FLASH DIFFERENT: iBOOK COYOTE RAM

We were driving back from town the other evening when we saw it: the purple flash!

The sun had just set, and the upper western slopes of the Sangre de Christos gleamed softly with the blood-washed glow that gives them their name. Quite extraordinary in itself, this daily dose of technicolor wonder, accompanied out on the mesas by the broadest spectrum of blues, grays, and browns I've ever seen. Back East the ever-present humidity blurs the gradations, but out here each shade registers clearly and changes second by second as the light fades.

It was the Friday after Thanksgiving, and down in Arroyo Hondo the sheriff was busy ticketing impatient Coloradans flying back north after raiding the shops and galleries. (Don't they know to slow down when the road dives deep into a canyon with a village at the bottom? Good Lord, do Colorado cops only wait at the tops of hills?)

By the time we reached the summit on the other side, the mountain range had turned dark green and shadowy in the disappearing light. As we passed the dump and rounded the curve to drop down again, this time into our own valley, a high snow-capped peak to the north caught the last rays of the cloudless sunset and dope-slapped me into sudden awareness! My God, a distinctly magenta-tinted snowfield on a purple peak, surrounded by a pinkish glow! A few seconds later it was gone, just in time for me to pay attention and brake for the cattle-guard at the entrance to our turnoff. (Bang, bump rattle-rattle!)

As we turned left at the little post office and rumbled up the gravel road to the house, my head was spinning. What a show! Does this happen every night, I wondered?

When I stopped so my favorite cowgirl could get out and open the big, wide gate, I rolled down the window to listen to the Nissan's fat four-cylinder motor idling in the crisp night air: the steady breathy chugging told me all was well. After I had driven through, Katy Jane swung the gate closed and followed the tailights back to the car. As she climbed back in, a trailing cloud of dust finally caught up with us and drifted past. For a brief moment I could taste it and feel a slight grittiness between my teeth. Hmmm, so this is the wild, wild West, I thought. In Maryland it would have been dampness, the smell of rotting leaves, and fluttering moths or mosquitos. Wherever we were, it was certainly different from where we had been!

Safe and sound back in our rented abode, I sat on a stool at the kitchen counter with a bowl of blue corn chips, a glass of limeade, a double shot of tequila, and a dying Macworld. The magazine had in fact arrived two days earlier and wasn't actually dead yet, just well on the way. Its glossy new cover belied the ancient contents within: almost every article I turned to, I had already read on the Internet. Not only that, but there on page 32 was the iBook review I had panned weeks before! Actual original content ran to fewer than 100 pages, and there was a stifling sameness to the few odd items I hadn't seen: whether to use GIFs or JPEGs for Web images, how to buy things on the Internet, and a couple reviews of oddball software apps I would never buy. With the shining exception of the ever-entertaining David Pogue's contribution, the few "opinion" pieces were old history. Why had I renewed this thing, I asked myself? No doubt about it, I was leafing through a waste of good trees: for all the hoopla and pretty pictures, there wasn't enough here to last through a late-night peanut butter-and-jelly sandwich.

There was one thing that stuck in my craw, however: a letter to the editor from someone who'd unwittingly added his name to the list of clueless iBook critics. His bitter complaint about what he called its "Fisher-Price look" left me shaking my head, and his obvious fear of being labeled a sissy for carrying one reminded me of long-ago playground taunts. Kids can be awfully mean to each other, but we're all grownups now, right??

You see, I'm finally sitting here with a tangerine iBook on my lap (after four long months), feeling as happy as a well-fed hound dog lyin' in the sun! I can no more understand people who find something wrong with this thing than I can empathize with traffic-addled souls who "have to" live where the jobs are. Some things feel good and some things don't. This baby is a winner, hands down.

Easy to say now, right? Except that I have never seen so much unmitigated crap in my long Internet life as has been written about this computer by supposed experts of one stripe or another. Empiricist bozos, I call 'em (with love in my heart). If I were preoccupied with bean-counting and spleen-venting like these gents, I might never have comprehended just how gorgeous my own two-tone wonder is! Just go find one (if you can) and see for yourselves: the swoop and sharpness of the inner edges of the clamshell halves, for example, are simply stunning. Everything gleams and feels good to touch. It really is beautiful to behold, and anyone who underestimates this is a fool. Me, I sat up late last night and typed until the battery ran down, just so I could keep looking at it.

