LIGHT IN MY EYES

Now this was weird! Very, very weird. . .

After weeks in totally new and often strange surroundings, finally getting adjusted and starting to settle in, to drive two thousand miles all the way back to a place I had shut out of my mind was more than a little unsettling. After we got here, I felt I was losing my mind!

"You're not supposed to be here," whispered the spirits.

And it was true: I walked into our Eastern Shore house, all musty and smelling like, well, a 70-year-old house in a damp climate. An amalgam of mildew, ancient cooking odors, and rancid dust bunnies assaulted my nostrils. My lungs and nasal passages, purified and pink with new capillaries after a month at over 7,000 feet, reacted like salted slugs. I could immediately feel them twisting, squirming, contracting, and foaming with mucus. My sinuses ached.

I was reeling from the olfactory blows at the same time my mind was cracking from the tension. "Oh, I love the soft air! It feels so good on my skin," said my lovely wife, not unexpectedly -- her genes were only two generations removed from Leicestershire, after all. She immediately set about returning utensils to drawers and hanging clothes in closets, exclaiming all the while what a fine house it was, and just look at all the space! (This from a woman who had just quite happily spent five weeks in an 800-square foot adobe cottage with two main rooms.) I stood there surveying the musty, bowling alley-length kitchen, wondering what was growing behind the basement door, grinding my teeth and declaring inwardly: I'm not putting things away, I'm packing! I obstinately deposited my suitcase, clothes, and travel bags in the middle of the dining room floor, instead of taking them upstairs. When I retrieved the Sony monitor and the Power Mac 8600 from the truck, I set them down on the living room rug, even though the hardware would have to go upstairs for me to be able to work. No farther into the house would the boxes go, I stubbornly vowed!

(Of course, such behavior is to be expected from those of us born under the sign of the Stupid Jackass. Conventional and Chinese astrology would have you mark me as a Leo born in the year of the Rooster, but that would be wrong. Trust me.)

The house was immaculate, actually. We had cleared out a major portion of our junk before taking off for New Mexico at the end of August and left the place in suitable condition to be shown to potential buyers. "I'm not going to let you leave those things in there," rang a musical voice that carried far more authority than one would think possible, emanating from a curvaceous five foot two inch hundred pound frame as it did. "I like the way the house looks, all nice and clean."

The jackass brayed and retreated to the basement to turn on the hot water heater. There he discovered a thousand wasps crawling around in a cold-induced stupor, crunching under his shoes. He grabbed a pushbroom to clear a space around the heater so he could kneel down and light the pilot. He could see the faint line of rust that marked where the water had risen after the hurricane, before the neighbor had gotten the sump pump running and saved his ass. He lit the pilot, fired up the main burner, and while still peering into the lower innards of the heater, saw even more wasps, illuminated by the glow of the gas flame. Har! Let the bastards get out of THAT fix, he thought. He closed the little tin panel, arose, crunched through the slowly-reviving wasps between the heater and the basement steps, and calculated how long it would take for the water to heat. Hmmm: there would be hot water tonight, before he collapsed from trip fatigue, and the jackass would have a bath. . .

Getting back to work was easy. Figuring out what was going on was not! To this day I have no real understanding of what happened or why, but then I'm just a news editor and only know what I read on the Internet.

The Web was in an uproar: unable to come up with the 500MHz processors needed to manufacture the high-end Power Macintosh G4 models within a reasonable span of time (whatever that is), Apple Computer had decided to reconfigure its professional product line-up to match available processor speeds. This wouldn't have been so terrible, except that the Apple Store's canceling all the preorders and then reinstating them created nothing but confusion. To my mind the repricing nonsense is easily blamed on an unhappy combination of coincidences that could have occurred in any organization, and no, I don't see any reason to analyze it. These things happen. Assign it to nefarious predilections if you will, but why bother?

Just last week Steve Ballmer, unspeakably rich president of Microsoft Corporation, was responding to Windows 2000 questions at an industry seminar. He had to try to explain why, after several years of fancy "Scalability Days" presentations to big-time corporations that declared otherwise, Windows 2000 was not going to be as scalable as everyone had thought, nor was it going to arrive before the year 2000.

[Ahem. . .]

Rather than admit that Microsoft had misrepresented its most important product and exaggerated what it would be able to do, Ballmer said that "part of the scalability argument wasn't about scalability; it was about reliability and availability." In other words, you poor deluded bastards out there only thought the company was talking about scalability when they used the word, uh, "scalability." And to clarify this remarkable defense, he came up with: "I think it's actually probably fair to say market perception lags reality," whatever that means. I submit that this sort of obfuscation is about as morally bankrupt as you can get, and yet for some reason there is no proliferation of PC-centric Web sites all demanding Ballmer's head on a pike!

