6:00 a.m. I happened to be behind an older couple, and from their conversation and their baggage I gleaned that they had a child traveling with them. Well, the "kid" turned out to be some guy who appeared to be in his late 20s, taller than me, with a gut bigger than mine, wearing a t-shirt, shorts and a baseball cap, on backwards naturally, and chewing gum like a cow. None of which would have been particularly remarkable until he started giving his mother a bunch of crap. As far as family dynamics go, I realize that one often reaps what one sows; but I still had to contain a visceral urge to throw a hard right elbow across the bridge of his nose. Would have been tough, since he was taller than me; but that's what occurred to me as I stood there watching that pitiful excuse for a human being. I realize this is inconsistent with my Buddha nature, but there you go. Well, maybe the Buddha thought about punching a few people in the nose too.

It was nice to be able to buy a draft beer for $1.05. Killian's was $1.50. I suppose that's not that uncommon elsewhere, but when you live in a resort area, you pretty much have to put up with resort-area prices.

The business portion of this business trip was appropriately business-like, and about as exciting. Worth the trip though. I'm something of an independent operator down here, so it was good to get together with the rest of the team.

Anyway, one nice thing about business trips is coming home. Caught a major break on the short Southwest hop back to Jax: Had nobody in the middle seat. Not sure if it was because of my Jedi mind-skills, ("This is not the seat you're looking for..."), my ability to assiduously avoid eye-contact, the incredible powers of focus and concentration I was able to bring to bear while reading USAToday, or poor personal hygiene. Whatever the reason, it was a pleasant flight back home.

And it's great to be back.

Competing Messages: Seeing What We Want to See

Once in a while, on the rare occasion when I'm engaged by one of the people whose opinions I've criticized, I'm accused of simply "seeing what I want to see," and the discussion pretty much ends at that point.

I'm certain I have biases, and they affect how I perceive the world around me. I'm not certain that those biases are necessarily the product of some unconscious desire I have. I don't speak up because I "desire" conflict. I speak up because I want to see grandiose claims of some radical, and usually "desirable" change, challenged if the world as I perceive it does not support the claim.

Mac: .Mac iDisk Glitch

It seems something is awry in .Mac-land. I use the service. I like it. I'm sure others will use this as an opportunity to grind an axe. More power to them, but not me.

The problem manifests itself as an error message when you try to access your iDisk from the desktop. The solution is discussed in this thread at Apple's Support forums. In my case, I used the Finder=>Go=>Connect to Server=> http://17.250.248.77/(your username). You'll then be asked to authenticate your username and password, and your iDisk will mount as a server volume, which you can access as usual.

This may be a temporary work-around. I was reluctant to go in and edit my hosts file since whatever the current problem happens to be, I expect it will be corrected by Apple at some point fairly soon, and I'm not certain that I wouldn't have to then go in and edit the hosts file again to change it back.

For now, this works.

Cheese Sandwich: Unwinged

And we're back. Lots of stuff to do today and this weekend, and for the first half of next week too. But I hope to find some time to disturb the comfortable soon anyway.

Cheese Sandwich: Wingin' It

I am out of here for a few days. Business, not pleasure. Back on Friday, barring calamity.

Enjoy the peace and quiet.

Competing Messages: Any Last Requests?

This was brought to my attention by an e-mail correspondent. Tellingly, it appears in the "Fashion and Style" section of the NY Times. My correspondent quoted this paragraph:

The biggest change, Mr. Duffey said, is that as more families choose cremation — close to 70 percent in some parts of the West — services have become less somber because there is not a dead body present. “The body’s a downer, especially for boomers,” Mr. Duffey said. “If the body doesn’t have to be there, it frees us up to do what we want. They may want to have it in a country club or bar or their favorite restaurant. That’s where consumers want to go.”

"That's where consumers want to go."

Those crazy consumers! They're party animals, I tell you! Anything for a trip to the country club, or bar, or favorite restaurant!

I'm not sure what I think about that yet. I guess it's an example of "creating culture" in the marketplace. Now, I'm in favor of cremation, myself. But I wonder to what extent the absence of a body has to do with keeping mortality at arm's length? If there's no body, maybe they're not really dead? Maybe they're just going away on a long trip?

But I thought this little paragraph was interesting:

Funeral homes do not always appreciate competition from entrepreneurs, whom they may consider interlopers, said Bob Biggins, the president of the National Funeral Directors Association.

Even in death, there's an opportunity to make some money. Because if you don't, somebody else sure will. That's the core belief of the commercial culture, with competition as its chief organizing principle. And, in a way, it kind of makes some kind of sick sense that we incorporate consumerism into our end of life rituals. All we need now is a good "story" to make it all sound quite appropriate and uplifting. I'm sure a marketer will be along at any moment to fill that need.

Competing Messages: Excedrin Headache Nr. 101

Doc Searls offers an invitation to those who "hate marketing" to follow a link to this essay, called Markets Without Marketing. He says he's looking for constructive feedback, so I'll try to be constructive.

First, from the content and context of the post, it seems Doc is under the impression that markets and marketing consist almost exclusively of products that are somehow computer, software or internet-related. It's hard to make sense of his essay if you think about things like hair care products, or shoes, or toothpaste, or perfume, or pain relievers, or tires, or cat food, or kitty litter, or motor oil, or bricks, or snack food, or fertilizer, or toys, or bicycles, or toilet paper, or... well, I hope I've constructively made my point.

How much do you want to think about all of those products? And if you do think about them, and I'll stipulate that everyone does a little bit, do you think you'd want to somehow engage in an exchange of information with the production supervisor on the shop floor?

"Say, Inspector 804 at Fruit of the Loom, that last batch of t-shirts I bought from you guys had kind of a stiff collar. Could you soften it up a bit next time, please?"

Commodity consumer items are low cost, and you probably don't want to invest any more time or thought in them than their monetary cost at the checkout counter. (Which is probably why we like marketers to tell us a good "story" about them.) You buy a pack of Fruit of the Loom tighty-whities, and if you don't like them, the next time you pick up a pack of some other brand. Or maybe you just buy them again if they're cheaper. But Fruit of the Loom and all the other brands still have to compete with one another for your attention, so that when you go to the store to buy some new underware (It's a not a misspelling, I'm trying to relate to Doc's technological view of markets and marketing), you'll at least have some sort of impression of Fruit of the Loom so that as you give it four or five seconds' worth of your attention at the store, you may choose them over, say, Hanes. The problem is choice. Your power to choose is the marketer's problem.

