6-27-2005 - Lately, entertainment industry watchers have been bemoaning a record-breaking box-office slump. Could it be the high ticket prices? Bad movies? Noisy audiences? Or maybe it is the search and confiscation practices reported in the New York Times:

Paramount had security guards confiscate all cellphones and handbags before the start of the movie, something the company warned about in all tickets and invitations to the screenings. (Studios have taken cellphones before but handbags seemed a new twist here.) The concern wasn't that Mr. Spielberg would be talking loudly to his agent during the quiet parts, but that people might try to capture scenes using cellphone cameras.

Yes, when I go to the movies, I want to be treated like a criminal.

5-20-2005 - I bought Bruce Springsteen's latest album from the iTunes Music Store, and found that the download includes a PDF version of the booklet that comes with the CD. Though cool, I thought it would be cooler if the image stored inside each song file showed the song's lyric page from the booklet instead of just the album front cover image. So I did it myself, using nothing other than iTunes and Apple's Preview program: I copied each page in Preview and saved it as a JPEG image, then dragged the image into the song's Info window in iTunes. Now, when I play the album, I can call up the lyrics for each song with a single click.

5-19-2005 - So my espoused Digital Medievalist has passed the music meme baton to me.

Total volume of music files on my computer: 7.6GB

Last CD bought: Zygote (John Popper)

Song playing: Idaho Potato (John Renbourn)

Five songs I listen to a lot, or that mean a lot to me:

• Uncle John's Band (Grateful Dead)
• Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes (Paul Simon)
• Canadian Rose (Blues Traveler)
• Crown of Creation (Jefferson Airplane)
• Into the West (Annie Lennox)

Five people to whom I'm passing the baton: Sorry to spoil the fun, but, as a former postal employee, I'm philosophically opposed to chain letters, to which phenomenon this sort of "pass the obligation on" activity has a close similarity. The meme ends with ME! (bwahahahahahahahahahhaaaa!!!)

5-7-2005 - Here's an observable phenomenon if you have QuickTime 7, which means, right now, if you have a Mac - the Windows version is "coming soon." It's a QuickTime movie that illustrates the difference between QuickTime 6's MPEG-4 video codec and QuickTime 7's new H.264 codec.

For this drive-by comparison, I used LiveStage Pro to build a movie that presents two otherwise identical video tracks side-by-side. I tried to match the compression specs as closely as possible: though I didn't quite nail it perfectly, the data rates do match to within five percent -- 417kbps for the H.264 track vs. 401kbps for the MPEG-4 track. Everything else is exactly the same: both videos were exported from the same iMovie project on the same machine at the same frame size and frame-rate. See if you can spot which video uses the new H.264 codec (which, by the by, encodes very slowly on an 800MHz G4 iMac).

4-29-2005 - Apple's revised operating system comes out today. It's called Tiger, giving headline writers yet another opportunity to trot out their jungle-cat-related clichés: Tiger is simultaneously being set loose and taken by the tail, all while on the prowl, baring its teeth, roaring into stores, and leaping into the forefront. Our copy arrives today, and no matter how it manages to manifest itself, I'm cleaning the litter box.

4-13-2005 - I'm not sure how different this is from an illuminated manuscript. Also, notice what kind of computer the artist uses; perhaps Umberto Eco was right.

3-26-2005 - The year is eighty-five days old today. Of those eighty-five days, we have had working phone service for sixty-five of them. The winter rains that inundated southern California this year have knocked out our phone service twice, not by downed lines but by drowned lines: somewhere between our apartment and the phone company's wiring closet three blocks away, water has shorted something out. Our first outage was in January, and it took Verizon over two weeks to restore our service, and only after numerous calls to an automated phone center -- finding an actual human to talk to at Verizon is harder than finding life on Mars. When we did finally reach a human, we could get only the vaguest estimate of when the repair might happen ("Possibly by the end of next week sometime. No, we can't tell you what day. Just be there when the repair persons arrive."). In the meantime, we lived on cell service and "borrowed" Internet connectivity from insecure wireless networks in neighboring apartments (what? Like you've never done that!). Now it's March, and yet another rainstorm has knocked out our main phone line yet again. And, yet again, Verizon doesn't know when they can get to it; the estimate is sometime next week (it's always "sometime next week"). Ironically, the number of Verizon Wireless commercials we see on TV seems to be increasing ("Can you hear me now?" asks the clueless Verizon dweeb. "No!" I scream back at the TV like a howler monkey). Sometimes I think that Ernestine has become Verizon's CEO.

3-22-2005 - I currently work for a software company with offices in a building at the Water Garden in Santa Monica, where, for the past several days, CSI Miami has been shooting. Yesterday, I was trapped at work because the building's lobby had been commandeered by the film crew so they could get multiple takes of two extras walking back and forth from one fake hallway (actually the door of a sundries shop) to another (the alcove in which the elevators are located). Today, I was allowed to leave on time because the afternoon shoot was planned to take place in the office complex's eponymous gardens...planned, but delayed, because it was raining in faux-Miami and the crew were all miserably huddled under umbrellas and ponchos. I guess the dancing lessons paid off.

