Cool Mac Gear

Look out below
Well, I trust everyone feels a whole lot safer now that we're bouncing the rubble in earnest. With any luck at all, a blond 22-year-old Special Forces lieutentant will fall into a tunnel and catch bin Laden washing his beard. I certainly hope so.

In the meantime, you don't know who to trust, or what mischief (or worse) is loose under the cover of the current emergency. Someone sent "This is anthrax!" letters to Planned Parenthood offices all over the country, and you can't tell me that was our man Laden.Well, you could try, actually. That would make as much sense as anything else these days, like how we have to ride airplanes to save the economy and the Air Force can shoot 'em down if the avionics crap out. Some vacation!

I guess we all have to go nuts once in a while. This past week the Taos post office was shut down all morning because of a "suspicious package," the nature of which was never made clear. I was writing the daily news for Applelinks in an office about a block and half away, and the street right outside my window was blocked off. Scary, huh? There were local cops and firemen, state troopers, FBI agents (where'd they come from?), the works. Well heck, that does it for me. I'm diving into something real. For part of each day, I'm gonna be a WEBFOOL...

Why do they call them masters, anyway
While "webfool" comes closer to expressing the essence of the thing, it's a relatively happy term and doesn't sound serious enough to rate the big bucks (hahaha) that Webmeister does. Hmm. Well, let me tell you a story: A few years ago, in another life, one of my daily activities was hand-coding HTML in SimpleText to make simple Web pages on a Mac LCII. Having my own domain was wonderful, and putting up a one-page site was a hoot and a half.

You had to have been there, I guess. This was back in the kerosene lantern days of the Internet, when most people you ran into had never even seen a Web site. No, really. Anyway, one afternoon as we were about to take off to go to a party, I was working on the original Zoo Zone site, trying to (be still, my heart) link one page to another. Shoot! I had time to upload the pages but not to view the results. Think 14.4 kbps with an LCII and a wife who's ready to go.

OK, so later we're at the party. I slip off to turn on the host's Quadra and log into the local college network. This was the only Internet connection in town at first, by the way. If you didn't belong to the college community, the only way to gain access was to be gifted with one of the accounts the president handed out to his friends -- at the time, the Eastern Shore didn't get any more democratic than that, though nowadays of course the underprivileged can swim and picnic on the beaches of the rich. Anyway, there it was: ZOOZONE.COM in glorious gold, red, and blue. My link was underlined and I clicked it. Wow! It worked! Whoo-wee. I go outside and join the crowd. A good friend there (then a Photoshop whiz at a local advertising company, now their Web producer) takes one look at me and says:

"Why JOHN, whatever has happened to you? You're beaming!"

The devil's in the Dreamweaver
I know haunted software when I see it. All right: possessed, in thrall to Beelzebub and his sweaty minions, you get the point. Dreamweaver is like that, spookily lurching into madness at the click of a mouse. That's not to say it isn't a powerful application, which it surely must be: it takes more RAM than a whole lab full of LCIIs (which isn't actually saying much). Sometimes I think it's too powerful, like Dick Cheney and a dozen oilmen behind locked doors.

I mean, it just does things. And it's always asking me questions I can't answer easily, like do I want to update all instances of this link or something, so I say yes (duh), and then it's logging onto the server and "putting" things I never asked for in places I never find. Come to think of it, that balances out.

Maybe it would help if I read the manual or took the tutorial, but who has time for that? I like to pull my pants on first and zip 'em up later. Yes, this can be embarrassing, but it's also how we learn things or maybe have some unexpected fun. The result is that with Dreamweaver, I'm always answering yes in dialog boxes I never knew I was calling up. (I learned a long ago with software that you have to keep saying "yes," because otherwise everything stops and you have to start all over.) But I like it, probably. I'm not sure, but when I tell it to upload the whole site, I think it only FTPs what's new. Cool! But why did it just open that Photoshop JPEG in Fireworks? Oooohhh.

Terror, schmerror
I know what fear is. Fear is a lump in a tender place, no money in the bank, a lover about to leave. Those are scary things.

I do not visit the Taos post office worrying about "suspicious packages." And I would happily climb on an airplane if, uh, my life depended on it (oh, I kill myself). [Is that a great sentence or what? Where is my money??] So go forth in joy, brothers and sisters:

I figure if nobody gets nuked before Christmas, we're home free.

Senior Applelinks editor and columnist John H. Farr meant to write a satircal column about the new Apple whatever-it-is but he forgot and came up with this one instead.

The new GRACK! Update mailing list is now operational. To receive your own weekly notice of new column postings, just CLICK HERE and send a blank email.

AUDIO CREDIT: embedded 44k file, European Birds -- Sounds and Sonograms.

DESIGN CREDIT: GRACK! byline graphic by Bob Farr.

Cool Mac Gear