April 30, 2001

How to tell when the time has finally come...

SETTING THE SCENE
There I was, peacefully computing away, while the OS X bundle I'd bought a few weeks earlier (OS X, OS 9.1, and the Developer Tools CD) sat gathering dust. I'd been making the rounds, checking my online writing resources to see which remaining paying venues had just gone under. The depressing list of casualties now threatened to reach even to the very shores of the Mac Web itself: iSynicate.com, which distributes Applelinks.com content among thousands of others, had recently laid off half of its employees. Our publisher reported that his contact person had changed three times in the last month, so who knew what was next? Egad!

Happy pundits proclaimed an end to bad news, but the layoffs were still coming in thick and heavy like waves of WWII bombers: rumble, rumble, boom-boom-CRASH! Meanwhile, the once-burgeoning field of Internet radio was disappearing like dawn mist in the sun, as performers' rights organizations wanted more money for "additional" Internet airplay. To me this was like publishers charging royalties for how many times a book was read, not just sold, but hundreds of radio stations were shutting down their Internet feeds rather than fight in court. Once again the music industry was shooting itself in the foot, if not the belly, by limiting public access to the joy of listening. If I don't hear the songs in the first place or even know of the artists' existence, I sure won't be looking for CDs in the store.

What a disgusting state of affairs. A judge had just stopped publication of a parody of "Gone with the Wind" based on an equally absurd interpretation of intellectual property rights, thus asserting the primacy of copyright over free speech. Pretty soon people like me would be charged by the word, I figured. Who owned the language itself? What if we all had to pay royalties to the descendents of our Indo-European progenitors? Hey, wait a minute, that's me! (Awright people, PAY UP!) But how, by Zoroaster, were we supposed to keep track of it all?!

DIE, DISK, DIE!
It was all too much for my delicate sensibilities. Enough of this, I sighed, quitting my browser and email to free up the phone line, in case someone without a steenking computer was trying to call me with good news (you never know, right?). But AirPort stays connected for ten minutes after the last summons, and with the 8600 connected to it via Ethernet, the only way to clear the line was to cut the power to the base station.* Wearily and distractedly, I slipped off my right moccasin, raised my big toe, and promptly turned off the wrong power strip!

I sat there for a moment, staring at my blank monitor screen and listening to the PowerMac's twin high-speed SCSI drives spin down. . . um, nope, shouldn'a done that -- damn, just like yanking out the plug! Still, whether from electrical storms, accidents, or as a result of bizarrely irredeemable system freezes, the power had been rudely disconnected a number of times before without obvious side effects. I turned the power strip back on, fired up the 8600, got bonged and scolded, and watched as the extensions loaded and the desktop appeared. (I SAID, "AS THE DESKTOP APPEARED!") But noooo... all I had was a silly pattern, one hard drive icon, and a watch dial cursor, except the hand on the dial wasn't spinning (not cool). Several three-fingered salutes and scoldings later, nada! The same hung startup, in other words, with most of the desktop icons missing and no on-screen action at all. Oh, I was resourceful, though. I had the OS 9.1 install CD at hand, so I started up with that, intending to select a bootable partition on the other hard drive and see how that worked. My only problem was, the mouse was dead -- no XLR8 USB scrolling mouse extension in the OS 9.1 CD's system folder, duh! And who keeps two different mice hooked up at the same time?

Well, there was the itty-bitty Wacom graphics tablet. I picked it up and moved the pen across its face: Eureka, cursor movement! Except that the virtually inaccessible control panel was set for drawing, not mouse simulation, so the cursor moved agonizingly little for each trip across the tiny 4 X 5 inch drawing area. Ai-yi-yi!

YOU KNOW THE REST ALREADY, RIGHT?
To make a long story marginally shorter, nothing worked. Oh, I finally navigated my way to the Startup Disk control panel and chose the other volume, but it hung on startup too. I somehow updated the disk drivers. I even found my "Quick & Dirty OS 8.6 Install" Zip disk and laboriously dragged a new Finder, System, System Resources, and a half-dozen other supposedly helpful files over to my startup drive's System Folder, but alas. Bah, humbug! I loved 8.6. It had never, ever let me down. But now, if I was lucky, killing it might save the day. The OS 9.1 CD was still in the tray, so...

So, I did it. I booted up with the CD and clean-installed 9.1. After all the hemming and hawing, blithering and blathering, I actually upgraded my operating system. What's more, I didn't bother with customizing the installation like I usually do: "Fill 'er up, with everything!" For all I know, my 8600 thinks it's a Mongolian PowerBook now. For that matter, who's the funny guy on my driver's license, and just when did I get married?!

But hey, it works now!

The Big Guy starts up like a PowerMac should, lo and behold, and going directly from 8.6 to 9.1 makes for a noticeable improvement. The new Finder is lots snappier than the old one, and I even signed up for iTools. No kidding, I really like 9.1 and wish I'd installed it earlier. While I'm on a roll, I'm going to update the operating system on the other hard drive and have at the iBook, too. But no OS X for now! That would violate my long-held rule of always staying at least one operating system version behind. Anyway, they tell me 9.2 might be coming down the pike soon, and I'll be all set. Some of us have to have the latest and greatest, and some of us just want to be able to work and have fun. For the moment, that means 9.1, while the mighty 8600 rolls on, beige and beautiful...

When it works, I really love this stuff.

Senior Applelinks editor and columnist John H. Farr says you'd better visit his Zoozone site while it's still free and check out FotoFeed, too. There's a cool new layout for the menu pages, and for some reason he's chosen to publish some letters he wrote from the Arkansas woods 30 years ago... (The boy's mad, I tell you, completely mad.)

* HOT TIP! HOT TIP! A helpful reader has informed me of the existence of a fabulous utility for AirPort. The thing is called AirPort Modem Utility 1.1 and it's even free! Here's what Version Tracker says about it:, but just go get it if you have an AirPort base station:

"Product Description: A small utility that lets you control and monitor the modem connection in an Airport Base Station. It provides status on the connection, the IP address assigned by your ISP, etc. Works on both wireless and wired machines."

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