UFO GEEKOUT ON LOBO PEAK

What can I say? I did see the blue lights.

The funny thing was, only a few nights before, on the My Mac Magazine chat at WWB, a couple of people had kidded me about the "blue lights" here in northern New Mexico. You know, UFOs. The Taos hum, cattle mutilations, all that good stuff.

Now I don't know about you, but when I hear "UFO," I think red lights. Out in West Texas, where they have the orange-red "Marfa lights," I used to know a fellow from Brownwood whose mother belonged to a Baptist UFO cult. These folks would actually go out and hunt for flying saucers as a kind of religious exercise, believing them to be heavenly vehicles piloted by avenging angels. Interestingly, my old friend more or less dropped out of sight a number of years ago. You don't suppose. . .?!?

At any rate, early Friday afternoon I was about to post some news stories to Applelinks, when all of a sudden it wasn't there. The site, I mean. Poof, vanished like my old buddy from Brownwood. According to Netscape, the domain didn't exist! And when I emailed our managing editor to report this travesty, the message bounced back. Hmmm. Suffice it to say this was a considerable impediment to my labors, so I tried everything I could to coax Applelinks back from wherever it had gone.

I trashed the MacDNR file. I trashed the Finder preferences. I rebuilt the desktop. I ran Norton Disk Doctor. I rebooted innumerable times. I went bananas. Being temporarily wifeless, I was able to do this as long as I wanted without being called away for silly things like dinner, and before I knew it, the sun had set. I washed a handful of cookies down with hot coffee and persevered. . .

About 8 or 9 o'clock, it happened: WHAM, the electricity went out all at once! No flicker, no dimming, no warning. In the sudden black silence, I could hear the hard drives spin down. You know how when this happens, you wait for a few moments to see if the power comes back on right away? Well, it didn't. OK, fine, I'll stop, I thought.

I got up from my chair, bumped around in the darkness, put my hand down where a flashlight ought to be (yes!), and made my way into the kitchen to light some candles. This accomplished, it occurred to me to go outside and look for other lights in the valley below. I opened the door, stepped out into the crisp, clear night, and -- oh my God!

There were lights, all right, but not in my neighbors' houses. It was the sky! If you've never been at high altitude in a dry atmosphere, I don't know if this will make any sense to you, but the stars out here don't "twinkle," they flash. It's the darnedest thing. Back East they shimmer gently, but here they're like intermittent celestial strobe lights. The first time you see it, it's quite impossible to believe. (Blink-blink, and look again: no, they're still doing it!) And just what was that, low in the sky to the southeast?? I didn't know what to think!

What I was looking at appeared to be a cluster of bright, flashing, blue and red lights. And (here's where it gets really weird) they seemed to be dancing, always in motion but staying in a fairly tight group. As I watched, single blue lights would swing out from the cluster a short distance, then return, but the cluster stayed in one place. I blinked again and again. None of the stars were doing anything like this. It had to be an atmospheric phenomenon, I thought. But the flashes were so bright, and yes, there was movement within the cluster.

But Jesus, it was cold!

I pointed the flashlight at the thermometer on the porch: 25 degrees, no wonder. I was already shivering, whether from strangeness or the cold, and I had no way of telling what the thing was or whether my eyes were deceiving me, so I beat it back inside. It was warm there, but if the power stayed off, that would soon change. Knowing this, I gulped down a bowl of raisin bran by candlelight and went to bed. All night long I was awakened repeatedly by mostly disturbing, vivid Technicolor dreams and got little sleep.

By morning the power was back, but Applelinks was not. I knew this immediately because I rolled out of bed and turned the computer on before I did anything else. ("The site, where's the site?! Aaaghh!! ")

All day long I toiled in vain. . .

I wailed via email to the system administrator for my local ISP. He had several helpful suggestions, like entering the IP addresses for a few other ISPs' domain name servers in my TCP/IP control panel. I tried them all, but nothing worked. While he waited for word from the ISP's "upstream provider," I got in touch with John Martellaro. John is of course obscenely smart in these matters and immediately suggested I download something called WhatRoute 1.6, a freeware route tracing utility by Bryan Christianson. This brilliant piece of software would produce a cool graphical map of the route a packet of information would take to reach Applelinks.com, if it ever did. While this involved a higher level of geeksmanship than I had bothered with before, it made perfect sense, like most of the things John suggests. (How does he do that??)

As a matter of fact, I was feeling pretty smart myself, since I had just joined the 20th Century and upgraded to OS 8.6 from 8.1 It only took me two seconds to fall in love with Sherlock, and before you know it, I had downloaded WhatRoute 1.6b4, run the program, and bombed the 8600 three times in a row (system error). It turned out that the latest version of WhatRoute is designed for OS 9. Curses! There was still about an hour of full daylight left, so I decided to shut everything down and take a hike. I grabbed a windbreaker, some apple juice, my walking stick and a hat, and headed up the road to the Forest Service trailhead at San Cristobal Canyon.*

[Tromp, tromp, tromp, tromp. . .gorgeous scenery, not a soul in sight! Tromp, tromp, wheeze, gasp. . 8,000 feet, remember . .tromp, wheeze, gasp, rest. . .]

