Cool Mac Gear

Down by the riverside
There's not much to be done for it, now that the martyr recruitment option has been exercised. I wish it hadn't, but what can you do. I know we have to do something. During the last war I often said we should be dropping teevee sets instead of napalm, and I don't think I was too far off the mark.

You have to admit we're a little peculiar. We've never met a country we couldn't run better, but when a judge threatens an entity like Microsoft with simply dividing it in two, strong men tremble. If there's a ray of hope in all of this, it's that Microsoft has never beem driven by intolerance or threatened the innocent citizens of the world.

Meanwhile, let's hope something good comes of it. I'm not sure what that would be, exactly, but I'm finding it much too easy to count up all the ugly stuff that might result and I need something to divert me.

OS X 10.1
There, that ought to do it! What, it didn't divert you? Well, I have to confess I haven't thought about it much either. When buildings are falling down and armies are marching, operating systems don't get a lot of air time. This one should, I'm given to understand, but the three people I've met who know something about it are all major geeks. Apple must be dying to have X be the default OS so everyone can bitch and get it over with. Then again, maybe the masses will love it.

But see? Besides folks like you, who's actually talking about it? I'm spending a lot of time these days in a small office with several Mac users. Until recently, an in-house graphics designer provided a good example of what I'd call a self-trained Mac expert. NONE of these people even make use of most of the goodies found in recent releases from 8.6 to 9.1! Nary a pop-up folder or windowshade in the bunch, and nobody knows from iTools, believe me. Needless to say, OS X, no matter what the update, never even comes up for discussion. Maybe I'm just in with a buncha goofballs, huh?

Hohoho. Of course not! These people are smart but distracted: by work, play, and the flow of their lives. My point is that they weren't talking about OS X before and they aren't likely to do so now. But if they don't really care about all the little Mac tricks the afficionados know, they might as well be using OS X...

"Knock-knock!"
Sometimes you don't want to know who's there: could be war, depression, eco-catastrophe, maybe even a lawyer. And any of these things will make it even harder to talk about whether people use the round hole in the panel on their iMacs for their fingers or the cables.

I recently heard a radio show guest talking about an ancient Toltec calendar that predicts a dozen or so "years of chaos" right about now. After then, say around 2012, things are supposed to ramp up in a very fine way indeed. Well, gee. That's a long time to wait for significant psycho-evolutionary developments, not to mention peace and faster PowerPC chips.What are we going to do in the meantime?

Since there really isn't anything a person can do, one way or the other, it might come down to just thinking about what's good in your life and giving it the importance it deserves. If in this process you find yourself not quite so anxious to fill up that new hard drive with all the lastest stuff, for example, give yourself a break:

You're only normal!

Senior Applelinks editor and columnist John H. Farr needs to find a house to rent and have the Nissan's front end aligned, but you can write to him anyway.

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

DESIGN CREDIT: GRACK! byline graphic by Bob Farr.