So Fruit of the Loom will be competing with Hanes to bring its brand and some sort of message to your attention, along with thousands or millions of other manufacturers of the myriad commodity items we rely on the marketplace to create and deliver to us.

That sort of marketing isn't going to to anywhere anytime soon, if ever.

Furthermore, many of the "messages" these brands try to convey have something to do with how you're supposed to regard yourself, how you're supposed to feel about yourself. Marketing is like The Matrix, less because of supposed "silos" (Have you ever had your cat caught in a kitty litter "silo?" I didn't think so.), and a hell of a lot more with how you're intended to regard yourself. Apple's "Think Different" campaign is an example of these sorts of lifestyle marketing messages that are intended to appeal to your ego, or your anxiety about how "cool" you may or may not be.

To make matters worse, or better if you're a marketer, is that marketers are getting smarter about what makes us tick, how to get our attention, hold it and then generate the desired behavior. Recall Seth Godin and his "stories" about "purple cows." Remember the guy in the recliner? The passive consumer, who doesn't care about Google, is sitting there ready to receive whatever compelling new "story" a marketer has cooked up to get him to buy a new snack food, a "junky plastic Christmas ornament," a new recliner, or maybe a clean t-shirt.

The problem with marketing is not Dell laptops that self-immolate and the negative attention unfortunate accidents like that generate. The reason why Dell gets so much attention is because they've been so successful. When your products are that widely adopted, you're going to have larger absolute numbers of people with unhappy experiences, and you're going to be harder-pressed, from a resource position, to make all those unhappy customers happy. The result is Jeff Jarvis and his Dell hell anecdotes, which were less about "the conversation," and more about Mr. Jarvis drawing attention to himself as he competes with all the other high attention-earning webloggers. That itself was a manifestation of marketing of the personal "brand."

The problem with marketing and the consumer culture is that there is no natural check on competition, save for individuals' authority over their own attention. The problem with authority is that for it to be exercised, you must first gain attention. So marketers are not only competing with other marketers, they're competing with you - for your attention. There is no boundary that a marketer will respect. Marketing messages are now being inserted into the dialog in movies and television shows, so you can't fast-forward through the commercial, or even get up and go to the bathroom. We're creating ever smaller, ever more inexpensive personal media players, and commercial messages are going to be coming right along with them, wherever you take the technology. And as wireless technology becomes more ubiquitous, then those messages can be even more personalized, or "permission-based," than the messages contained in broadcast media, which we've become somewhat adept at filtering out. As your new, location-aware, personal media player discovers you're walking down the street approaching a coffee shop, and it's 1:30 PM, 94 degrees outside, a little message might appear between tracks, or a brief translucent image might be superimposed, regarding how good a nice iced coffee might taste right about now.

The negative effect is that so many entities are competing for individuals' attention that individuals have less attention left to themselves. Furthermore, the messages marketers convey are often absorbed or incorporated into the belief systems of the consumers. Many then "drink the Kool Aid." Among those marketing messages is the belief, now seemingly firmly rooted to the advantage of marketers everywhere, that "markets are conversations."

Because it is a "free" market, there is no check on competition, and all players in the market must compete, if they hope to survive. So any competitor who isn't pushing back boundaries is at a competitive disadvantage to all those who are. Again, we are not consumers, we are the consumed.

Now, I don't think the answer to this is to regulate the marketplace, at least not entirely. I do believe some regulation is required, particularly with regard to health and product safety issues. But I think a better answer is for people to become more knowledgeable about marketing and human behavior, and how marketers exploit it.

Once upon a time, we had to worry about "lions and tigers and bears, oh my." We've pretty much eliminated the threat of predatory animals, along with most of the natural environment; but now we have to worry about predatory marketers, commercialism and consumerism, and how those things can adversely affect the experience of our lives. You can't change the nature of competitors in the marketplace. Saying "markets are conversations" doesn't make marketers any less predatory, any less competitive about seizing your attention. It doesn't change for one nanosecond what they want from you.

It just makes it seem nicer, so you're more inclined to surrender what marketers seek.

Cheese Sandwich: Miles to Go

It's kind of interesting, the chain of events that seemed to accompany buying the iMac, and how they have affected the use of my time. It seems the iMac became kind of an impetus to make some additional changes.

The iMac made the sixth Mac in this apartment, only two of which are regularly used. What I was reminded is that the more stuff you have, the more stuff you have to think about, and who wants to think about stuff? So I decided to get rid of four machines.

Unless you're just going to bury them in the backyard in the dark of the night, there are probably some important things one ought to do before letting go of an old computer. First, you need to retrieve any data that you might need one day. Chances are, this is probably irrelevant. If it's been sitting on a hard drive for some years and you haven't needed it in that time, you almost certainly won't need it any time going forward. Attachment, like desire, is a source of suffering. Still, it may be worth taking a look.

Second, while you may not want to hang onto that old data, you probably don't want to share it with just anyone else either. So you need to scrub those old bits off the hard drive before you give it way. That's kind of challenging using older technology with which I have grown a bit rusty. So that has consumed a fair bit of time. Ideally, I could just reformat the drive and reinstall the OS, but in the case of the 6500, both of my copies of Mac OS 9.x refuse to install on it, because one is a 9.1 disk, requiring a native G3 processor, and the other is just an upgrade disk so it won't do a full install. The hard drive in the 6500 is from my first iMac, and it boots the 6500 just fine with the 9.x install from the iMac, but I can't install a new OS without going all the way back to 8.5 and then upgrading from there, and I definitely don't want to do that!

I managed to pull my document folder from the 6500 by connecting it to the iBook with an ethernet cable. I'm sure I did something wrong because it took five hours to move about 370MB of data, which is pretty absurd. I'm hoping to do a defrag and then optimize the directory with Disk Warrior and hopefully that will keep the deleted files from being easily recovered. I'm sure individual sectors of readable data will still exist, but I don't think I ever did my taxes on that machine (the old iMac), and pretty much everything else is just noise.

