April 9, 2001

HOW LONG did you say I have? WOO-HOO!

DANGEROUS DELAY?
You might think that I'd have my income tax figured out and filed by now. You would be wrong, of course. This year I thought I'ld probably have to pay through the nose since I didn't have Applelinks keep back any withholdingand I didn't realize I had to pay quarterly estimated tax, whatever that is. Go ahead and laugh -- I was about to cry, thinking of horrific penalties. And then something wonderful happened.

Few of you may remember or care, but there were a number of forest fires last summer in New Mexico, the largest one just south of where I live. Well, the IRS has decided that because of these natural disasters, some of us have until January 16, 2002 to file income tax returns for the year 2000! We don't have to pay any penalties for late filing of the estimated tax, either. Thousands of people were evacuated because of the fires, you see, and couldn't file on time. Rather than deal with these hardship cases on an individual basis, the IRS is simply letting everyone in 21 counties in New Mexico off the hook! A nine-month filing delay and no penalties: is this cool or what?! My first thought was: "Yee-haw, I don't have to do my taxes, I can go ahead and play with OS X!" No, really, that was my first thought. Honest.

A buddy of mine who runs a bookstore had a different idea: "Hey, why don't they do this EVERY year?" (Talk about giving someone enough rope!) Wow, January 16th. Next January 16th! I'm in big trouble...

INTERNET SHENANIGANS
OK, let's say you're hungry and you decide you just have to have a nice big bowl of cereal. You get up from your desk and walk over to the cupboard, right? Hah! No, of course not, silly: you go back to your desk, boot up, and hie thyself to a Web site: MyCereal.com, the site that asks, "What cereal will you create?" Don't believe me?

"Welcome to mycereal.com, where cereals don't exist until you create them. We will formulate a cereal tailored to your individual tastes and health concerns, and deliver it right to your door."

The first thing that happens when you hit the "Enter" link is that you're taken to a log-in page! Obviously, this is not something you do when you're hungry, no matter how fast the Fed-Ex jockeys drive in your neck of the woods. A log-in page...geez...well, not really wanting to choose my very own cereal-making password, I gave up. Make my own cereal, indeed. Heck, I can do that with a little fancy scoopwork at the bulk bins, but usually I just buy something already in a box or bag and eat it. Works for me every time.

Well,what do you think? Is this thing grotesquely dumb or just deceptive, hmmm? And note that the domain belongs to General Mills...

I remember a time, a few years ago in Maryland, when I wanted some Levi 501 jeans -- you know, the traditional kind with the button fly, the ones everybody wore before the boomers bulked out and the manufacturers all came out with FAT PANTS! As it turned out, finding 501s on the edge of the Eastern megalopolis was about as easy as booking a stagecoach into downtown D.C., but I had a brilliant idea! Internet shopping was just catching on, so I decided I'd go to Levi.com, ho-ho, and snag a pair of real jeans, not goofywacker hip-hop sackware or Stuff for Guys Who Sit All Day. But the online jeans store didn't have 501s! In fact, I'd never even heard of most of the styles I saw there. What the -- ?!

I was really pissed, and so I emailed and emailed. I flamed every contact person I could find until someone slipped up and told me the truth: the online store [drum roll}....was a market research tool! Levi-Strauss understood 501s. They already knew they could sell those to guys who still had cute little butts and lived west of the Potomac. What they wanted to know was, would the kids bite on this or that? The online "store" was stocked with real pants, presumably, but the jeans were different from what you could get at the mall!

That's what I think MyCereal.com is. Maybe they really will deliver your own custom-blended cereal right to your front door, but General Mills doesn' really want to sell cereal online (duh!), they just want to know which ingredients (besides sugar) are most popular. In other words, they aren't semi-altruistic saviors of cereal, they just to invent the next button-fly breakfast food. The beauty of the cutesy "online store" model, you see, is that in addition to gathering data (which any sophomore with a pencil and clipboard could do), it reveals what new thing we're actually willing to pay for. I guess this isn't much different from any other kind of market research, it's just easier to set up: no need to hire a busload of sociologists, just grab a Perl freak , rent a server, and cross your fingers behind your back.