1-13-2005 - For no good reason other than idle curiosity, I have launched Apple's Activity Monitor program and kept it running in the corner of my screen while doing some of my daily Web browsing. What I've found is very interesting. Ordinarily, Safari chews up only a few percent of the CPU cycles once a page is loaded. But when I view a page with a couple of embedded Flash advertisements, Safari's CPUsageŖ rockets up to between 65-80%. I wonder if there's a way to charge the advertisers for CPU cycles like we used to do back in the old mainframe days....

12-16-2004 - My old iBook (dual USB) suddenly began acting badly five months out of AppleCare: when I would open the iBook to awaken it, the screen sometimes wouldn't come on, or would come on only if the screen were held at a particular angle. As the iBook is my test machine for Xcode 2.0 (I'm writing a book with my brother for Wiley's Ihnatko series on it), I could ill-afford to lose it, and replacing it would eat up most of the book's advance. However, Apple does have a special Expanded iBook Logic Board Repair Extension Program, and the good folk at the local Apple Store sent my iBook in for me last week. It came back yesterday, with a couple of parts replaced, and the charge was $0.00. The iBook works perfectly, and the repair process didn't involve wiping the hard drive (which often happens in repairs). Nonetheless, I had backed the iBook up with Carbon Copy Cloner, and since I had removed most of my personal data before I took the machine in for repairs, I did have to restore my iBook from the back-up. That, too, worked perfectly: I hooked the iBook up in target mode to the iMac, reinitialized the hard disk, and ran the restore from the CCC disk image I'd created. Booted perfectly from the restore.

Sometimes, Murphy's Law is not enforced.

11-8-2004 - I received an email message this morning from a writer at Entertainment Weekly who, apparently, has been reading my weekly insane rant about the magazine. He complains that I have been regularly misspelling his name, for which I humbly apologize. As for all the nasty things I say in my weekly reviews...um...how about, "It's all in fun"? Except for the misspelling business: that's just wrong!

10-28-2004 - A friend of mine finds herself suddenly assigned to at least a year's military duty at Fort Irwin; she's been in the California Army National Guard for ten years, and now finds herself forced to leave her son and husband and her job as an emergency medical technician to help fill the suddenly depleted ranks at Fort Irwin because the fabled Black Horse Regiment stationed at Fort Irwin is being deployed to Iraq. Let's see: the community loses a health care worker, a son loses his mother, and the army loses its top desert combat training unit to a mission that was supposedly already accomplished last year. I think the president calls this winning "the trifecta".

8-31-2004 - Apple revealed its new iMac today, and I've seen various analysts opining that the price of the machine is too high. I've also seen reports stating that Apple will have a tough time keeping up with demand. In fact, I've seen both complaints in the same article, attributed to the same source. So I wonder how Apple would benefit by dropping the price if they can't make enough of them to sell at the current price?

8-28-2004 - Reports claim that the revolutionary forthcoming Windows operating system, code-named "Longhorn", will not be as revolutionary as planned in order to keep the release schedule from slipping even further. There is no truth to the rumor, however, that the system is being renamed "Coplandhorn".

8-27-2004 - Now that Windows XP Service Pack 2 is released, I felt that I should install it on my copy of Virtual PC. I went to Microsoft's site and ran the appropriate wizard to set me up for automatic updates as they suggested, and I changed the automatic update time from the default 3:00AM to 10:00AM. Then I made sure that VPC was up and running at 10AM. And nothing happened. So I tried the next day, and, when 10AM rolled around...nothing happened. So I finally went to the Windows Update site and manually downloaded and installed the update, which took about 3 hours.

When the update completed, VPC rebooted...sluggishly...and then presented me with a Security Center window telling me that I had no anti-virus software. Beside the warning was a button labeled "Recommendations." I clicked it and got a window recommending that I purchase anti-virus software.

I think the true value of Windows may lie in its vaudevillian sense of humor
("Doctor, it hurts when I do this." "Then don't do that." [rimshot])

8-7-2004 - It's been well over a year since the last time I posted a cartoon. This will never do. So here's one.

7-30-2004 - The digipundits are offering their takes on the Apple/Real iPod compatibility issue, but few seem to understand many of the technical and business issues at stake. So, I figure I may as well offer my half-ignorant take on the matter.

Apple uses a digital rights management system (DRM) called FairPlay to protect songs purchased from the iTunes Music Store from being played on non-authorized devices. Apple has implemented portions of FairPlay in its iPod firmware so that an iPod can play a protected sound file. Real has come up with a way to protect sound files that work with the current version of FairPlay as it is implemented on an iPod. Apple is upset, and warns that Real's protection scheme may be illegal, and that Real media protected in this fashion may stop working on future versions of the iPod. Pundits are all weighing in on whether Real has "hacked" the DRM, whether Apple is being a spoilsport and a monopolist, and whether Apple should license FairPlay to Real.

I can't speak about the legality of Real's actions (I'm not a lawyer), nor can I speak about whether Apple should license FairPlay (I'm not a contract lawyer, nor an MBA). But it seems to me that Apple probably has to fight Real's attempt unilaterally to take advantage of FairPlay as it is implemented on an iPod.