Then there are the numerous peripherals and software that are kind of unique to one machine or another, and those all have to be pulled together from the various places where I've squirreled them away.

Tomorrow I hope to get rid of the 6500, a Stylewriter 2400, ScanMaker E3 scanner, a big box o'disks, cables, spare power supply, along with a Powerbook 190, and assorted spare parts at the local Mac users group meeting. Hopefully, someone will be there with enough time and knowledge of older Macs to make productive use of them.

Then I've got to get the iMac G3 and the G4 MDD ready to be shipped to family members. That'll be a little easier to manage. The iMac is a fresh install with Panther and Mac OS 9 in two partitions. While I may have some e-mail I'll want to delete, there's really nothing else on the iMac. The G4 has Tiger installed and I can use the secure delete function for the really incriminating, I mean, embarrassing bits.

The challenging thing for those boxes will be packing them to survive shipment, and then hauling them someplace to be shipped.

Anyway, all that has occupied a fairly significant amount of my time. I'd been hoping to write a few things about John Gray's essays in Heresies. It's been nice reading things that seem to validate my own views, since I seem to be so often in the minority in my skeptical or, some would claim, cynical views of the internet and human nature. Admittedly, I could be writing some of that now instead of boring you with the minutia of getting rid of old computers, but I felt like meditating a bit on the downside of attachment it seems.

One of the observations that both Gray and I share is that a religious impulse toward believing in something has been transferred from God to other things. In my view it was first to political theories, then economic ones, and now science and technology, often with elements from the others embedded in them as well. I'm not sure Gray would agree with exactly that sequence, but the larger picture of a religious faith in some human constructed theory that ultimately leads to some salvation is probably accurate. He attributes it to the influence of Christianity, which may be true.

But it does underscore something Hugh MacLeod wrote, sincerely, one suspects, "The market for something to believe in is infinite."

What makes this a true statement is ultimately a lack of faith. The notion that whatever faith one has is insufficient in some respect, invariably encouraged by those with something to sell, and that when one has just the right thing to believe in, then "meaning" and success and salvation will be at hand. And there's always someone hoping to sell you a new church, a new political theory, a new economic theory, a new scientific theory, or a new technology, each one of which is purportedly the answer to all things.

But you can be sure, if someone is selling it, it's an answer to nothing.

What makes that "market for something to believe in" truly "infinite," is the infinite capacity to fear, to doubt, to be anxious. And someone will always exploit that for their own advantage. And those who buy it, those whose anxieties are relieved, however momentarily, will embrace the peddler and elevate him or her to savior, or at least saint. Until the doubts and anxieties return, and a new peddler comes along with a better product to sell.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

Alas, I have nothing to sell you. But then, I would tell you that there's nothing you need to buy.

Hard to Say Goodbye

My mom is from Canastota, New York where she and Dad currently reside. When Dad retired from the navy in 1967, we moved from Warren, Michigan to Canastota to be close to Mom's family. There was a huge extended Seitz family up there, so it wasn't like we were moving to someplace where we didn't know anybody.

Still, Dad had to make some new friends, which isn't very hard for him. One of the first was Louie Balducci. Louie passed away the other day, and Dad's been recalling some fond memories of his good friend.

BSG: Season 3 Premiere

According to Bear McCreary, the composer for Battlestar Galactica, the season premiere of the third season will be a two hour episode:

I just thought I'd let you all know that the beginning of Season 3 truly kicks ass. I've started writing music for it and I think it's safe to say you'll be blown away. I won't spoil anything (you have each other for that!) but I will say that the season premiere will air as a two hour movie... more intense than most films you pay to see in the darkened theater.

BSG: "I'm going back."

Season 3 promo.

Rock on.

Mac: Al Hawkins' Screencast

If you've never used Tinderbox, Al Hawkins has prepared an outstanding screencast (in four parts) that shows some of what Tinderbox is capable of doing in a very practical example.

Right now, Tinderbox is a Mac-only application, but it is being ported to Windows, so Windows users might be interested in watching the series of four QuickTime movies as well.

The screencasts are exceptionally well done. Al is on old blog-buddy of mine, we both started on editthispage.com late in the last millennium, nevertheless, this is an unsolicited endorsement. Eastgate might consider contracting with Al to develop a series of tutorial screencasts like these.

Naturally, I'll refrain from any triumphalist remarks about "demand supplying itself." I'll leave that to the true believers. I remain an unrepentant heathen in these matters.

Pink

Happened to read this review in The Washington Post about a singer named Pink.

Bought two of her albums this morning at iTMS, her latest, I'm Not Dead, and her 2001 breakout M!ssundaztood. Not the kind of thing I normally listen to, but I think I might grow to like it.

Definitely not a woman in the "shiny, happy people" mold.

Cheese Sandwich: "Mmmmmm...burgers.....mmmmmm...."

Had a hamburger today for the first time in I don't know how long. But it wasn't just a regular hamburger, it was a Whataburger Hearty Burger, back for a "limited time only."

That's because you've only got a "limited time" left to live after you eat one of those things.

Came with a 20% off coupon for your first coronary bypass operation too.

I mean, I liked it, but I can't recommend it to anyone. Seriously. This was one bad burger. Just a bun, some sauteed onions, A-1 Sauce, bacon, cheese and meat. And probably more saturated fat than I've eaten in a month.

"I love to see a man of advancing years throwing caution to the wind. It's inspiring in a way."

BSG: Two More Fans

A wise woman I've been talking to for almost seven years now and her husband are the latest fans of Battlestar Galactica.

What are you waiting for? You know you want to watch it...

Competing Messages: More Conversational Marketing

I guess the party line would be something to the effect that blogging would solve this issue:

They were also paid thousands of dollars for the advice they offered to dozens of companies, like Eli Lilly, Johnson & Johnson, Morgan Stanley and Citigroup. The hospital officials and their spouses received a free trip to the luxury resort, where they could join the Morgan Stanley Tennis Tournament or the GE Healthcare Barbecue. All of this came courtesy of the Healthcare Research and Development Institute, a for-profit company that is owned by about three dozen hospital executives, but underwritten by 40 or so of its handpicked corporate members, all suppliers to hospitals.