Meanwhile, on the Web and off, the weirdness continued to accumulate.

I met our old heating oil delivery man in the driveway. "I thought you'd moved," he said, almost accusingly, as if resentful at having to adjust to my imminent leaving twice in six weeks. And for sure, I would have left him in peace, except that our two and half-story farmhouse held the heat about as well as a tennis racket compared to the small New Mexico adobe we'd just left. The encounter left me feeling more than a little odd, and I wondered what seeing our old friends again would be like.

I opened the Baltimore Sun. . .ahhh! What a comfort to have a daily newspaper again, if only for a couple of weeks -- or was it?? There was trouble in a Frederick County neighborhood: a woman had placed large rocks inscribed with religious slogans in her front yard, and the local homeowners' association, citing a prohibition against "noxious or offensive things," was calling in the law. Ye gods, I thought, don't let those morons visit Dubuque! (Do you know what a "bathtub Madonna" is? They probably wouldn't like the illuminated "Virgen de Gualalupe" statue in front of the trailer across the road from the post office in San Cristobal, either, but I think it's kinda cool.)

Closer to home in Baltimore County, another group of neighbors was upset because a certain couple had erected a large white metal garage to house their motorcycle collection. One resident said, "It's been a dream to live on the water. To have someone come and destroy it with a commercial-type building in a setting that's rural, it's a shame." What would these folks think of the one-and-a-half dead school buses in the Vigils' pasture, I wondered, not to mention the dozen '72 Mercury Comets rusting away in another nearby yard. (Don't ask!)

This was not making me feel any better.

And then I read about all the hell being raised by readers of the Easton Star-Democrat down in Talbot County! It seems a 33-year-old woman had been brutally murdered while trying to buy crack in nearby Cambridge, MD, and the good people of Talbot County, either for reasons of having delicate stomachs or wanting to protect the tourist industry, objected seeing the lurid details printed in their local paper. This is in the same area where a nice young fellow recently stopped his car, pulled out a big pistol, blew away his 2 and 3 year old kids (still strapped in their kiddie seats), then went to the police and boo-hooed a bogus story about a carjacking. (And for some reason my 86-year-old aunt in Maine is worried about our moving to the wild, wild West. Go figure.)

And then the geese came. Oh, they come to New Mexico too, but farther downstate, where there's some actual water. But this is the Eastern Shore of Maryland, and the geese are back. So many of them now, after years of protection, that hunting season will be reopened this year. Oh well. For now at least the critters are here, flying across the cornfields and marshes in long, impressive V-formations. It's a wonderful sight against the backdrop of changing leaf colors and all those good things.

We had dinner with several best friends, and it was fine. Nobody hated me for moving away, and I got to talk way too much about our new home and only a little bit about the new Apple line-up (five of the six people sitting at the table work with computers every day: a Web editor, a teacher and network administrator, a graphic designer, a programmer and technician, and a Web site producer). We ate crayfish, shrimp, clams, oysters, and rockfish, drank lots of champagne, and a good time was had by all.

Later, I thought about Apple.

I thought about all those Macintosh Web sites puffing out their chests and calling for blood. I remembered the nasty, indignant emails from morally outraged G4 customers posted on even more Mac sites. And then I remembered the machines:

The new iMacs, iBooks, and Power Macintosh G4s are all simply beautiful and even stunning industrial designs. Mac enthusiasts are already fighting over them like starving refugees at a bread and blankets handout. I tried to get an iBook at a CompUSA store while passing through Des Moines, got stiffed, and hung around for an hour playing with a Special Edition iMac DV and the one G4 on display. I don't remember what the megahertz were and really don't care! (Either of those machines could wrap my 8600 around a tree trunk and not break into a sweat, as any fool could see.) I was grinning like a fiend the whole time and continually looking over my shoulder for someone to impress, but I never had an audience. If I had, they would have seen the gleam in my eye as I opened and closed Photoshop or picked movies to play. What glorious fun!

Back in the Southwest, half a foot of snow had fallen in the mountains. We'd have to stick to the Interstates on our way back, no doubt. Here in Maryland the sky was overcast and drizzling. We had two weeks to pack up everything we couldn't deal with all summer. My iBook might come this month! (I've changed the "ship to" address three times!) One could find something terribly wrong or disturbing about one aspect or another of all of this, but I demur.

Aside from being a bit tired and overwhelmed, I feel fine. Moreover, I'm "out there." I have a larger agenda. In fact, I'm on fire.

(Just look at my eyes!)

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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Official Farr Site Bonus Explanation: the more astute among you will have noticed that the normally constantly-mutating byline image has remained the same for several weeks. This is because of the rigors of careening back and forth across the Land of the Free, but fear not: when the traveling is done, new pictures will appear.

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February 10, 2012