Here's why. FairPlay is a work-in-progress. Its features (that is, the nature of the rights it grants) are subject to Apple's agreements with the music publishers who supply songs to Apple's iTunes Music Store. If a future renegotiation of Apple's contracts with them requires changes to FairPlay's operation, Apple will have to change the iTunes software, and the iPod software, to accomodate those changes. Apple can do this as long as it has control over both the version of FairPlay running on desktop machines (Mac and Windows) and on iPods: they simply release an update to iTunes and to the iPod firmware that allows backward compatibility with the previous version of FairPlay.

But Apple has no control over how Real has worked around the current implementation of FairPlay. So, if Apple has to change FairPlay in the future, it cannot guarantee that those changes won't render Real files unplayable on the iPod. Yet, should the Real files fail to play under a future version of FairPlay, most iPod owners won't blame Real for this: they'll blame Apple. Apple will have to handle a torrent of customer complaints (each one of which costs them real dollars), as well as handle the bad publicity (which will hurt their product sales). Real will have to bear none of those burdens. So for very sound business reasons, having nothing to do with maintaining a "monopoly" on digital music, Apple must try to resist Real's attempt to finesse the current FairPlay DRM.

The problem, of course, would not exist if DRM systems were not a condition that the music publishers demand in order to allow digital music to be sold in the first place. But that is a separate issue. If the publishers demand DRM, Apple has little choice but to provide it or to abandon the music distribution business. And Real's attempt to piggyback - without permission or technical review - on Apple's DRM system is simply not in Apple's (or an iPod owner's) best interests.

7-6-2004 - The new Real Player for Mac OS X makes use of Apple's Webcore framework, the same framework used by Apple's Safari Web browser for Mac OS X. Using Webcore, Real Player is able to display Web pages; in fact, Real Player can actually serve as a simple Web browser with much of Safari's abilities. This means you can do very sick things, like go to Apple's QuickTime trailers site and watch movie trailers using the QuickTime Web plug-in inside a Web page being presented by the Real Player.

6-27-2004 - The Digital Medievalist's mother gave us a Club Aluminum dutch oven (much like this one, only in red) about a year ago, and it has become a regularly used item in our kitchen. Recently, though, we (and by "we" I mean the Medievalist) cooked something in it that turned the aluminum near the bottom of the pot black. For major catastrophes like this, Google is my friend -- I found a remedy in just a few seconds of searching: boil a few teaspoons of cream of tartar in a quart of water to remove the stain. So, I put the water in the pot, added the cream of tartar, and turned on the stove. As the water reached boiling, nothing happened. I walked away, let it boil for five minutes, and came back. The black stain was completely gone. Next time, I'm going to watch the pot when it boils....

6-18-2004 - The book I wrote with my brother Dennis, Teach Yourself VISUALLY iLife '04, is out, and I've created a site for it. Yeah, I'm bragging. You got a problem with that?

6-17-2004 - While I was out getting bialys (see below), I also got gas for my car. The last time I filled the tank was two months ago to the day. Even in these days of high gas prices ($2.379/gallon), refilling the tank cost less than $19 dollars: the car took a whole 7.86 gallons, and had averaged just under 41 miles per gallon. That what comes of working at home and driving a Prius.

6-17-2004 - This morning after I took the car to get gas (see above) I went to the local bagel shop to get my supply of bialys replenished -- I like to have a bialy for breakfast, sliced in half, smeared with salsa or garlic relish, and toasted with cheddar cheese (or sometimes stilton) melted over it (what? like you don't have any weird food habits). I noticed that the shop now offers a "lo-carb" bagel. They were nasty black little lumps with oat-flakes sprinkled on them; they should have been labelled "gluten for punishment".

6-4-2004 - Last night I dreamed that Apple had produced a new kind of photo book you could purchase from iPhoto: a movie book. The pages were high-quality paper with color images from your iPhoto library. When you double-tapped on a picture with your finger, it would play a few seconds of video right on the page. I don't think we'll be seeing that any time soon, though.

6-4-2004 - A few weeks ago my spouse spotted an inexpensive uninterruptible power supply and, even though our funds are constrained, insisted I get it. I did. This morning our reliable California power went out. The UPS worked: my iMac didn't even flicker. The spouse is smug.

3-31-2004 - Today I purchased and installed Virtual PC 6.1 with Windows XP on my 800MHz G4 17-inch iMac so I could do some cross-platform work with FileMaker Pro 7 for a technical editing job I have. First, I think Microsoft's Macintosh Business Unit (and Connectix, which did the bulk of the work before MS bought the Virtual PC line from them) has done a great job making this simple to install and use. Second, XP is much better than any previous version of Windows I've used; however, it still feels and looks like a cheesy Mac imitation (if XP were a bookcase, it would be made out of particle board covered with badly printed woodgrain shelf-paper). Third, I'm astonished at the size of the download for all the needed security updates: there were a half-dozen at least and it's still not done (I've been watching the progress gauge crawl along for well over an hour).

Ha. It just finished and is now restarting the virtual PC--took about 90 minutes for the updates. And it didn't seem to wreak havoc, either. So now I have an outpost of the Evil Empire lurking in my Mac. I feel so...unclean.

