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Bird (?) lovers corner
I've got to take a picture of the ravens in the cottonwood trees so you guys can see them. In the mornings especially, there are maybe a dozen or two sunning and squawking. Every once in a while a restaurant across the street tosses out stale baked goods, dead chickens, quien sabe, and when they do, there's a commotion that reminds me of those nature films with vultures fighting over a zebra carcass. The birds would be in the cottonwoods in any case, I figure, just to warm up and keep an eye on the dumpster.

But these are ravens, not crows, you understand. BIG BLACK BIRDS that make the most otherworldly noises, especially during mating season. I was just about to say that ravens and great blue herons should win the "WhatthehellwasTHAT?" prize until I remembered those long-ago whipoorwills in the Arkansas hills. Oh man... To hear that coffin-rattling shriek on a still, muggy summer night was a thrill and a half. The first time I thought for sure my shack was surrounded by razor-wielding cannibals until I heard the lilting "whi-poor-WILL! whi-poor-WILL!" that followed the whoops. Quite the bird, and much more scarce now that so much woodland habitat has been destroyed.

So ravens aren't so much scary as weird. Very, very weird, and maybe not even ravens at all. In the shape-shifting traditions of shamen, wizards, and other manipulators of space & time, the raven is a favorite disguise. This definitely gives a sighting an extra edge, I have to say. At any rate, courting ravens probably won't frighten you, but you might think you're listening to Arcturan barnyard animals. [Note Arcturan script below in animation downloaded from that distant planet via special satellite connection.]

Moving right along
Nobody has asked about signing up for my "content-free" Zoozone subscription, so I guess that's a bust. I wonder how those other Mac sites offering ad-free subs will do, after everyone's aunts and girlfriends pony up, that is. "Ad-free," indeed -- some of these sites are are already ad-free! Oh, I kill myself (or they will). I still say this is one of the dumbest ideas in the world. Would you pay extra for a magazine with no ads?

Personally, I think we ought to go nude. I mean really naked, all the way. [See next image, below] What's more, I once stood outside Moscone Center with Del and Lysa and discussed this very thing. No, not naked pictures of me, silly! But Mac pin-ups, kinky computer porn, salacious images of pretty girls & guys doing naughty things with their Macs. We saw dollar signs dancing in the San Francisco afternoon, we did. Even Lysa liked it, but then Lysa thinks different.

I dunno, though. This may now be an idea whose time has passed. I mean, every nerd on the planet has a digital camera by now. Still, maybe all it takes is gumption! We all know that sex sells, and Apple's streaming QuickTime has made plenty of these folks rich. Also, I just did a domain name search: the following domains are still available, so go for it and grab 'em while you can!

Interestingly, MacBabe is taken. So is MacSex, AppleSex, and, um, AppleLust, but maybe you knew that.

From eensyband to skinnyband
Faithful readers may recall a recent discussion about DSL on this page. As it happens, I'm waiting for a free (!) DSL router thingie to arrive before I get serious about broadband, but I did call Qwest to find out about a second phone line. Good ole Qwest. I should mention here that the New Mexico papers this week were full of news about how Qwest has caught the Enron disease (voodoo accounting, falling stock value, etc.) and is now borrowing daily from banks just to pay regular operating expenses... Yow! Since this also resembles the way I'm using credit cards while waiting for a publisher to rescue me, I shouldn't throw stones. Anyway, I called them and they said fine, second phone line, no problem, and cheap too, as long as I wired the jack myself. A very nice lady tech support person told me how to do it, "...just take another pair of colored wires, you know, orange plus orange & white, etc.," so I said I'd go look at the network box, the customer interface, and then decide if I wanted to go ahead and order a second line. No $85 Qwest-installed jack for this boy.

The picture below doesn't show half the mess. There's also a totally indecipherable outlawesque splice-o-rama leading to the actual box for our particular apartment. What you see represents where our three jacks connect to the actual wires that do the work. And there are six apartments in this complex. I knew as soon as I started pulling things apart, all hell would break loose, so I was undecided about whether to order the second phone line. But guess what? When my wife and I got back to our place on Friday afteroon after a short outing, there was a note from Qwest: they had gone ahead and connected the second line anyway! (Must have something to do with the company's cash-flow problems.) Anyway, I was actually pleased, except that a) I had no idea how to wire the phone jack by my desk for the new number, and b) an earlier test of the modem connection speed from that same jack showed a whopping 26,400bps, tops.

So what did I do? I found a handy hole a previous tenant had drilled through the window frame in the room where my computer is and poked one end of a 50-foot telephone extension cord (4 wires, no modular jacks) through it. Outside once more, I ran the cord to the gray box, installed a male jack plug on that end, and plugged it into the test jack in the gray box, nyuck-nyuck-nyuck. Back in my office, I installed another modular plug and stuck the cord into the AirPort base station. In other words, I avoided the apartment's lousy internal phone wiring completely and jacked directly into the outdoor interface box. Since that line is only for Internet use, everything is cool. And now I get 44,000bps! This might not seem like a lot to you, but I've just almost doubled my connection speed and it doesn't tie up the telephone. Yay!

Do I get a ticker tape parade with that?

Senior Applelinks editor and columnist John H. Farr thinks everyone should use JHFARR.COM for a Web browser home page. That way no one will miss a thing and someday he can stop using his MasterCard to pay for birdseed at Wal-Mart.

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Feb. 11 "Killer Email & Wiccan PotLuck" Feb. 4 "Meanies, Guerillas, & Subscription Copycats" Jan. 28: "Full Moon Frenzy, w/ PowerMacs" Jan. 21: "iMacs & Webmaster Schadenfreude" Jan. 14: "Was It Only a Week Ago?" Jan. 7: "Useless Column" Dec. 31, '01: "I Want a Refund"

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

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