Hospital Chiefs Get Paid for Advice on Selling, NY Times, July 17, 2006

I guess since "markets are conversations," there's money to be made in facilitating those conversations. It must be difficult to keep track of all the quids and the quos, but it's a cinch they're all pros.

Competing Messages: Commercial Art

The nature of competition in the marketplace is that it necessarily competes with everything that might command our attention. So the market finds ways to insinuate commercial messages into every potential medium and venue.

Since "markets are conversations," it's no surprise to find that fictional conversations are becoming commercial messages.

Cloudlapse 7-15-06

Some morning I'll get up and go down to the beach and do this right. Not this morning though. But for not doing it right, it's still kind of interesting. A brief movie of things that happen before our eyes, which we nevertheless do not see.

Scanners Live in Vain

"Conceivably, the proposed solution could be applied in quasi-real-time to allow a single human to monitor ten times as many sites as he or she would otherwise monitor," says Gordon.

The Surveillance Society may become ten times more efficient.

Well, if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about! Just sit back, relax and enjoy the transparency of it all!

Of course, I immediately thought of Robert Scoble and reading 1.6M feeds per day. And then Riya and their automated face-recognition Web 2.0 ubiquitous surveillance application.

One New Law

Elaine of Kalilily writes:

AND FINALLY, if you could make up ONE new law and have it enforced FOREVER, by goons, what would your law be? Use your imagination, let your despotic instincts run free.

I wrote back that I didn't really know, since I think all laws are flawed. Well, that's not true, first I said that my one new law would be that henceforth, I get to make all new laws; but those kinds of things usually end badly for the clever chap looking for the loophole.

But since all laws are flawed, maybe they shouldn't be enforced by goons.

Maybe we should outlaw goons. But then only outlaws would have goons.

But we probably should have some goon control laws.

;^)

Comic Life Example

This is just something I whipped up in a hurry. Three stock photos and a couple quickies from Google.

Mac: iPhoto and the Media Browser

This is probably nothing new to anyone who's been using a Mac and iLife for a while, but it only came to my attention recently.

A number of applications can take advantage of the music and photographs you have stored in your iTunes and iPhoto libraries, through something called the Media Browser. The programs that I have that use it include the iLife and iWork apps, and Comic Life. I believe the notebook application Journler uses it as well.

This was not news to me, but it wasn't extremely useful apart from posting fairly recent pictures using iWeb.

I was also aware that iPhoto can support multiple libraries, and I've been thinking about splitting mine up into a number of smaller libraries, perhaps divided by date or something. Again, something that has some utility in managing a growing collection of digital pictures, but it wasn't something that seemed to have much more potential beyond that.

Well, I've been trying to clean up this place and get rid of a lot of crap around here, and among the things I had to think about keeping or throwing away were these CDs full of clip art for various graphics programs. It dawned on me that perhaps I could import all their contents into an iPhoto library, and then be able to actually use them, instead of just having them gather dust while occupying space on a shelf.

The idea was intriguing enough to get me to actually hold down the Option key while launching iPhoto and create new library. To be brief, most of the clip art is in some proprietary format that iPhoto can't recognize. As it turns out, that's probably okay because there were still a large number of .jpg and TIFF files that iPhoto did recognize with no problem. When I was done, I had almost 4000 stock photographs in a new iPhoto library.

This is pretty cool! But I need to do it all over again, because I didn't do it very intelligently the first time. Most of the CDs had the photos organized by some sort of subject matter. Not all of them, and it wasn't always clear from the cryptic folder names what the subject matter was supposed to be, but if you look at few previews in Finder, you can figure it out pretty easily.

What I originally did, was just grab the topmost folder containing all the photographs and drag and drop it onto iPhoto, which would then dutifully suck all the photos into its library. Then I'd eject the disk and repeat the process with the next disk. So at the end, I had a library full of images with little structure apart from a "roll" associated with the filename of the folder I dropped onto the iPhoto icon in the dock.

After it finishes importing a folder or folders, iPhoto leaves all those photos selected, with the blue border around each image indicating it's "selected." If you then click on the "+" button to create a new album in the source column, it will automatically include all those photos in the new album, and you can give that album the name of the subject matter for that folder, which makes it a lot easier to find something you might be looking for in the media browser.

Now, some of the CDs didn't have that level of structure and all the photos were just in a folder called JPEGs or something. So some manual intervention is still required to make the material more readily useful. But just having it available on the hard drive, in a library that can be called up from within an application, makes them infinitely more useful than if those images were sitting on the shelf.

Most of them aren't really suitable for printing in any sort of high production value publication. But they're perfect for the web, or school reports and the like. In the past, Caitie and I would do Google image searches for particular topics when she needed a picture. I don't know why, but I like this better.

So if you've got some stock photo CDs hanging around not being terribly useful, this might be something worth considering. I think it's going to make Comic Life a lot more fun to play with now.

Do I Have to Paint My Face?

Continuing an ongoing discussion regarding freedom and knowledge with Scott Reynen.

I'm persuaded that examples become constraints in themselves because they often seem to obfuscate more than illuminate. So instead, I'm going to try to succinctly state something about freedom and knowledge, without getting too wrapped around the axle regarding knowledge of freedom.

Let's stipulate, for the moment, the possibility that "freedom," like "free will" may well be illusory. That is to say, it's possible that the universe is deterministic, or contingent, and our knowledge or beliefs regarding freedom are an artifact of our disadvantageous perspective.

Having said that, now let's ignore it, because it winds up giving me a headache, and it doesn't seem terribly useful in getting one out of a box, real or metaphorical. It might be incredibly useful, but I haven't made up my mind yet; and likely because of that, I can't try and explain it.

Knowledge, or even belief, sometimes knowledge is little more than belief, and often we rely on unchallenged belief more than knowledge, seems to be essential to any meaningful application of freedom. Knowledge or belief are what orient the subjective self in the objective universe. Freedom seems to be related to the capacity to effect a different orientation of the subjective self in the objective universe. Otherwise, "you can't get there from here."

You have to know you're in a box, and you have to know there's an "out" of the box you might be in.

Or do you? If you're in a box, what can you say you truly know about what's outside the box? Well, there's the utility of belief, anyway.

Nevertheless, no matter where you go...