3-16-2004 - Now this is both interesting and distressing: my Congressional Representative, Henry Waxman, has commissioned a report on "the administration's public statements on Iraq", and there's an associated Web site that lets you look up each statement from a database. So far, so cool. But, much as I'm all for disclosing instances of public officials' public dishonesties (and my disappointment with the current Administration's actions and behavior went exponential a long time ago), I found myself troubled by the manner in which the report and database represent themselves. First, just who actually prepared the report is unclear: it's only stated that it "was prepared at the request of Rep. Henry A. Waxman" but no other source of authorship is given. Second, the database appears to be hosted at the House of Representative's Web site, but, in fact, the database is really hosted at the domain of the Carol/Trevelyan Strategy Group. Is any of this wrong? No, not really. Just misleading. And I don't like it when people with whom I happen to agree undercut their positions (and, hence, mine) by engaging in the same sort of behavior that they're protesting. C'mon, Hank, you can do better!

2-23-2004 - Well, GarageBand has me in its clutches again. My friends, the famous rhetorician and the medieval Latinist, obtained the elusive M-Audio eKeys49 MIDI keyboard at the Apple Store in far-flung Costa Mesa on my behalf. So now I can make truly ugly music with Apple's GarageBand far more effectively. This is probably not a good thing.

2-13-2004 - So it seems that folk are concerned that the theft of some Microsoft Windows source code could be a security risk. This is silly. First, the source code for Linux and for the core of Mac OS X are freely available and that hasn't caused any security issues -- at least, none that the community of programmers haven't been able to respond to quickly because of the very open nature of the code. Second, if hackers armed with only a portion of the Windows source code can find critical exploitable vulnerabilities that Microsoft's own programmers haven't been able to find, then Microsoft has been unabashedly lying about their new dedication to security and should be held accountable.

2-1-2004 - The book about Apple's iLife programs that I finished late last year has been delayed: the new iLife release means extensive revisions, including coverage of the newest program, GarageBand. Naturally, I've had to make some tunes with GarageBand in order to plan the chapters covering the program: Under the Gibbous Sun and Rimshot prove how easily a non-musician can produce mediocre but listenable compositions (by the way, the word in the background of Rimshot is "peanuts").

1-11-2004 - Someone named Graeme in the UK sent me an email this morning to inform me that my EW Review page is a googlewhack. Here's my dilemma: if I tell you which two words earned EW Review that honor, it would no longer be a googlewhack.

1-9-2004 - Analysts and some normal humans are getting all upset because Apple's new mini-iPod costs more than the pre-release rumors would have it; the colorful metal music boxes retail at $249, and folk are saying that that is too much. Keep in mind that the first iPod (with a similar capacity) retailed at an even higher price, but as newer models came out, the original iPod dropped in price. I have a feeling that as parts become cheaper, and newer iPod-minis emerge from Cupertino, the first generation models will drop in price.

12-21-2003 - More stuff to worry about....

12-8-2003 - Steve Jobs gives an interview with Rolling Stone this week, and the man sounds surprisingly...well, unmercurial. And pretty savvy about the music business, too.

12-7-2003 - An article on The Sydney Morning Herald's site today notes that some mental health professionals are upset with the characterization of Gollum's mental state in Peter Jackson's adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings: "Mental health groups say media commentators, and the film's director, Peter Jackson, are perpetuating negative stereotypes of mental illness by referring to Gollum's 'schizophrenic nature'." Hey, people, Gollum is not suffering from a medical or psychological illness--he is under the influence of an evil magic ring! It ain't the sniffles, it ain't psychosis...and he ain't a real person. However, I am not so sure but that the folk who are getting upset about this might need a few sessions on the couch....

12-6-2003 - I was just reading an article posted on the eWeek site and, when I got to the bottom of the page, I found that I hadn't got to the end of the article. No, folks, there was a link to lead me to the article's second page. More and more I see this (the New York Times does it, too). Why? As far as I can tell, it's so these sites can sell more space to advertisers that will be near the top of the page, which allows them to charge more money for the ad. There is absolutely no technical reason that the article I was reading couldn't fit on a single Web page. Breaking the article up, in fact, only made it more difficult for me to read, and harder for search engines to index. I'm not even sure it was to the advertisers' advantage: every time I have to click to read more, when there is no technical reason for doing so, I get annoyed, and I'm not sure that an ad viewed by angry people helps sell product. Color me cranky (say, what color is cranky?).

11-22-2003 - Holy double-cross! CNET News reports that Barbara Gordon, a top sales executive for Sun Microsystems, has left that company to join forces with its arch-nemesis Microsoft. Funny, I always thought that Barbara Gordon was actually the secret identity of Batgirl! Does Bruce Wayne know about this?

11-17-2003 - They call themselves "Parents and Kids against StealingŖ" and they have created SendThemBack.org to tell us all how to make amends for illegally downloading or copying copyrighted material. My faith in human nature has been restored. (By the way, illegally downloading or copying copyrighted material is not legally "theft", nor is it "piracy" - it is a different crime, one called "copyright infringement". Those who mislabel this crime are akin to those who label any expression of free speech with which they disagree "treason" - in other words, they are liars, and when you hear these lies you should very carefully consider whether ulterior motives inspired them, or whether they merely express a pathological disorder, like coprolalia.)

