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More Wacky Mac Woo-woo Than Usual
OS X BUNDLE ARRIVES The OS 9.1 CD, my main objective, was there just like I'd read it would be. Good! And included with the nice shiny OS X disk was an itty-bitty thin glossy booklet about installing the operating system (I stood there and leafed through the whole thing in about 30 seconds). OK, I did see a few relevant tips, but the overall impression was that OS X would be as hard to set up as taking that original iMac out of the carton and plugging it in. Hah! I already knew better. Apple had posted enough Technical Information Library notices and software updates for this baby to choke a hippopotamus. I'd read enough to know that for me, OS X would be something to experiment with on my extra hard drive. I do so much with my 450MHz G3-upgraded 8600, no way would I mess it up! But since I'd gotten OS 9.1 and OS X from MacWarehouse for the price of OS 9.1 alone, I figured I would install X on one drive and optimize it as the improvements come rolling in. I keep hearing that various developers are hard at work finding ways to turn off the CPU-clogging eye candy, especially that swooping genie-into-the-bottle trick. Bleah! I want a closed window to VANISH, not do a silly dance (sometimes I think Steve Jobs needs a keeper, you know?). Oh well. 8.6 STILL PRETTY DARNED NICE  You may have heard that not using desktop pictures can speed up your Finder. Well, loving photos as I do, I've never tried doing without. The above image, even in much larger form, obviously takes less oomph to mount than my high-rez photos, and yes, the Finder does speed up! Going to plain orange-red would be even better. Dang! OS 8.6 feels like somebody took a hot poker to it. If OS 9.1 isn't at least as fast, I'm going right back, no kidding. INTERNET EXPLORER?! [GASP] I played with it for a while. The Internet banking thing worked fine, thank goodness, and IE seems reasonably fast. It also has too many features for my taste, and managing bookmarks is much easier with Netscape (just my $5.95). But my biggest gripe is with the way pages display: adjusting font size on the fly is very cool, but cranking the size down from the default kindergarten-size letters renders the smallest writing illegible (for some reason Netscape doesn't work that way). ISP DIPPITY-DO You have to understand that in this part of northern New Mexico (Taos County), you can't sign with a national ISP. Qwest (U.S. West) doesn't offer its service here, for example. What we have are several private companies, including the new enterprise from the electric co-op. At last count one could sign up for residential plans along these lines (maximum access plans cited):
That's it. Those last two are from Kit Carson. Naturally I signed up for the 300 hours -- what's not to like about free? I already have the first two but will cancel the 150 hour plan and cut back the 200 hour plan to a minimal $10/mo. account just to keep the cool email domain (newmex.com). Change is coming, however. Somehow or other, Qwest has just agreed to spend $768 million dollars to upgrade service in New Mexico. After years of pleading poverty, the former U.S. West has suddenly found nearly a billion dollars ("Oh look, here under the bed!") and now some people who have been waiting for as long as EIGHT YEARS may finally get residential phone service. My wife and I may even be able to get a second phone line, woo-hoo -- you simply can't get them now, believe it or not. Yes, this is America, but no, it isn't like the part you may live in or be familiar with. At any rate, with Qwest and Kit Carson Electric Co-op laying in fiber-optic lines as fast as they can, a lot more people in this area will soon have Internet access and even a choice of providers. I expect Qwest will kill everyone else with a dependable unlimited access plan for less than 20 bucks per month, though. BUT HOW DO YOU FIND ONE? When I finally got smart and looked through my old friends' email addresses to grab a few domains to look up, I did locate four different ISPs that serve the rural area in question. One was too expensive, so that left three. Of these, one doesn't offer online signups (you have to go into the office and sign the contract), so that was out. Of the remaining two, one waived the setup fee for online signups and I grabbed my credit card, but the little voice in my head said, "Check the setup procedures"... AAGHHH! Not only had their Mac support stopped with OS 7, the "procedures" were decidely odd and involved things I'd never had to do before. "No thank you!" -- might as well through my money out the window. I ended up choosing the last one, a familiar outfit that seems to know what it's doing. The service costs a little more, but the Web site doesn't give me the willies and I'm reasonably confident that at least a few people there use Macs. WHAT ELSE IS NEW Sunspots, do you think? Senior Applelinks editor and columnist John H. Farr, following in the footsteps of such wealthy and respected writers as the rather persnickety Andrew Sullivan (NYT, New Republic, etc.), is now set up to dun visitors for contributions at his Zoozone site. The Zoozone has brand-new JPEG-laden FARR SITE columns to tempt the unwary and also features a different New Mexico image every day at FotoFeed , but feel free to toss a few coins in his direction even if you don't read a thing. * "Window Monkey" is a groovy little app that lets you assign different colored backgrounds to each partition or folder, which provides another excellent way to tell at a glance where this or that folder resides. Say you choose "Show Original" for an alias: the background of the window that opens tells you instantly where it came from. I use this trick almost every day.
AUDIO CREDIT: embedded 44k file, European Birds -- Sounds and Sonograms.
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Cool Mac Gear• iPod 1G-2G • iPod 3G • iPod 4G • iPod Mini • PowerBook-iBook • Keyboard Skins • Garageband
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