Now, in Scott's example, being "out" of the box, or the act of getting "out" of the box, is an application of freedom in some way. I'm not sure it is, but I understand his point. I'm in a box. I want out. I'm not "free" to get out, until I have or apply knowledge of crowbars and wooden boxes. Knowledge sets me free.

So, assuming for the moment that knowledge of boxes and crowbars and wood has liberated me from my box, what can we say we truly know about our new circumstances? What if we're just in a bigger box, and we don't "know" it? Are we any more free than we were in the box that we "knew" about? I'm not sure. I tend to suspect we're not, really. Maybe we're just more comfortable in a bigger box. Some people spend much of their lives building and moving into bigger and supposedly better boxes. I like being comfortable. Though I must say, I've learned most of the important things in my life by being very uncomfortable. Maybe that's made me freer. I'm not sure. It's made life more meaningful, I know that.

But perhaps we believe we're more free, and that has some utility of its own, not to be casually discounted.

Care to get out of that "box" bounded by the womb and the tomb? Some people are searching for knowledge that they believe will get them out of that box. Then there's that whole cosmological box problem. Not to worry though, more knowledge will make them free. Freer. Or something.

That wasn't very succinct, and I'm afraid it wasn't very clear either.

Are you sure you don't want me to say, "There is no spoon?"

Even insomnia has its merits.

To Whom It May Concern:

Respectfully, if you only have time for one clue this year, this is the one to get...

You're not paying attention.

"Deal with it."

I hope that helped.

And I hope it was respectful enough.

Though I suspect different people likely have different ideas about what respect really is, what merits it, and how it is shown.

Ugly as Sin

I went out to look in on the Ospreys and while I was letting the camera take some pictures (Ya gotta love the time-lapse feature.) I spotted some large birds circling around nearby.

Well, to make not much of a story much shorter, they were buzzards I think. Carrion eaters of some kind. Ugly and huge. (A quick image search, and they're black vultures.) Took some pictures, but I'm not happy to see these guys in my back yard. They seemed to have the Ospreys agitated as well. They spent a lot of time vocalizing and looking upward. May not be connected, but it's different behavior than I'm used to seeing.

Dawn, July 9, 2006

Can't decide which one I like more, so here's another. I like this one because it's more clearly a pelican. I like the first one because of the wings, though it's nearly out of the frame.

Meh. I take pictures, I'm not a photographer.

Another Oldie

And I figure this is probably worth another listen. It's from Cast Away, and it kind of deals with freedom and surrender. It's not obvious, but it's not utterly opaque either.

You're Going the Wrong Way

This is one of my favorite scenes in that great John Hughes Buddhist dharma-drama, Planes, Trains and Automobiles.

I'd like to show the actual clip, because there are a couple of very brief costume scenes, one with Steve Martin as a skeleton, the other with John Candy as Satan. It's quite funny as well as being perhaps unintentionally meaningful.

It's interesting to note in the scene that, in surviving their encounter with death, their baggage was flung into the road. Being human, what did they do? They went and picked it back up again. I thought that was pretty funny.

Anyway, here's a little sound clip from the movie, going out to all my thoughtful Church of Web 2.0 friends:

Kind of plays into that whole knowledge and freedom thing too, if somewhat obliquely.

A Few Idle Thoughts

I was back in the dojong today for the first time in a month for jujitsu and this was the first time wearing a ground-fighting uniform that weighs, oh, I don't know, maybe 500 pounds or something like that.

Previously, we had trained in just t-shirts and pants, but that precludes a lot of training on holds and chokes and throws. So I was kind of looking forward to wearing the proper uniform, but it came with its own surprises. Apart from the weight and its heat-retention properties, the rough, textured surface, combined with grabbing and twisting, managed to pull the corners back on the fingernails of about three of my fingers, enough to make one bleed pretty good, as well as taking small patches of skin off above the last knuckle on three other fingers. So, ow, my fingers hurt!

To say nothing of my neck and shoulders.

It's enough to make me wonder if I'm not getting too old for this sort of thing.

But I'll tell you what, that Corona I had after class tasted like just about the best cold beer I ever had. And putting my skinned knuckles against that cold glass felt pretty good too. So, you know, there's trade-offs I guess.

Anyway, I'm not really here for a long post, just wanted to comment on something Scott Reynen mentioned in response to my last post with respect to knowledge and freedom. I've only just started thinking about some aspects of this subject, while others have occupied my thoughts for the better part of seven years now. I'm not sure what that's saying, exactly, except maybe I reserve the right to change my mind about some of this.

His is a relatively brief post, so read the whole thing. I'll quote just a small part here, so I don't lose anyone who's not going to make the jump, but I'm responding to a bit more than just this quotation. Scott is responding to what I said about external knowledge not making us more free.

He writes, "I agree, but I think this ignores an important point: knowledge does not make us free, but it enables freedom. Conversely, ignorance constrains us."

Like many such discussions, it's possible to get bogged down in semantics in the early going. The problem is, freedom, semantically, is a tough nut to crack. It's another one of those ideas that plays a big role in our belief systems, for which we seem to have only the most superficial understanding. Or as Scott avers, "ignorance constrains us."

It's hard to know where to start unravelling this ball of yarn. I'm inclined to think that it may be best to avoid trying to unravel the thing at all, and I'm not really sure where I'm going with this right at the moment either, so what to do?

Lots of problems here. There are the epistemological issues surrounding how it is we "know" something. Taking an example that is almost certainly wrong, but is probably a worthwhile illustration, if everyone "knows" the world is "flat," then many people are constrained by knowledge, and perhaps Columbus acted on faith more than knowledge. So which thing made anyone more free?

Then you kind of have to wonder about how much knowledge you want to have before you think you have enough freedom. At what point does the desire for knowledge itself act as constraint? The space shuttle went up the other day. The shuttle managers were free to decide to scrub the launch because there were still unanswered questions regarding the safety of the foam on the external tank. So this goes to the issue of risk, which probably can't be separated from freedom. I suppose you can say the shuttle managers took a calculated risk when they approved the launch, but what does that mean really? If we had a damaged orbiter up there right now, and a bunch of folks waiting for a ride home, how would we be talking about knowledge and ignorance and risk today?

I suppose, in a way, you might begin to think that knowledge has perhaps less to do with freedom than we may believe. If true, then as "knowledge," would that make us more free? Maybe. Maybe not.