11-16-2003 - Now that I've got more reliable access to my iDisk happening (cured by a $79 Airport card for my iMac--I installed it to work around a problem that Apple's old Graphite Base Stations have handling WebDAV connections via NAT over bridged Ethernet/Airport networks, a problem which Apple probably will never fix [*sigh*]), perhaps I'll post more phenomena than I have in the past. In the meantime, I've been playing with iBlog, and have used it to create a weekly review of Entertainment Weekly. (What's the Latin for "Who will review the reviewers"? Anyone? Bueller?)

8-12-2003 - A news report yesterday stated that benevolent software hegemony Microsoft (all blessings to them [please don't hurt us!]) lost a patent suit brought jointly by Eolas Technology and the University of California. The jury decided that Microsoft's Internet Explorer contains functions that infringe an Eolas-UC patent, and the jury awarded the plaintiffs over half a billion dollars. Microsoft, looking through its pockets for spare change to tip the legal staff, announced that they will appeal the decision. Given the justice system's track record in dealing with Microsoft, one can expect that within five years California will boast the William Gates University of California, and that the degrees it grants will be licensed on a three-year renewable basis.

6-15-2003 - Another boomer-friendly consumer concept, and this one's in a squeeze bottle. The folks at Nestlˇ have just introduced what amounts to Bosco for grownups: Nescafˇ Ice Java coffee syrup. Pour yourself some cold milk, squeeze in the syrup, stir, and you got yourself a nice glass of chocolate mil...uh, I mean, sweet iced coffee. But I bet the jingle isn't as catchy as Bosco's.

6-9-2003 - From the Department of Inauthentic Reportage...

Los Angeles (AP) - Stymied in their search for weapons of mass destruction following the conclusion of the Iraq war, Bush administration officials announced today the creation of the Office of Illicit Ordnance Investigations and assigned it the responsibility for conducting the search.

Ari Fleischer, the President's outgoing press secretary, stated today that "Heretofore, the search has been spread among various military units, intelligence agencies, civilian authorities, and even a few United Nations weapons inspectors. As a successful former business executive, the President realizes that this duplication of effort has led to inefficiency, and has undertaken to streamline the operative paradigm of the weapons-seeking initiative. To that end, he has created a central coordination office to which all mass-destructive weapon and weapon-like device investigatory units will submit their status reports and from whom they will obtain their operational assigned objectives."

Chosen to head the OIOI is former sports legend and actor, Orenthal James Simpson. Fleischer stated that the President picked Simpson because of the ex-athlete's extensive experience pursuing unpromising investigative leads, both from his search for the still-to-be apprehended "real killers" of his former late wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and from the numerous police cases with which he was involved in the acclaimed Police Squad movies. Simpson, in a press release issued following the administration's announcement, vowed to not rest until the weapons have been found. "And when I find them," the press release concluded, "I have a feeling that I'll be that much closer to finding the real killers, too."

5-20-2003 - High concept cinema: Inspector Clouseau as Maxwell Smart in England. Uh...groovy, baby.

5-8-2003 - Some weeks ago I resigned my position. I wasn't let go, I wasn't fired, and I didn't leave to take other employment. I left because the organization for which I worked had become one of those sad pockets you can often find inside a bureaucracy in which the vision had dimmed, the joy had departed, and the practice of politics had replaced pleasures of performance. In short, what had once been my career had been turned into a dead-end job. Given the current economic climate, my leaving wasn't, perhaps, the most prudent thing to do, but I had to weigh the abstract value of my self-respect against the fiscal value of a steady paycheck, and, oddly, the steady paycheck just didn't weigh enough.

I'm no Pollyanna; in fact, when someone tells me "every time one door closes another one opens" I'm apt to respond, "Yeah, and the flies get in." Still, things have worked out better than I would have hoped. I still don't have a job, true, but it looks like I may have a career. Not only have I been asked to work on the ninth edition of the Macintosh Bible (something I've done twice before), but I've also acquired, quite by chance, a literary agent and the opportunity to write a book about Apple's iLife applications. It'll be interesting to see how this new career develops....

5-1-2003 - On Monday, Apple rolled out its new music store service and debuted its new model iPods. The music store is dangerously addictive, and only a firm exercise of self-restraint (involving frequent reviews of my currently stagnant income stream and some small electric shocks) stopped me from dropping many dollars into the digital download depository; not that I got away completely unscathed: Apple and the music labels stocking the store got five bucks off me pretty darn quickly. And the new iPods are making me seriously consider getting Yet Another Digital Device - although my original model 5-gig iPod is still my favorite toy, I can feel the techno-lust surging (ooooh, red glowing buttons! Pretty!). The specs say the new models have more storage and better software, but are smaller and lighter - this last, however, seems at odds with the photo published in the online edition of the Economist...that thing must be eight feet tall!

4-11-2003 - For a number of months, I've been having odd problems connecting to my iDisk at Apple's .Mac service; the main problem being that files I copy from my desktop machine (a 17-inch iMac) to my iDisk usually end up corrupted (note that the iDisk is the virtual device that is serving this very site to you, Gentle Reader). I don't experience this problem from my laptop computer; only from my desktop machine. Periodically, I've posted notes about the problem to Apple's discussion boards, where I saw a few other reports of similar problems, but no solution has been offered on those boards that worked for me.