Performance-wise, it obviously runs rings around pre-G3 PowerMacs, the only kind I have any experience with, and considering how many of those are still in use every day all over the world, that means there's a lot of hound dogs waiting to be fed! It also connects to one of my two local ISPs at almost twice the speed of my 8600. Hmmm. Maybe the faithful Global Village modem needs a firmware update. . . (mutter, grumble)

The iBook is sturdy, easy to look at, more than fast enough, and does everything I want: I can write, email, surf, listen to music, or play with graphics programs, no sweat. It wakes up instantly from sleep, the handle gives me an extra hand when moving from room to room, and the battery lasts for hours. I feel happy owning one! Is there a problem here? Half a million would-be iBook owners don't think so.

(Only three mice, Macworld??)

Maybe it's time for a new way of looking at the world. We've been on this chop-it-up-and-analyze-it jag long enough. Where has it gotten us, anyway? To the point where we need a study to tell us that exercise is good for you, for God's sake, to the dead-end where a developer can whack down a forest unless we can prove he's harming the environment, and to the ludicrous situation where grumpy old men waving laptop stats are trampled by hordes of screaming iBook fans!

Too much fear and not enough faith in our own dreams, that's what it is. There has to be a better way, and it might be something as basic as following your heart and trusting your intuition. It just seems to me that we're doing everything the hard way, with only ourselves to blame.

I dunno, maybe I've been doing this too long. Let's see, in Internet years, that would be about -- yikes, no wonder! Dog years are nothing by comparison. Maybe I'm becoming an ole Internet dawg. . . ("Awwroooo!!") And maybe that's why I'm tired of people telling me to be nice to and "evangelize" the poor deluded PC masses. If they choose to fly dragging a ball and chain, well, let 'em! Where is it written that I have to convince everyone to be like me? I'm beginning to feel like the Macintosh anti-christ: I may attract a little attention, but I ain't savin' nobody. If I had a club, its motto might be: "Evangelize, hell: more Macs for us!"

("Awwroooooo!! Yip! Yip!")

Just don't get the idea I don't believe in what I'm doing. You want to know how much faith I have? Every computer I own was bought on credit and not a one of them is paid for. What's more, to bust out of our rut and receive the gift of coyotes and the vacas negras grazing 50 feet from the door, my wife and I have taken one HELLUVA hopefully temporary pay cut! There's more to the story than that, of course, but I'll spare you the details to preserve the health of any empiricist bean-counters in the audience. Suffice it to say that if you wanna see the flash, you gotta face the fear!

(gulp)

Coyotes, now, they know all about change. They were virtually exterminated just about everywhere, but now they're back, all fat and sassy. Around here the locals rank them just below telemarketers and Texans in terms of desirability and back up their opinions with rifle bullets. For that reason the coyotes our landlady told us about, the ones who used to cross the adjacent field where the cows are grazing, have been conspicuously absent. Until the other night. . .

I was staying up late, playing with my iBook. It must have been around 2:00 a.m. or so. I had just entered the TCP/IP configurations and was about to see if the sucker would go online, when all of a sudden there was a terrifically loud, sharp caterwauling like nothing I'd heard till then. For you city-dwellers, the noise is something like what you'd get if you simultaneously jabbed a dozen nearby dogs in their stomachs with red-hot pokers! Believe me, you wouldn't mistake it for anything else, except maybe the end of the world or an earthquake at a banshee convention. In the single-digit silence up here at 8,000 feet at two in the morning, it was explosive!

Not being one to trust my ears right away, I had to open the door and stick my head outside: oh yeah, coyotes, all right, and only about a hundred yards away, from the sound of them. I quickly closed the door, lest the cat slip away in the moonlight and never return. He was awake, too, standing in the middle of the kitchen with his eyes wide open! I closed and hoisted the iBook, scooped up the kitty with my other hand, and retreated to the bedroom. Enough excitement for one night, I thought. Tomorrow would bring another day with another sunset and time to install the iBook RAM I'd been hoarding.

To do that, you insert it at a 45-degree angle, then mash it flat (ouch!) until it snaps into place! Can you believe it??

(Now there's real excitement!)

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.

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March 18, 2010