Maybe we're all about as free as we're ever going to be. And knowledge doesn't have a whole lot to do with making us "more" or "less" free. Except for the self-referential conundrum of knowledge about freedom, if we assume that such knowledge may be known. Remember, some knowledge is just wrong.

Anyway, those are a few idle thoughts in response to Scott's thoughtful reply, with which I disagree less than perhaps this response might suggest. Knowing that or not, one is of course free to respond as one sees fit.

One final note, there are a lot of people who get paid good money to think a lot harder about these things than I do. Well, maybe not a lot harder, but they get paid good money to anyway. So perhaps you should listen to them instead of me. I, naturally, am an authority on nothing. I make all this shit up.

The Law of Conservation of Misery

I'm reading a book called Heresies Against Progress and Other Illusions, by John Gray. (Obviously, not the Men are from Mars, John Gray.)

It's a collection of essays, so I expect it will go fast. But even the introduction has been fun. Here are a couple of quotations:

Secular societies are ruled by repressed religion. Screened off from conscious awareness, the religious impulse has mutated, returning as the fantasy of salvation through politics, or - now that faith in politics is decidedly shaky - through a cult of science and technology.

...

The lesson of the century that has just ended is that humans use the power of science not to make a new world but to reproduce the old one - sometimes in newly hideous ways. This is only to confirm a truth known in the past, but forbidden today: knowledge does not make us free.

Now, there's an aspect of that last statement with which I think I may disagree. But I think we may be thinking about different kinds of knowledge. The externally directed "knowing," the discovery and gathering of information, while empowering in other ways, does not make us more free. With that I think I agree. But I think there is an interior knowledge, hard won and limited though it may be, tempered by an awareness of the state of ignorance, that affords a certain degree of freedom, more so than mere education.

I'll comment some more after I finish the book.

Social Hygiene: Another Resource

Anyone interested in another skeptical voice regarding the liberation theology of technology would be interested to read ideant, a weblog by Ulises Ali Mejias.

A relevant quotation from his most recent (to date) post: Doc Searles, in reaction to Rosen, writes of a world where "the demand side supplies itself." That's exactly my concern. Technocracy has created a scenario where the subject is willing to commodify herself unquestioningly, to aid in furthering the process of making herself part of the market. That the old institutions have not quite yet realized how to capitalize on this is simply a momentary lapse. They'll catch on soon enough.

Contrast that with this more recent post from Doc Searls, pointing to Terry Heaton.

I haven't read enough of Mr. Mejias' weblog yet to conclude how much in agreement we might be, but I think his views are significantly different from those of the prevailing authorities. From what I've read so far, he does seem to have somewhat more hope for some aspects of technology than I do. I'll try to address those at some point.

He also seems to present his arguments in a somewhat more academic and, perhaps, civil manner than I do, which may be more to the taste of those who may have grown weary of my ranting.

Cheese Sandwich: Seventh

I'm still working on getting the iMac configured the way I want it. I installed the Kodak EasyShare software, which seems to be required to transfer pictures from the EasyShare One wirelessly to the computer.

I was able to transfer some pictures, and that works well enough. I then tried to export the pictures from EasyShare to the desktop, and that worked as well, but the way the program reduces the size of the file creates horrendous jaggies, and it can't seem to export to my iDisk. So it seems likely it'll be easier just to transfer pictures through a card reader to iPhoto, and not use the EasyShare software at all.

I received an e-mail from Kodak asking me to be a part of some group that offers them feedback on their products. Somehow, I managed to lose it in trying to get everything squared away on the various machines I have running at them moment. That might have been cool, I think they could certainly use some help.

I did find a nice little case for the EasyShare One at Target. It's called a D-Pods 50 from LowePro. Weird name, but the camera fits in it nice and snug, and there's a pouch for the spare battery and another one for a memory card. There's a velcro strap for hanging it off your belt, which I've learned isn't "cool," and a shoulder strap, which is apparently okay, if not exactly "cool" either. Whatever happened to, "It's hip to be square?" Huey Lewis, we need you now!

I bought Johnny Cash's American V from the iTunes Music Store. I think it's supposed to be his last release, though I read something in a review that suggested there might be enough material for one more. American V is thematically structured to be a final work. I was surprised to see Cash covered Springsteen's Further On Up the Road from The Rising, but hearing it made it seem a logical choice.

It's interesting, if also sad, to listen to this album and Warren Zevon's The Wind, as two works contemplating the end of life. Cash seems to have had the perspective of one who is resigned, indeed ready to go, while Zevon was perhaps defiant without being in denial. As one would expect, I think, given their respective circumstances.

Anyway, American V is recommended. Good music.

Speaking of iTunes, I've been meaning to mention this for a while, but it seems to slip my mind all the time. There's an iTunes podcast subscription for some of the recorded work of Alan Watts. If you're at all interested in something perhaps a little more meaningful than marketing, or changing the world, you might want to check it out. Of course, it's meant as a "teaser" to get you to buy the expensive stuff, but as a wise person once said, "It's all good." Something to do with being in the world, and not of it?

Who knows?

Maybe you do.

Cheese Sandwich: Fourth

I'd hoped to get a shot of the shuttle ascent yesterday, but this is the first launch I've been able to see from this location, so it took me too long to spot it as it went up. Well, I didn't spot it at all, one of the neighbors did! Now I know where to look next time.

Spent some time getting the G4 MDD hooked up to the TV, that seems like it could work, albeit not exactly the way I'd like it to. I had to route the audio and video through the Panasonic DVD recorder.

Sending the audio directly to the ZVOX resulted in too much noise and an audible hum, and I would have had to disconnect the GameCube to free up a video input on the TV as well. But the DVD-R has multiple video inputs, so I connected the G4 to the DVD-R, and then selected that source on the DVD-R, and the DVD-R as the source on the TV. It's a kludge, but it's mostly a proof of concept thing. Video quality from the G4 is good. Audio quality leaves something to be desired though. I thought I'd run iTunes on the G4 playing through the ZVOX, but it doesn't sound very good. Understandable given the route the audio signal takes: G4=>DVD-R=>TV=>Panasonic compact stereo=>ZVOX speakers. I have to use the Panasonic stereo because the TV doesn't have a controllable audio-out signal, so the only way to control the volume is to run it through an amplifier of some kind. I may try to connect the iPod dock to the second input on the ZVOX and see how that sounds.

