|
||||||||
|
Cool Mac Gear• iPod Video • iPod nano • iPod 1G-2G • iPod 3G • iPod 4G • iPod Mini • PowerBook-iBook • Garageband |
Doing the Impossible Without Even Trying "Magic needs space." Wood
is good  Come to think of it, for most of my adult life, I've lived places where I had to chop wood or chose to do so. That's very weird, considering. But I enjoy it. One thing I learned years ago was to let the maul (axe, whatever) "do the work." This is something any labor-savvy person will tell you, no matter what kind of relatively heavy manual tool you're using, from a shovel to a pick. In the case of a shovel, this means letting the pointed blade find its own depth as you slide it into a pile of dirt, for example, rather than tensing your arms and shoving it in as far as you can. In the case of a splitting maul, this means letting the weight of the falling tool generate the force to split the wood, rather than trying to swing the darned thing. For kindling, I take a chunk of nice dry, straight-grained firewood and split it up into pieces roughly an inch square in cross-section. Doing this with an 8-pound splitting maul is like using a 450MHz G3 and 448MB of RAM to write this paragraph, but what the hey: the cool thing about chopping kindling is that if I don't really try -- let's say that again: if I don't really try, I can have that big heavy maul come right down in the middle of a two-inch thick chunk of wood. In some respects, it's a matter of "thinking" where I'd like the thing to fall, only it's really more like not thinking. I look once at the desired point of impact and then let the tool come down: ka-chunk! (Ahhh...) Doing
and not-doing  Ever since I replaced the original hard drive with a 9BG replacement SCSI model a while back, there have been peculiar drive mounting problems. At first both hard drives (forgot to mention that I have two of 'em) would show up on the desktop like they were supposed to. As time passed, sometimes they would and sometimes they wouldn't. When the non-boot drive didn't show up, I could sometimes bring it to the desktop using Apple's Drive Setup utility. What would always work, though, was a hot restart. As long as both drives were already spinning, in other words, both hard drive icons would appear. Eventually it got to the point where the second drive would never mount until the second boot-up, and I just got used to starting up twice and letting the computer run all day long. Well, a few weeks ago I installed OS 9.2.1 on the hard drive I was planning to use all the time (switching disks, as it were -- see yesterday's article). I didn't try to start up the 8600 cold to see if the drive mounting situation had changed until three days ago. That was when I installed the second and final update, from OS 9.2.1 to 9.2.2. The first time or two I started up cold, the same thing happened: drive number two was nowhere to be seen. It had occurred to me that since the installation process involved updating the drivers, the old bugaboo might have disappeared. Whether that had anything to do with it or not, after a long session spent setting up a new set of popup windows, moving applications and folders around, etc. -- general housekeeping, in other words -- SHAZAM! The second drive reappeared. Everything has been fine ever since, in fact. Finding
my spot  Those of you familiar with my activities over the last few years know that life hasn't been exactly predictable and secure here in El Norte. But in a couple of areas, things have, if not exactly fixed themselves, at least shifted to a whole other level that's just as good as a solution for the time being. I'm not trying to make myself know the unknowable or fix the unfixable, if that makes any sense, and yet, and yet... The images on this page were taken on Sunday and show a place I've visited before but just couldn't "make work": too far out of town, no water, no power, iffy phone situation, the wife would freak out, etc. Well, this morning I went back and something clicked, all by itself. Use any metaphor you want, a circle completed, perhaps. To me it was like a whole bunch of STUFF between the beginning and the end just disappeared and there I was at a beginning again. Oh my. (All right, one more)
Senior Applelinks editor and columnist John H. Farr invites your comments. FARRFEED.COM -- Salon Weblog (Current year's columns just below)
"GRACK!" is © copyright 2002, John H. Farr, all rights reserved
Page: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 |
|
||||||
