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Cool Mac Gear• iPod Video • iPod nano • iPod 1G-2G • iPod 3G • iPod 4G • iPod Mini • PowerBook-iBook • Garageband |
or How I Spent My Weekend A plethora of riches... Digtital
hub of doom What I have, see, are oodles of folders of JPEGs, all organized by date and year. It's no problem for me to locate all the pictures I took around Easter last year, for example. But say I want a certain "adobe in the snow" image. See? I'm sunk. I guess thumbnails would make sense, duh. The next thing you'll say is that iPhoto does all this for me, which it probably does. I knew it! I'd intended to be an iPhoto guru long ago, but preparing my 8600 for OS X has taken forever. As I've written before, I have nearly everything in place: extra RAM, all the utilities, Jaguar, a video card with 32MB of VRAM, and I even ordered a nifty little 10,000 rpm SCSI hard drive to park it on. A kind soul even sent me his old SCSI CD burner so I could find a secret enemy to give the Que! USB burner to for Christmas. Trouble is, I just don't have any secret ones. You know exactly who you are, all right, and as soon as the Que! hits your mailbox you'll call the bomb squad! Oops, I forgot. We don't have to call the FBI any more, they just read all our emails and show up unannounced. Yay. Who,
me? Oh, I'm rich! Anyway, as I bent down to pick up the newspaper, a FedEx van roared into the parking lot and stopped right in front of me, scattering gravel far and wide and spooking a flock of usually unflappable (no pun intended) ravens in an adjacent Siberian elm. As the driver walked around to the side where I standing, trying very hard not to notice the doofus in a bathrobe who obviously didn't have to work for a living like he did (little does he know), I called out cleverly: "I'll bet you've got something for me!" This caused him to risk raising his eyes from his clipboard and acknowledging my presence. "Are you number six?" he asked, which I obvious wasn't, having an actual name like everybody else, but that was the number of our apartment so I said yes. With that he slid open the side door of the van, releasing a warm blast of cigarette smoke and donut fumes. Driving a delivery van must be one of few jobs left for smokers, I realized, and wondered why he wasn't happier. "Sign here, line two," he said, handing me his clipboard. After I did, he tossed me the box from MacResQ, slammed the door shut, and hopped back inside. A second or two later he was gone, but I had what I'd been waiting for: a 9.1GB 10,000 rpm SCSI hard drive with adapter for less than the price of an oil change with Castrol synthetic. Don't
even think about it I poked around a little more, as long as I had the case opened up. Damn, no other places to screw down a hard drive, at least not any I could see. I carefully counted all the devices inside: there was the small hard drive, the big one in the bottom bay, the ZIP, the CD-ROM, and the floppy drive. The floppy drive! I literally had no memory of when I last used the floppy drive. "What the hell do people use floppies for now anyway?" I'd recently asked a sociology professor I know. He said his students used them to put their papers on. Don't make papers like they used to, I reckon. But so what: I didn't need the floppy drive, did I? Why, I could take that out and put the new hard drive in... This was dangerous ground, though, and I knew it. Sure, I could do that, and it might work, but ten minutes later I'd find the most incredible long-lost floppy disk and want to see what was on it. Shoot! You know I would, too. That's just the way these things go. God designed the universe with rules like that so we wouldn't grind wrenches into screwdrivers and end up not being able to take our nuts off. Ready
to roll Tomorrow I'll drive over to the Time Capsule from Hell (northside Hinds & Hinds 10x 20 ft. storage unit, # 96) and pretend I know where my box of leftover computer bits and pieces is. Then I'll install the new hard drive, back everything up, and finally have OS X up and running on my five-year-old computer. (God, what a cheap bastard I am.) Today the rent, tomorrow a new Mac. Or maybe glasses, or stamps, or shells for my 12-gauge. If I can't run X, see, or mail out agent submissions, I can always blow something to smithereens. Hah! (That oughta bring 'em knocking...) Senior
Applelinks editor and columnist John
H. Farr
hopes everyone's days are merry and bright.
The
illustrated version of BUFFALO LIGHTS
hasn't been uploaded yet, but the Buy Now button
will deliver the reduced-price text-only edition!
Info here.
(Current year's columns just below)
"GRACK!" is © copyright 2002, John H. Farr, all rights reserved
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