Fan noise from the G4 isn't an issue while the TV is on, even in quiet passages. But when I don't have something playing, it's quite audible. Sleep isn't an option with the USB 2.0 PCI card installed, so that's out.

As it is right now, I can make the G4 do nearly everything I want it to, but there are several compromises. Ideally, I'd want better audio, a quieter box, sleep function when not in use, and a smaller form factor. All of which sound like arguments for a Mac Mini. But that's not really in the budget at the moment, so that's a project that will have to wait for another day.

One problem I haven't resolved is getting Apple Remote Desktop 3.0 up and running well on the iMac. I had it working on the G4, where I could observe and control my parents' eMac, but I've not been able to do that on the iMac yet. I was also not able to control the G4 MDD. So I've got to dig into that some more. In my experience ARD 3.0 is much more complicated than the earlier 1.1 version I was using with little difficulty. And don't tell me VNC is easier, because in my experience it's nearly as complicated and performance isn't that great. We had VNC running to control my parents' machine, and it sucked. ARD 3.0 gave acceptable performance, at a cost of greater complexity in setup. (Which is kind of counter-intuitive, since it's an Apple product working with a Mac. It should "just work.")

I did buy the Canon PIXMA MP500. I haven't printed anything yet, mostly spending my time yesterday trying to get the G4 set up. I've used the card reader though, and that was something of a disappointment. The printer is advertised as a USB 2.0 device, and I'm sure it is for printing and scanning, but it seems to work much more slowly as a memory card reader. Much more slowly. So I guess I'll keep the SanDisk reader around anyway. Sigh.

Ambrosia Software says that Snapz Pro X2 isn't totally compatible with the intel Macs, though most of the incompatibilities seem confined to the movie recording feature. I mostly use it for capturing screenshots. I'd install it, but I can't find my license code, and I think I've changed e-mail addresses a couple of times since I registered it, since I can't seem to recover it in the Lost Codes page. I've requested a more thorough look, hopefully it'll turn up.

Anyway, I am reminded of the expression, "With my personal computer I can now do, much more quickly, things I never used to have to do at all before." I'm also aware that it is becoming iteratively more complicated in setting up new machines with each upgrade. Mostly because I'm asking them to do more on each one; but this has some implications for hardware upgrades going forward. I'm wondering if this might not be my last general-purpose desktop machine?

iMac Core Duo Notes

A few more observations on the switch to to the iMac Core Duo.

I have an old (vintage last millennium) Lexmark Z52 ink jet printer. When I first installed Tiger on my PowerMac, I noticed that the driver for the Z52 was changed to some GIMP-based driver, and it sucked. I managed to re-install the Lexmark driver, though, if I recall correctly, it wasn't advertised to work with Tiger. Nevertheless, it did work, and I could print photos correctly. The GIMP driver just dumped ink on the page in a pattern that vaguely resembled the photograph. Text was okay, as I recall, but even that left something to be desired.

Well, here we are today, and while I can install the Lexmark driver for the Z52, Tiger doesn't allow me to access any printer-specific features, so once again I'm stuck with the GIMP driver. I suppose if I were a patient man, I'd try the GIMP drivers again, but I'm not optimistic.

The Navy Exchange has the Canon PIXMA MP500 on sale for $169.99, and a $30.00 mail-in rebate nets it out to $139.99. It's a multifunction printer with both a scanner and a card reader onboard. I think my Epson Perfection 4490 is a better scanner, but for occasional scans the Canon is probably more than adequate. I could put the Epson away and bring it out when I wanted to scan slides or negatives. It would also clear the SanDisk card reader from my desktop as well.

I suppose that completes today's exercise in rationalization.

I haven't figured out exactly what I want to do with respect to another minor issue. From time to time, I did enjoy watching a video on CNN. Well, they use MS's Windows Media format, and that's not being supported anymore. There's a Flip4Mac QT plug-in for Windows Media files, but I'm not sure if that's Universal yet or not. I'll check before I go much further. Another alternative is to force Safari to run under Rosetta, in which case the WMP plug-in would work as it did before, though I'm not much enamored of that notion. So I'll have to sort that out at some point.

I bought a Miglia TV Micro, which is a USB 2.0 TV tuner in a package about the size of an iPod Shuffle (or a pack of gum, if you're not familiar with the Shuffle). It actually comes with a remote that's about six times the volume of the device itself. I put a splitter on the cable jack that serves the cable modem, and connected up the tuner. It comes with EyeTV which is probably the best feature for the $99.00 price tag. Picture quality is below average with a lot of noise, possibly related to the proximity to the computer and the Buetooth and WiFi radios, and possibly the data stream on the cable. It's watchable, but it's not something I'd want to record for posterity. EyeTV has you sign up with Titan TV service, and that seems to be pretty spiffy, except they don't seem to have the correct channel line-up for my cable provider. It's close, but they don't seem to have updated since the last revision which was more than a year ago, I think. It's possible I hosed the sign-up, so I'll probably step through that again.

There's no pretty way to use the TV Micro on the desktop. I'll try to hide it someplace so all that's visible is the USB cable. The little package gets pretty hot while it's running, so I'm a little uncertain about the longevity of this device. The idea was to be able to watch something here at the desktop when Caitie's over and she's watching Disney or Nick and I've had my fill of Phil of the Future.

I installed a spare Airport card that I had into the PowerMac yesterday. Unfortunately, I did that after I had disconnected all the peripherals. I had the notion that I would simply control the G4MDD with Remote Desktop, but it's set up for an ethernet connection. I'll have to hook up the 15" ViewSonic LCD for a few minutes to get it switched over to WiFi, and then I'll be able to operate it remotely through the iMac or the iBook. Then I'll have to unmount the hard drives one at a time until I find the one that's whining. Murphy's Law says it'll be the boot drive.