Then a few days ago I went to the venerable MacFixIt site, as I do most days, and found that one of my discussion board postings was quoted on MacFixIt's top page. I found this rather gratifying, first, because it is always nice to be taken seriously, and secondly (and even more importantly) because the very public appearance of my connection problem might mean that someone would take action to solve it. And so it appears to have happened.

This morning, a very nice fellow from Apple called me and asked if I would have time to help them examine the iDisk connection problem in detail. As a result, for much of the day I've been working with the folk at Apple, trying various connection methods with their .Mac servers. While I can't report on a solution yet, I can say that the Apple folk were responsive, intelligent, and a pleasure with whom to work. We (or they, with my assistance) amassed some good evidence and uncovered a few clues that could lead to a solution.

The whole experience has also made clear to me how hard it is for any technology company like Apple to solve all the problems that users report. For example, my little problem involved the work of three Apple technical staff and a good part of a day just to acquire the information they needed to diagnose and possibly to solve the problem. It will almost certainly require some other folk to do the necessary coding and testing to make sure that the problem is solved and that the solution doesn't create any other problems. And my problem is only one of many problems that users report with Apple software or hardware (no slur on Apple: all operating systems and computer hardware ship with such problems - an OS is a very complex engineering construct, and so is a personal computer, and the number of interacting variables involved in the creation and mass production of them is astronomical). It's no wonder that intermittent and isolated problems like mine take a while to get fixed; the wonder is that so many of them do get fixed at all.

So, though I've had the connection problem for a while, and have been disappointed that the several software updates Apple has shipped during that time have not solved my problem, I haven't been outraged. And now that I've actually been able to communicate with Apple about the problem in some detail, I am impressed and delighted with their professionalism and courtesy.

4-5-2003 - Page 3 on Steve Portigal's Foreign Groceries Museum site shows, among other things, four flavors of Pringles for the Japanese market. Back in the late 1970s one of my alternate personalities lobbied Proctor & Gamble (Pringles' proud pappa) for a BBQ flavor, and they wrote back that they'd consider it (the complete correspondence is right here). If memory serves, it took them more than a decade to concoct a BBQ-flavored pseudo-chip, but having started, they're now popping out new flavor variations faster than you can, well, eat potato chips.

3-21-2003 - A couple of days ago, Apple Computer announced that Al Gore had been named to its Board of Directors, causing Rush Limbaugh to wonder whether "one bad apple can spoil the whole bunch." For years Rush's been a fan of the computers made by a company whose CEO is a turtle-neck-wearing liberal vegan, but now that a centrist Democrat has been named to its board, a board which meets maybe four times a year, he's worried about the company's future. Uh, yeah, whatever....

3-20-2003 - Another brother, another birthday, another card. There are just so many jokes you can make about cake.

3-11-2003 - This particular drawing is for a digital medievalist with whom I've had a rather long-standing relationship.

3-8-2003 - Another cartoon. I'm on a roll now: two in less than a month! My legions of fan will be pleased.

2-9-2003 - Here is the front of the birthday card I gave my brother yesterday. The message inside the card read, "Some tendencies we never outgrow." I believe it's the first cartoon I've drawn this year--several people have asked me why I'm not drawing more; I think the quality of this piece answers that question.

2-4-2003 - Some observable phenomena may be better left unobserved; for example, the lunch mentioned in this photograph.

1-12-2003 - Just now I was channel surfing through Adelphia Cable's digital offerings, and hit the local broadcast outlet, KCOP, which was showing Singles (1992). But over the soundtrack of the movie was also the soundtrack of Kubrick's The Shining (1980). For a while the combination of Bridget Fonda, Scatman Crothers, and Danny Lloyd seemed to make a certain amount of nightmarish sense.

1-1-2003 - Each year, sometime during the week between Christmas and New Year's Day, I gather up all the charitable solicitations that my wife has plucked out of the mail during the preceding twelve months and spend a few hours writing checks (I know -- one half-penny-worth of bread to this intolerable deal of sack, but whatcha gonna do?). This year, though, a couple of organizations to whom I ordinarily donate didn't get their checks. Why? I blame some too-clever-by-half M.B.A.s working for these groups, folk who decided to bring modern marketing techniques to their organizations, and who have conceived of their organizations' charitable activities as branded products to be offered to their "customer" base. This strategy, however, came a cropper when it came to us.

You see, we have a small apartment and way too many things (mostly paper things called "books") in it, so, as part of a much larger attempt to keep the clutter to a minimum, my wife does not save every request for funds that we receive, but keeps only one from each organization who solicits us. She doesn't usually open and read them when they come in; she just plucks them from the mail and drops them in the solicitation file folder -- if there are two from one organization in the folder, she throws one of them out. So, what happened this year is that several of the groups to whom we ordinarily donate each sent us several mailings, and each of those mailings contained a targeted request for one of their several charity funds in their product blend of funds. In the case of two charities, the request that happened to be retained in our incoming solicitation file was for a specific charity fund to which we did not care to donate. All would have been well if the solicitations had also contained a way to send general donations, but, no, that apparently was not deemed good marketing practice: let's not confuse the charity consumer with too many choices. So Habitat for Humanity and the Planetary Society lost out in the year-end donation sweepstakes in our household this year. Sorry.

