ONE MORE TIME, FOR JACK

Oh no, not again! But this time it was different.

My wife and I had hardly been home from Tucson long enough to get the bed warm , two nights in fact, when we got the call that my father-in-law had passed away in his sleep around 8:20 p.m. Central Time Saturday night. As these things sometimes are, the news was a relief in some ways but still packed a ferocious punch. There's an elemental rending of the psyche when a parent goes, no matter what the relationship. In this case we're talking about a one-in-a-million guy with a heart of gold, and I didn't have to think twice. Memorial service? Off to Des Moines! (What's a week without another road trip, anyway?)

No stranger to life on the open road, Jack had covered quite a bit of ground as a traveling salesman in his younger days. In the process he learned a little bit about every small town and burg you'd ever care to mention and kept meticulous records, too. Not too long ago we found some of them, and I wish I could quote them now so you'd see what gas, food, and hotels used to cost! He had an amazing memory for names, personal histories, high school basketball coaches and other notables, and could anecdote you to death (so to speak), but no one really minded. The amazing thing was that I never once heard the guy say a bad word about anyone. A lesson to us all, if ever there was one. You'd think with all those experiences he'd have accumulated a stack of grudges, but I never saw a one.

Lordy!

Comb through all my utterances with a slam filter and you'll need to clean the thing after every pull. Yet Jack went through life without a ripple! How is this even possible?? Meanwhile, here I sit worrying about stupid things like how to make a living and whether my Internet job can survive this careening back and forth across the prairies. Man! I sure hope it's not too late to learn a thing or two from my father-in-law, wherever he is.

The answer, like most important life knowledge, is probably simple and has to do with always having a sense of humor! Jack was a trickster, a gentle joker who always surprised with little acts of fun and kindness. At the same time he had enormous fun building an identity for himself: a student of the Civil War, a lover of the Old West, a diehard Nebraska fan (Go Big Red!), and a lifelong master of all things automotive, at least until microprocessors and plastic changed our cars forever. But always, and in everything, a sense of humor. The things he didn't approve of, he just didn't mention, or would couch with sly, ironic naming. It must have happened, but I never saw him get upset.

So I wonder how my father-in-law would approach things that drive me insane, like how to do my job while I'm flying down the freeway! At least I have my beloved iBook to carry along from motel to motel, and it doesn't require the "support satchel" my PowerBook 540c did. (I'm about to pass that baby on to my sister -- visit her Web site and buy some art! -- and I hope she has a sense of humor.) No, the iBook is a joy. What isn't so joyful is getting reliably connected on the road. (Are you getting this, Jack?)

We've covered this ground before, but it has to do with (a) no local AOL dialup numbers in the boonies, and (b) the aggravation of looking them up in the first place! Dialing the 800-number on the motel phone is rarely successful, and when I do manage it I'm confronted with a long list of numbers and have to fumble through a local directory (if there is one) to see which exchange I should select (for some reason I never do this first). In the process I usually lose my connection and have to start all over again, if I can once again trick the motel switchboard into letting the modem dial out. Using my Sprint calling card with my home ISP works like a charm, naturally, so that's what I usually end up doing, after wasting valuable post-driving awareness trying to get the free staff AOL account to function. (Jack??) My last extended period of cross-country travel resulted in phone charges of almost $200 and the results as expressed in what I was able to write and post to Applelinks were erratic at best. There has to be a better way, doggone it. And if I've learned anything at all after writing this column for the last two years, it's that any number of you will tell me how. :-)

At least on the road I don't have to play "AirPort roulette." (See, I'm learning!) That's the game where you open the AirPort window and see if everything locks up. At least in Russian roulette you have five out of six chances of surviving, but with the AirPort software, the odds are less than half as good. Remember, I love AirPort! It's the damn software that, that. . .(O.K., Jack, I'll start over :-). . .it's the software that needs a little more time in the oven. Can you spell "half-baked"?? They tell me that this very week we can expect AirPort 1.1 from Apple's servers, and I'll be the first in line!

You think I exaggerate? How many times has your control strip crashed?? And the cool thing about AirPort software freezes is that even after initiating a forced quit, the iBook won't restart. Norton Filesaver does its thing, the dialog box asks me if I mind if the RAM disk contents are trashed (duh!), and then nothing. It goes through every step except blacking out and bonging to life again, while the desktop just sits there serenely waiting for the three-fingered salute! No doubt something is bungled up. No doubt one of my darling little "extras" is the ball bearing in the porridge.

What, you want me to test for extension conflicts? Are you MAD?? Who has time for that??? And no, I won't buy Conflict Catcher. It takes too long to open and makes me want to uh, er -- oh jeez, I'm doing it again! A lifetime of spewing is hard to give up in a day. You see, I'm really afraid of finding out what the conflict is, because then I'll have to give up "Look Mom No Hands" or "FreeRam Plus," and then where would I be? Huh??

Anyway, we have a trip to take and a real man to honor. Jack used to love road trips, even if he once made his living that way. You people who grew up in the East and cringe at the thought of driving longer than 4 hours at a stretch don't know what you're missing, or maybe you do. But years ago in the middle of the country, when families went on vacation, they'd drive "to the mountains," not the beach. And the mountains were in Colorado or Montana (still are, actually). Try that from Illinois or Iowa in a '55 Whatever and you're talking several days rolling down the highway, before Interstates too, when there was always something new to marvel at 'round every bend in the road. Those are the kinds of trips Jack used to take, shepherding a wife and three kids all the way to Anaconda most summers. He had a "Montana jar," too, where everyone in the family would drop money all year long so they could afford to go. (Makes burning your credit card to fly the brats to Orlando sound just a little shallow, doesn't it?)

I've been making trips to Des Moines from Maryland and now from New Mexico for over twenty years, but this will be the last one with an in-law connection. The old house has already been sold, and my wife's mother is moving to Dubuque to be close to her daughter's family. For years now we've driven to Iowa and walked the streets of the neighborhood where my wife grew up. That this should now evaporate feels strange, very strange indeed. Maybe our friends back in Maryland feel the same kind of thing when they drive past our old house in Still Pond. You never know.

But on this and future trips up north we'll at least cover ground that Jack knew and loved, mainly Nebraska! Oh, will we ever cover Nebraska. What I like about driving through this part of the world, besides the 75 mph speed limit, are the rest areas in historic locales. There's always a marker or exhibit to read, and thinking about folks in covered wagons going down the very same trail in oxen overdrive gives me goosebumps. I think my father-in-law must have felt the same way.

(You know, I just might rename the iBook "Jack," too. Maybe he can do something about those freezes! And maybe, just maybe, they won't bother me so much).

Break out the booze and Kleenex, we're on our way!

John H. Farr also edits the Apple Computer News for Applelinks.com and invites your comments. The Farr Site Archives are desperately in need of revision but still have links to most past columns. The latest ones can be found at the bottom of this page. And just for fun, visit the Zoo Zone.

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May 16, 2012