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Just say no :-)
Sometimes you just have to shut 'er down and step back, which is why I pulled last week's GRACK! after 24 hours on the air. It was a glorious rant full of thought-provoking truths but also turned out to need many more corrections and follow-ups than I had time to deal with.

The parts I liked best had little to do with Mac-specific themes, but you know I'll move heaven and earth to find a way to talk about things like the spread of manmade genetic material to native varieties of corn growing high up in the mountains of Michoacan (!). Frankly, that scares me even more than authoritarian morons trashing the Constitution or the fact that nothing we send or post on the Internet has been, is, or ever will be completely private and secure. Monsanto's little marvels have gotten into the very heart of the biosphere, folk, which means that what we were assured could never happen already has! And they're still at it... The consequences are as yet unknown, but consequences there will be. I wonder if Steve Jobs thinks about this when he digs into his "organic" raw veggie salad...

[There! See how it's done?]

Hot Apple news of a different kind
The other day I discovered a heretofore unknown hazard of life in northern New Mexico. The place we're renting now in Taos has a large kiva fireplace on the east wall. A kiva fireplace usually sits up off the floor, sometimes built into a banco, a simple adobe bench- or shelf-like affair that looks like it's extruded from the wall itself. The adobe and plaster mass surrounding the kiva may contain small nichos (built-in niches) or shelves to set things on, only be careful, 'cause the whole thing gets hot, eventually. I had all kinds of things stacked on ours until I started keeping the fire going for hours at a time (a good way to find out what melts and what doesn't).

We often experience temperature swings of 40 degrees or more from night to noon, so the mornings can be quite nippy this time of year. My wife and I like to pull our chairs up close to the kiva and read the paper over coffee. This is a nifty thing to do because I can set my mug down by the firescreen and my coffee will get even hotter, no reheating needed. The cat digs it too, and the fact that the simple fireplace is simultaneously sucking all the warm air out of your house is temporarily irrelevant.

For the past two years we lived north of here in a little mountain valley with no TV or newspapers available. Here in town we have our daily paper delivered, but unfortunately the Albuquerque Journal doesn't have all the comics we'd like. One legacy of life in the mountains is that my tangerine iBook is set up to download 32 of our favorite strips from the Houston Chronicle Web site, so hauling it out is a regular part of the morning routine. You see where this is going, don't you? (Yes, I did. No, you shouldn't!) All I did was sit there for a moment, only a moment mind you, to read Doonesbury online, but that was all it took for the back of the iBook screen to get REALLY HOT...

God loves Macs or maybe just mine
At the risk of stealing my own thunder, I'll tell you now that the 'Book wasn't damaged, at least not that I can tell. Kudos to the designers and engineers who brought us that first iBook, too. And I wonder if the thickness of the Rev.A model's lid is anything to be thankful for? If I'd been sitting there in front of the kiva with a shiny new iBook on my lap, would it now be a curly, warped pile of junk? I suppose there's only one way to find out.

Maybe I can borrow the new iBook a friend of mine is ordering. She's a writer and a longtime Windows user. As with many Windows users, her years of experience have convinced her that there might be a benefit to trying that other platform after all. Actually, she has two major hassles she's hoping to avoid, constantly accumulating CD-R coasters and avoiding the looming horror of Windows XP's registration and re-certification requirements: install non-MS software on your PC, for example, and it may shut down, requiring you to contact Redmond before you can re-install the OS and get everything running again.

Anyway, the lady is worried about her novel. She has hundreds of pages finished already in WordPerfect 2000 format (I think), not to mention piles of notes, etc. stored on floppies. What she wants to do is transfer all of this data over to her new iBook. My question to you, dear readers, is: what's the best way to go about this kind of a task? Which Mac word processing app is the best one for her to use, considering the translation and conversion issues? She will NOT use Word!

There has to be a way
Our man Steve wants to woo Windows users with cool new Mac hardware running OS X, and these people need to know the best procedures for moving their files. I don't think I've heard much about this, have you? Should my writer friend convert her Windows WordPerfect files to plain text first? Is there a way to preserve the formatting? She'll need an external floppy drive, too.

What should she watch out for? Is Appleworks the thing to use? Nisus Writer? And now that I think of it, what's the cleverest way to actually shift the stuff over? Can she use the backup CDs she's already made? There's a lot I don't know [oh really?].Educate me fast, folks, and we'll nab another convert.

Omigosh, I just thought of something else: what about OS X itself? Isn't that what we're recommending to refugees from the Dark Side nowadays? How does this simplify or complicate the answers to the other questions? What's the best information source on Windows to OS X migration, file transfer, translation, and all the rest? Is this already written down in a book I haven't had to read yet?

You would think!

Senior Applelinks editor and columnist John H. Farr will be happy to give literate email correspondents their 10 seconds of fame, so have at it.

GRACK! EXTRA: ANTIDOTE FOR DEPRESSION! Proof that somebody actually cares may be found at the New Scientist Web site.

Those of you who know what "smart tags" are may want to include the following code in the <head> section of your Web pages. (This page is so protected, BTW.) But since the solution comes from Redmond's own skunk labs, I can't vouch that using it won't cause Microsoft's Passport servers to send your credit card numbers to Afghanistan.

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.

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