12-10-2002 - Some people take their condiments very, very seriously. (Me, I prefer Kimlan.)

11-24-2002 - Yesterday was our twelfth wedding anniversary, and what better way to spend it than sauntering through the gardens at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, followed by high tea. And so, that's what we did.

9-8-2002 - Something for the masses of H.P. Lovecraft/Scooby-Doo fans out there.

9-8-2002 - I've been playing with my new 17-inch iMac. It arrived two days before I was scheduled to leave town to attend the 60th World Science Fiction Convention in San Josˇ (ConJosˇ). My OOTB experience was not great; I'd ordered the iMac direct from the Apple Store online, and when it arrived it was broken: the screen refused to stay, well, erect, flopping down as though the machine were unwilling to look me in the eye.

I called Apple's customer support who suggested I take it to the nearest Apple Store, and they suggested I try the Newport Beach location (some fifty miles away). I pointed out to them that there was one much closer at The Grove. They opined that that was probably a good choice, entered my case number into their system, and apologized for the broken machine.

So I called the Apple Store at The Grove to find out the procedure for bringing the iMac in, and they made a mistake and transferred my call back to the centralized customer support line, who once again suggested that I take the machine to a nearby store. I told them that I had called the store in The Grove and that they had transferred my call back to customer support for some unknown reason, and the customer support representative said, "The Grove, that's in New York?" I said, "No, Los Angeles." They said that I could take the iMac to The Grove, but that there was a closer Apple Authorized Service Provider who could do the repair: MacSolutions. This dealer was a scant three miles away, and I had done business with them in the past, so I re-boxed the posture-challenged iMac and drove to MacSolutions.

MacSolutions told me that they would have to order a part and that it would take a few days. I told them that I was leaving town for a week, and they said they would try to get the machine fixed before I returned. I left the machine with them, drove to San Jose in my Prius (46.7 MPG on the drive there and 48.8 MPB on the way back) with my wife and my brother, and spent the next few days consorting with Klingons, Jedi Knights, and Filthy Pierre at ConJosˇ.

The required part arrived at MacSolutions the day after I returned, and Paul, the technician who worked on my iMac, said that it was the first 17-inch iMac that he'd worked on and remarked that he was excited. Though that remark gave me a frisson of fear, his excitement apparently did not affect his skill, because he replaced the monitor arm perfectly the same day and I took the machine home that afternoon.

The iMac can look me square in the eye now, and I've spent the past few days busily moving my various files and applications into their new home. Although its arrival was inauspicious, the iMac itself is wonderful. Fast, quiet, with copious disk storage and--now that it can hold itself up without the aid of Viagra--a marvelous screen.

9-7-2002 - September 11th is coming and with it, I fear, an enormous media orgy. The Onion sums it up better than I possibly could.

8-18-2002 - Some news stories are just too big to hide, and too disturbing to ignore. This isn't one of them.

8-4-2002 - Today my wife and I went to the new Apple Store at the Grove in Los Angeles. The Grove and, hence, the store, is located on land that was once occupied by the Gilmore Drive-in Theater, behind the Farmer's Market at Third and Fairfax in Los Angeles. My grandparents, with whom I lived when I was finishing elementary school and starting junior high several decades that-a-way, lived only two blocks away from the Farmer's Market, and I used to spend much time there, prowling the novelty shops, souvenir stores, and food stands. Now I have a reason to go there again, for the combination of nostalgia and techno-lust is a heady one. The store itself seems designed after the title of a Hemingway short story--it is a clean, well-lighted place--and the busy atmosphere there this afternoon was reminiscent of the convention floor at a MacWorld Expo. We prowled around, stroked the lovely hardware, bought some DVD-R disks, and then had falafels in the Farmer's Market a few steps away. A splendid way to spend a lazy summer afternoon.

7-5-2002 - I had an interesting discussion today with a colleague regarding blogs, and encountered two manifestations of Cowboy Programmer Attitude (CPA) that bothered me. The first was a version of "I'm smarter than other programmers" and the second was a version of "I'm smarter than the user."

The "I'm smarter than other programmers" proclamation ran something like, "As far as I can tell, a blog is really just a variant of a newsgroup post. Why did they bother building a whole new API? That's inefficient!" The person who said this did not use a blog, did not read blogs, and had only heard a little bit about them, yet he felt completely justified in his opinion. Well, opinions are fine, everyone is certainly entitled to have one, and maybe his opinion in this case could eventually be justified--however, without actually looking at the API involved, without familiarizing himself with the variety of blogs out there on the Web, without becoming familiar with the way blogs are used, and without looking at the feature set of the various blogging tools that have arisen in response to bloggers' needs and desires, this person nonetheless felt himself to be justified in condemning the inefficiency (and, by implication, condemning the efforts and the intellectual competence) of hundreds of programmers and thousands of users.