The Bluetooth mouse gets mixed reviews. It's nice having no wire, but I miss a scroll wheel or the Might Mouse's little pea. More troublesome is that it doesn't always slide smoothly on this mousepad, a problem that didn't occur with the Logitech mouse I had used on it before. It may also have something to do with having worn the slightly textured surface of the mousepad smooth in the center. Worse, it seems a little erratic in its performance. Every now and then the cursor seems to jump around. Most of the time it's fine, but when it freaks out it can be annoying. I may go for the Logitech wireless mouse and keyboard and use the Apple BT set with the iBook. But there's no real urgency there. I may just go with the wired setup and save a little money too.

Well, that's enough about all that. On with the show...

Another Gigabyte of RAM

Just installed another gig of RAM in the iMac. Overall system response seems to be quicker, switching between apps. I'm not noticing the watch cursor in Tinderbox at all, but the flicker in the active line of text is still present. When the agents update, I get the briefest appearance of the mouse cursor, which is an I-beam when the cursor is in the Tinderbox window. When I'm not typing, the mouse cursor (not the text insertion cursor) doesn't appear at all. When I'm typing, it'll appear for a brief instant and then disappear. I don't observe that kind of behavior in Mail when I'm composing an e-mail message, so it does seem to be related to Rosetta.

Again, it's not an "issue," something that detracts for the usability of the program. It's more like an artifact that is simply a product of the Rosetta environment.

On the other hand, I did install 10.4.7 right after it was released, and there were supposed to be some Open GL libraries missing or something. So I suppose I should re-install 10.4.7 before claiming it's a Tinderbox under Rosetta artifact. (Update 7/4/06: Reinstalled 10.4.7 combo-update and no change in text entry flicker. Again, it's not an issue, just wanted to close that loop.)

Mark Bernstein e-mailed me regarding the previous post, and mentioned that Tinderbox will eventually become a Universal Binary, but it will take some work so patience is probably in order.

Test... Test... Is this thing on?

First post from the iMac. Ignore any loud explosions you hear coming from the lab...

Guess that worked.

Slowly getting everything up to speed here. The timing was probably pretty fortunate. The PowerMac has developed a whine in one of the hard drives that's pretty much guaranteed to drive me crazy. I'm going to have to try and figure out which one it is and then remove it before I do much else with it. The S.M.A.R.T. (clever, that) feature is reporting that all the drives are operational, so it's not something that's likely a near-term failure, it's just a very annoying sound.

Apple's C.H.U.D. 3.5.2 utility has been pretty stable on the most recent versions of Tiger, and it enables processor napping on multi-processor G4s. With that enabled, the MDD runs pretty cool and the fans are actually fairly quiet. I could experiment with turning off the napping feature and put some load on the processor and see if the fan sound would cover the whine. While not "quiet," the sound of the fans would recede into the background better than the whine. I may try that later. For now, I just shut it down when I can't stand it.

The iMac is still in a temporary location, which isn't conducive to large amounts of typing, so you'll be spared any interminable rants this morning.

As usual, I'm writing this in Tinderbox, the newly released version 3.5, as it happens, and it's not a Universal app. Responsiveness is fine, but I'm noticing something in the way text is drawn on the screen. As I type each character, there's a small, but noticeable amount of "flicker." It is limited to the single line that new text is being added to, text above is rock solid. At first I wondered if it might be a hardware defect in the new machine, but I just launched TextEdit, which is Universal, and there is no such phenomenon.

It's not horribly distracting, and I suppose I'll get used to it at some point. I recall reading something from Mark Bernstein that converting Tinderbox to a Universal app would be a non-trivial task, not very likely to happen soon, if at all. I suppose I should bring AppleWorks over to this machine and see if I notice the same phenomenon. I also get the watch cursor every few seconds, which I think is the Agent updater running in the background. It doesn't appear while I'm typing, but if I stop, it appears for a moment and then disappears, every few seconds.

I just launched Activity Monitor to see what the memory and disk activity situation looked like. It looks like we may be using some virtual memory, which may be impacting the performance of Tinderbox under Rosetta. Disk activity seems to coincide with the frequency of the watch cursor in Tinderbox. I'm still in the stock 512MB configuration, and I've got Safari running with a bunch of windows and tabs, along with a half a dozen other apps. So it's possible this is something that might be alleviated with some more RAM - but maybe not, too. We'll see. It's not a show-stopper by any means. I've got another gig of RAM inbound, I'd hoped it would have arrived yesterday, but perhaps tomorrow.

I do want to say that Tinderbox 3.5 adds some interesting new features that I hope to spend some time exploring once I get this machine set up in its permanent location.

Well, this is pretty uncomfortable typing here, so I'm going to give my wrists a break and stop right here...

====================

Had a problem exporting after changing the location of all my associated files to my iMac. Shot an e-mail to Mark Bernstein and got an immediate reply that solved the problem.

I just moved the iMac to another, larger, table and everything seems to be up and running. I'm trying for a cleaner, less cluttered workstation this time. I'm not sure if I'll achieve that. The black Sony LCD gives an unbalanced appearance, though I should also note that monitor spanning works without a hitch.

The old setup was cluttered with a bunch of USB peripherals I seldom, if ever, used, along with two external hard drives, an SRS Wow™ thing, two USB hubs and cables everywhere. I've boxed up the USB devices, and I hope to use the external drives with the G4 (perhaps to be replaced by a Mac Mini at some point) as part of a media center device.

I bought an Apple Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, and I've paired them to the iMac. I thought at first I'd use them with the iBook but I'm not sure about that now. The Mighty Mouse is pretty sweet, but I like the "Look ma! No wires!" appeal of the Bluetooth devices.

My old table was a 5 foot cheapo folding table, particle board with the fake dark wood-grain top. Now I have a 6 foot cheapo folding table that actually folds in half. It has a light plastic top with a textured surface that drives the optical mice crazy. I pulled the WowPad out of the box o'crap and put that down. The mice didn't like that fake woodgrain surface either. The WowPad is another dark item though. I may have a static problem though with the plastic surface though. We'll see, I guess. Hopefully not by frying a flash drive or something.

I am anxious to get rid of a bunch of crap now. I dearly love that little G3 iMac 400/DV, but I never use it apart from reminding myself what it's like to use it either in Mac OS 9 or Panther. I didn't take advantage of the recycle offer when I bought my iMac, but I think I can find it a decent home somewhere. Same thing with the 6500.

Anyway, now I've got a pile of crap I have to put away, so I'd better get busy.