There was not a sound to be heard at first, except an occasional flutter of birds' wings and the wind in the pines. Farther along I heard the roaring of the creek at the trailhead, and I allowed myself ten minutes more, hiking up alongside the rushing water through grassy glens in the deep Ponderosa pine forest. Orange-gold sunlight still reached the treetops but was about to leave, so I reluctantly turned around and headed back. I was utterly alone. A crack of a twig on the forest floor would have made me jump ten feet in the air, but there was none. I scanned the steep slopes for signs of the Mighty Puma as I made my way down the canyon trail (you never know) and felt distinctly relieved to reach the open clearing at the trailhead once more. The sunlight had moved farther up the mountainside. It would be dark in 20 minutes, and I quick-marched back to the dusty gravel road leading back down the mountain.

The trailhead being 45 minutes walk from my front door, the last half of my walk was an adventure in stumbling! I could see the twilight shadows deepen and lengthen in the distant Rio Grande gorge, but I had trouble seeing the large rocks protruding from the dirt right in front of me. A walking stick comes in especially handy at times like this, so you can steady yourself while descending, night or day -- good thing I had one, or I would have fallen for sure.

I made it back to the house, turned on the 8600, and checked my email: there was a messase from John M., advising me to go outside, look at the stars, and "ride it out." Feeling uncommonly sensible and smug, I fired back that I had just taken a 2 hour hike! Let him top that, I thought -- and he did!

"We have mountain lions and bears up here on the mountain. I don't know about you, but I would suggest that if you go walking after dark that you take a) cell phone (assuming you have coverage), b) a bright flashlight and c) a sturdy, heavy, lethal walking stick. (or a 9mm automatic. Your choice.) I'm not kidding."

John lives outside of Denver at nine thousand feet (curses!) and since I haven't heard him say a dumb thing yet, I figured I was lucky to be alive: my walking stick was anything but lethal, I hadn't carried a flashlight, and if I had to carry a 9mm on a hike, I might as well be in Baltimore! As for the cell phone, I emailed in reply:

"You've got to be kidding! 'Hello, 911? A cougar is stalking me right now, and. . .OH NO! He's --' [scream, gurgle, clatter, static]"

At least I had thought about the Mighty Puma. But I still had a bigger problem, not being able to raise Applelinks! I microwaved some leftover broccoli and sirloin, washed them down with what was left of the apple juice, and proceeded to download and run WhatRoute 1.4. (This version lacked the graphical readout but ran just fine on OS 8.6.)

My ISP was now reporting that the trouble wasn't with their server and that the upstream provider was working on the problem. Cool! But I had seen the lights, climbed the canyon, made it back alive, and was ready for anything, especially now that I had 8.6 and a new toy: WhatRoute!

Friends, this widget is just what the doctor ordered. If you're languishing on the borders of geekdom, you owe it to yourself to get this app and learn a few things. Most of you know that your signal takes a circuitous route when you hit a link for a particular web site, but just where it goes is quite a revelation! After "pinging" to get the IP address (it's easy), you tell the program to run a trace, and you can watch a readout that shows you how many "hops" the signal makes from server to server. From where I live, the signal destined for the Applelinks server on the East Coast went first to Albuquerque, Los Angeles, San Francisco, a couple of other places I can't remember, then back and forth between the same two Pacific Bell servers forever. Aha! Even a non-geek can tell that this ain't right -- you don't reach the ocean by going back and forth between Dayton and Columbus, for example.

Every time I tried, the results were different, of course, but each time the readout showed the packets bouncing around inside the PacBell system and never leaving. Sounds pretty spooky, doesn't it? Stranger still was the solution, when it was discovered: a problem with equipment in Ann Arbor, Michigan! (Don't ask. . .) When things are working correctly, a signal from here to Applelinks makes anywhere from 8 to 12 hops and usually circumnavigates North America in the process. Download the software and see for yourselves -- this is pretty weird stuff, folks! (Linearity has gone out the window, in case you haven't noticed, but that's probably a good thing.)

That last sentence could be a metaphor for our times, as well as a hint about the Big Picture, about the way everything really works anyway, from sub-atomic so-called particles to whether you'll fall off a mountain this afternoon. The truth is out there, as the man says, but if you go looking for it, you'll end up bouncing around inside a concept and never get anywhere. A great illustration I once read went something like, "This medicine won't work if you think of a monkey while taking it."

(See?)

Last night the electricity did not go off, but I stepped outside to see the stars and look for, uh, you know. I turned toward the southeast, and damn, there they were, those same dancing blue and red lights! It was later than the night before, and the lights were higher in the sky just as any star would be, but I swear, they moved. They separated, spun around, flashed on and off, did the polka. What the hell?? This has to be a trick of temperature and humidity levels in the upper atmosphere, right? But why isn't anything else moving like that? Do they see these things in Cleveland, fergodssakes?? And do you know where your cows are tonight???

(I'm blaming it on the monkey!)

Pleasant dreams. . .

John H. Farr also edits the Apple Computer News for Applelinks.com and invites your comments. The Farr Site Archives have links to all past columns and occasional snippets of biographical info.

To be notified whenever the column is updated, just send a message titled "Subscribe FSN" to this address.

*If you don't know where it is, you'll never find it. (Good!)

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January 08, 2009