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The Internet never sleeps
One of the joys of this medium, besides being able to work in your bathrobe, is that things like javascript date counters and automatic ad rotation can give the impression that something is happening, even when it isn't. In the "real" world outside of cyberspace, when things are dead, they're really dead (more on that directly). But I can post a news item from just about anywhere, so long as I can go online, and contribute to the impression that Applelinks cooks! Which of course it does, always.

Right now, for instance, publisher Joe Ryan could be sitting in front of his monitors watching every move I make, figuratively speaking. "Where's that GRACK?" or maybe, "Enough of the snotty satire, can't he find some damn NEWS?!" There's no way to know, unless I hire a detective or a hacker. No, in this business, we just assume that everything is always "on." Uh, which of course it is, don't get me wrong. I for example am always online, even in my sleep, which I almost never do anyway. If something happens anywhere in the world, I hear about it before everyone else. And if there's a computer industry hook to hang it on, you get to read about it here at Applelinks long before those other sites get around to following my lead and trying to make news out of it. Oh, I'm good, all right. One plugged-in sumbitch, that's me. Got a modem where my ear should be.

Why, I could be sitting in a motel room in western Nebraska right now and you would never know. I could still post the daily news and you could even send me email. There would be nothing between you and the illusion of a living, breathing intellectual presence eager to know what GigaWire is. (Oops, almost gave away the store.) Well, maybe. If the motel is in Ogallala, all bets are off.

Room at the inn, no desk clerk
"Oh no, not more Nebraska stories!" Now wait a minute, you might like this. My wife and I are heading for northeast Iowa over the holidays (again), and the first logical overnight stop after a 500+ mile run from northern New Mexico is Ogallala. This morning I called ye olde Stagecoach Inn and tried to get a room for December 25th. This wasn't a problem, actually ("we only have one other reservation") but if we hit an antelope in eastern Colorado and have to spend the night in Punkin Center, God forbid, I'll want to call Ogallala and cancel the $57 room. Why a simple room in an empty motel should cost that much in the first place is beyond me, but no matter. I'd need to call sometime in the afternoon to kill the Visa charge, right? So get this:

"We have lots of rooms but we're closed until 6:00 p.m. that day. There's one other couple expecting a room, and if they hadn't made a reservation, the manager wouldn't come in that day at all."

No point in showing up early, is there? Plan B called for swilling margaritas at the adjacent Golden Spur Steakhouse and Saloon until the motel manager tore herself away from Christmas dinner with grandma and the ranch hands, but the saloon is closed too. Rats! Plan C now specifies no reservation (and nothing to cancel), arriving after 6 and hoping the first couple didn't decide to bag their trip and free up the manager to stay home and watch bad TV. Naturally, I have a Plan D: Screw Ogallala! I've been to Boot Hill, anyway. Yes, there is a "Boot Hill." Plenty of dead cowboys but no Internet access. No AOL, no nuthin'. Anything I post from the Stagecoach Inn comes via an expensive long-distance hookup, if it works at all. No, the obvious thing to do after driving 500 miles across the High Plains is to drive another 150 miles east into the zero-degree blackness and find a motel with a living manager and someplace to get a decent grilled cheese sandwich, at least. And no, I will not plug in the iBook and read my email after unloading the Nissan. A hot bath and HBO is more like it.

No exploding shoe jokes, please
My wife made me promise, not that I'm necessarily bound by such unprofessional proscriptions. But how much plastic explosive could a guy cram into a typical shoe, anyway? Women's shoes are something else, of course, at least the ones I saw clomping through the food court at the Coronado Mall in Albuquerque a while back. That place has the best motto, by the way: "Shopping is always the answer!" And they came up with that way before we were all admonished to forget the Bill of Rights and max out our credit cards. (I love this state...)

Meanwhile, back at the Expo or rather just before it, our man Steve will be risking dictional disbarment by flogging the Mother of all Revolutionary Products in a two and a half hour presentation that will have Bill Gates hugging the porcelain in every one of his 35 bathrooms. My only problem here is that once you label an MP3 player "revolutionary," the air has just about gone out of that particular balloon. Revolutionary would be something that had Windows users throwing their PCs off a cliff. Revolutionary would be something that produced a quantum leap in how people relate to technology. Revolutionary would -- hey, I think we're getting warmer! But maybe it'll really happen. I am NOT cynical, just tired of corporate hype, even from the good guys.

I won't be at the Moscone keynote anyway, and not because I couldn't change my Macworld reservation to be there on Monday morning. (Iowa, remember?) No, we'll be rolling into Taos the night before, on our way back from [gulp] Ogallala and points northeast. But I'll be sitting at my desk in the Horse Fly office bright and early on Monday, January 7th, eager to see if an ISDN line will give me more of the QuickTime webcast than random 20-second chunks. As soon as I find out what the Next Big Thing is, I'll let you know. I just hope he tells us right off the bat, before making everyone sit through iMovies of rich California pre-schoolers working on their screenplays. But I'm prepared. I have a Plan E, you see. If the new Apple product has anything at all to do with "digital lifestyle," I'm gonna light my boots and end it all!

These Tony Lama half-lizards pack quite a wallop, I'm told.

Senior Applelinks editor and columnist John H. Farr still hasn't dealt with your helpful suggestions regarding migrating from Windows to OS X and may forget everything after the lunar eclipse on the 30th. Beat him with a stick or send him something he can sell for food. In the meantime, go read his latest FARR SITE column. Here's the teaser:

"Soon I was in the rotation. Lorenzo came by three times in between dealing with a pair of Indians with a motor to sell, a hippie couple in a rusty Volvo, an Anglo highroller with a Lexus in need of a tailight, and a van-load of vatos who just wanted to visit. The fourth time he pulled a gorgeous set of tiny articulated-head socket wrenches with orange handles from the back pocket of his coveralls and got down to business."

SMART TAGS ARE FOR DUMMIES!

Those of you who know what "smart tags" are may want to include the following code in the <head> section of your Web pages. But since I got this from Microsoft (eeww!), I can't guarantee that using it won't innovate you into cyberhell. (I'm using it on this page, though, so watch me and see if I act like a salted slug.)

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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