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I got AutoDoubler last week. My forty meg hard disk had been oscillating between three and five megs free for the past year and a half. Every time something new came along (you are a cruel man, mister disk of the month), I had to move stuff off my hard disk onto floppies to make room for it. DiskDoubler was some help but not enough. The bulk of the space on my hard disk was taken up by applications and System Folder. DiskDoubler was toooo slooooow. Besides, it changed all my icons to generic DiskDoubler icons when compressed.
AutoDoubler to the rescue
AutoDoubler automatically compresses everything except items in the System Folder and whatever else you tell it not to. With AutoDoubler I went from four megs free to eleven. It worked great. (Remember, this is Fiction! Asst.Ed.) I didn't notice any slowdown in launching an application. I had to exclude my desktop pictures and startup screens, CompuServe, Navigator, and Bulk-Rate. I manually excluded the System Folder, too, just to be on the safe side. Each compressed file had a "DD" stamp on the lower left corner of its own icon. Slick.Double coupon day at Gregg's
Seven megs. I saved seven megs. And that's above and beyond what DiskDoubler had already saved me. According to AutoDoubler my 38.4 meg disk (must have lost some bits here and there over the years) was now equivalent to a 56.3 meg disk. Compression had increased the apparent size of my disk by 47%.But you know what? It wasn't enough. I couldn't load Word Perfect back on my hard disk, and Practica Musica, and Prototyper, and all my startup screens, and all the sounds from MacValley's AOL sound disks. No, it wasn't enough for that. Not nearly enough. I needed a new, big, hard disk, but I couldn't afford it. Not with car insurance and rent and telephone bills, cable TV bills, credit card bills, and vet bills for five cats. (I love cats!) No, a new big hard disk was not in my immediate future. Compression. I needed more compression. But how to get it? I was stumped. I sat and stared at my screen --- 10.8 MB available. I went online. But there was nothing more than comparisons of StuffIt, Compactor, and Disk-Doubler. I needed real information, technical information. I found pieces of code for Huffman compression and JPEG compression and tantalizing hints of Apple's QuickTime compression and Kodak's compression. I put it all together and I had --- nothing. These guys are working miracles, but they haven't come up with a way to stuff forty megabytes into five. Not without losing information. No one has.
Looking for the purr-fect solution
I have five cats. Five is crazy. We had four --- two gray tabbies, a yellow cat, and a black and white. Then the lady across from us moved and abandoned her cats. One calico cat got out and spent two whole hours curled up in my lap. That made five.The cats are important. The new cat especially. She moved in, made herself at home, and ignored my other four, so they had to ignore her right back. "Ha! So you're not bothered by me? Well, I'm not bothered by you either. So there!" There were no fights until the night I was sitting in front of my computer with several applications opened to documents I'd downloaded having to do with compression. The new cat came and sat on my lap. Before long my yellow cat showed up. He likes to sit on my lap while I'm working at the computer. If I set my left arm just right he can rest his head on it and I can still reach the keyboard. He tried to stop his jump in mid air, but gravity got him. Yellow and calico fur flew.
Mixing meows
I don't let the cats step on my keyboard. They're usually very good --- but they rolled all over it as they scrambled off my lap and out of the room in a cloud of hisses and fur. I flew out after them right into the middle of a cat war. Yowls and screams and growls, and cats flying in every direction. Gray fur, yellow fur, white and black fur, calico fur. Into the bedroom, into the bathroom, on to the kitchen, through the living room, into my office and all over my computer. Five cats across the desk over the keyboard and into the mouse. As I swooped by the monitor trying to grab and separate them I saw that ResEdit was open, and Think Pascal, too. I didn't have time to do anything about it because they were all off after each other again. Finally, it ended. My arms were covered with scratches. The cats all seemed quite pleased and at ease with each other.I went to check on my computer. No applications were open. It looked as if it had just rebooted. 12.1 MB available, it said. "Criminy! What have the cats deleted?" I thought. I was tired. I meant to track down what the cats had done to my machine, but the bed was too inviting. I lay down for just a minute, and fell asleep. No alarm --- I hadn't set it. I woke in a panic, late for work. I never stopped to think that the computer was still running.
When the programmer's away, the computer will play
When I got home, I heard the computer fan. So my machine had been running all day. I leave it up and running all the time after work and over the weekend so it didn't bother me. But I ducked into the office anyway to take a look. 34.2 MB free, it said. Impossible. There wasn't anything missing. It was all there. I double clicked on folders and applications. They all opened with no problem. The Auto-Doubler control panel cheerfully told me that my 38.4 MB disk had an effective size of 233 MB. My cats had created a miracle!Enter Steven King
I got out some tuna to thank them, but I could only find four. What's the big deal? you ask; one of them was hiding. But the thing of it was, I couldn't tell which one was missing. These were my cats. I knew they were my cats, but somehow the features of five cats had been blended into four. All but the black and white one have some sort of striping. The two grays look a great deal alike except one has long and the other short hair. The calico and the short gray haired tabby have round kitten faces. They were all there, but there were only four of them. So there I was, with four cats that were really five cats. Crazy. Okay, so one cat was hiding. I went to the bedroom --- no cat. On to the guest room --- which wasn't there either. Somehow the bedroom, though it was still the bedroom, looked like the guest room, too. The bathroom was missing, but the hall bathroom seemed to take on the features of both hall and master bathrooms. I'm glad my wife has gone to visit her mother. I don't think she could take this.It took me only five minutes to get to work this morning. It's a fifteen minute drive. There were fewer people there, although I couldn't tell who was missing. My lab had only one room, and one Quadra, instead of two. The day went by very quickly. The clock had only six hours marked around its face. It took me a minute and a half to drive home. There was only one cat, but none of them was missing. There they were, all five compressed into one. 38.3 MB available, said the hard disk. The AutoDoubler control panel informed me that my 38.4 MB disk had an effective size of 14.4 gigabytes. The apartment had one small room.
I am sitting at my keyboard with my chin resting across my forearm and I am purring. Long white whiskers arch gracefully from my beard. My ears are pointed and my fur is a patchwork of gray, black and white, yellow, and calico. From my window I can see North Hollywood, and Denver, and New York City, and Paris, and Moscow, and Tokyo, and the Grand Canyon, and the Rocky Mountains, and the Alps, and the Sahara, and the Amazon, and on and on and on. The whole world compressed into one neat little picture. After all that talk about the world shrinking, it has done it at last.
I curl up to lick my hand/paw. None of the cats is here, but none is missing.
Gregg Writes
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