The second proclamation ran something like this: "Why would anyone want to bother posting a blog? Who would want to read it? I don't see the point." This sort of CPA is far more pernicious than the first, since it reduces the client's needs to triviality if they don't happen to correspond with what the programmer feels is important. In some cases, this is no big deal; in others, it can be disastrous. I can't tell you how many times I've seen bad user interface explained by a programmer offering a variation of this attitude ("Only someone stupid would [press that button/provide that input/click that control]"). Sometimes the user is stupid or ignorant. But often a user's request or complaint indicates a real problem that is not being addressed or a need that is not being met. It is not the professional programmer's place to pass judgement on the user's needs or desires but to fulfill them.

6-23-2002 - I'm driving again. Our new car is a Toyota Prius. Cameron Diaz has a Prius. So does Ed Begley, Jr. How hip does that make us?

The Prius replaces a sixteen-year-old Honda Accord, the first (and, until a few days ago, the only) new car I'd ever purchased. The Accord was a wonderfully dependable and economical ride; the Prius, obviously, has yet to prove itself, but in its first hundred miles it has travelled mountain roads and freeways with ease and grace, and has delivered almost 42 miles per gallon. The Prius is a total full-on geekmobile: you don't start this car, you boot it. The center-dash LCD touch-screen provides an energy flow display, fuel consumption and power regeneration graphs, access to the GPS-enabled navigation system, as well as virtual controls for the radio, the cassette player and the six-disc CD changer. The car's computer monitors and controls the interactions between the gasoline engine, the electric motor, and the continuously variable transmission, providing a driving experience that is pleasant, intellectually engaging, and occasionally surreal.

I have a feeling that this car and I are going to become great friends.

6-12-2002 - Don't have time to read something long? Try something short--really short. Something that is a power-of-two words long. One recent entry is a four-word story called "Reaching the Black Hole" by M. Stanley Bubien.

6-1-2002 - My car was stolen two days ago, taken from the carport underneath our apartment. I went downstairs to get in the car and go to work and there was a car-shaped hole in the air where my car was supposed to be. It was the second oldest car in the carport (16 years old) and the dirtiest, and it obviously wasn't easy for the thieves to get into it because they apparently had to pry the door open (a strip of bent door molding was left behind). I hope the crack they buy with the proceeds of the crime gives them emphysema.

5-11-2002 - A friend of mine is about to turn fifty. This is for her.

4-14-2002 - "Spare the snark, spoil the networks" is the slogan of Television Without Pity. I don't know what that means...probably the result of watching too much TV.

4-4-2002 - Baseball season has begun, offering almost endless opportunities for America's athletes to exhibit exemplary sportsmanship. Or not.

3-30-2002 - I had lost faith and turned to Microsoft's Internet Explorer last year...I had no choice: it was the best browser (warts and all) available for Mac OS X, and I was fully committed to Mac OS X. Of the other OS X browsers, OmniWeb had the nicer display, iCab the smallest footprint and the most fanatical support of Web standards, but neither could handle the variety of bizarre pages I visit as well as IE. And Netscape 6 was, well, clunky and lumbering. But today I installed the latest Mozilla (v. 0.9.9) for Mac OS X. Open source may be a slow process (over a year ago, the tech press seemed convinced that the Mozilla project was too slow to ever produce anything of interest), but the results seem to justify the development pace. The latest version is fast, stable, and feels mature: by this afternoon, I'd made it my default browser.

3-23-2002 - As online advertising revenues plummet, and the big media companies enlist the aid of their fully-subsidized legislators to copy-protect just about everything that isn't a hundred years old, we stand to lose the free-flow of information that made the Web blossom. For example, would a fully conglomerated and mass-media-assimilated Web provide us with this? I think not....

3-16-2002 - Wired reports on two dudes who turned a Mac SE 30 into a bong. When the idea came to them, one reported, they were "probably stoned." Well, yeah. (Wonder what I can make when my trusty Newton 2100 finally kicks?)

3-3-2002 - Dwelling on individual bummers, not to mention the total bummerosity of a universe that is really, at best, indifferent to our lives, not to mention our species' very existence, is no fun, and having fun, though ultimately hopeless and pointless in the face of that indifferent if not inimical universe, is, well, fun, universe be damned.

3-2-2002 - I have over 760 songs on my iPod, all "ripped" from CDs that my wife and I own. The recording industry does not like this; they call me a pirate. They plan to produce CDs that can't be copied. Meanwhile, many recording artists have to pay for audits in order to get the royalties to which they are entitled from the recording companies who call me a pirate. Irony...it's what's for dinner.

2-22-2002 - Gentleman animator Charles M. Jones died today. If you don't feel sorrow and loss at that news, I feel sorry for you.

2-19-2002 - Dog pile on the Redmond geeks! First, AOL subsidiary Netscape sues Microsoft for damages caused by illegal use of its OS monopoly, then the judge overseeing the anti-trust case and the proposed settlement orders Microsoft to reveal its source code to the dissenting states, and now the ghost of Be sues Microsoft for damages. C'mon, let's everybody join in!

2-18-2002 - As if I had anything to say. Instead, I'd like to direct you to my wife's instructional technology blog, since it is very cool and useful.

By the way, this isn't a blog...at least, not an automated one. Just simple, old-school HTML, whipped up in a text editor.

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