WAYBACK MACHINE IN OVERDRIVE
Check it out: we now have a chief executive whose USDA actually proposed not testing schoolkids' hamburger for salmonella... shades of the 1890's! And you may have noticed the following: Ollie North's crony appointed UN ambassador, axing the greenhouse gases treaty, renewing the Cold War (why?), trying to drill for oil in a pristine wilderness, etc. Where does it stop? New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd suggested the government would soon be putting nicotine back into cigarettes, and somehow that doesn't seem far-fetched. The prez wants to build a sandlot baseball diamond on the White House lawn, after all. "Gee whiz, Mister, that's swell!" Man, it's the Bowery Boys all over again. Next thing you know, they'll have us all out on the rooftops with binoculars looking for Chinese bombers. (Don't worry, it'll be easy: they'll be prop-driven and flying low...)

Anyway, since the government just withdrew the above proposal to allow wholesale poisoning of school cafeterias (surprise, surprise), I guess we aren't going all the way back to the age of social Darwinisn. Heck, maybe the 1930's will do! We've all heard plenty about dot-coms dying like last year's bunny rabbits, but I finally read a few relevant reports and got quite a shock: ye gods, I had no idea shares of so many firms had dropped so much. There are companies out there whose stocks had been valued at several hundred dollars per share but now are in the single digits! No wonder the Mercedes salesmen are looking glum. It might be time to head for the hills again, if you can afford to fill up. And good Lord, just wait 'til summer!

Gasoline is one area where we are definitely not going back to the past. I remember gas wars when I was growing up in Texas.The lowest price I ever say was 14 1/2 cents per gallon at a Shamrock station across the street! "Nevermore," quoth the raven ("Grack! Grack!"). Now we have government of the oilmen, by the oilmen, and for the oilmen. Does anyone believe for a minute that the oil industry is upset because the price keeps shooting up? Does anyone think that by drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge or anywhere else, enough oil is going to be found to drive the price back down?? Under the circumstances, is anyone wacko enough to expect the government to enact any measures to encourage less consumption of oil??? I try to wrap my brain around all this and have to stop, it hurts too much.

DETACHMENT OR DESPAIR
The thing is, you just can't compel humanity to do the right thing. Wouldn't be right, anyway. Karma has to seek its own level , the movie has to play itself out all the way to the end, and so on. Too bad we're all stuck in the theater for now, but I hear things are pretty wild on the outside. Maybe I should just scrootch down in the seat, finish my popcorn, and shut up. We aren't about ready to be gods yet.

But here's what I'm driving at. Just as every study that's ever been made shows there are vast fortunes to be made through the efficiencies of energy conservation and the growth of related new industries, so too has every study of the costs of computer ownership and maintenance shown that Apple hardware costs far less to use over the long haul. And yet the world isn't moving en masse to the Wonderful World of Macintosh, not by a long shot. It's enough to drive a person nuts. I mean, Apple gear looks better, too! I just spent a bewildering half hour looking through a PC catalog and had to shake my head in wonderment at how ugly most of them were (with a few notable exceptions). Cases with weird creases and slots, mangled box-like heaps without a soul, who want would want one of these?Well, hundreds of millions of people, apparently!

Sometimes a person just has to step back a little and take a deep breath or two. What I mean is, one day we could wake up to find that Steve Jobs has sold the company, given all his money away, and gone to Mali to help with the rice harvest. I don't think this is likely, but who knows what's going on or why? Who knows what strange and marvelous destiny is being worked out throught the mechanisms of nine-month filing extensions, market research tricks, zombie politicians from our father's graves, or converting millions of Mac lovers to Unix geeks?

Do YOU want to play God? Well, I don't. I just want to try that command-line trick to speed up OS X. Hey, maybe it works on tax returns, too.

Senior Applelinks editor and columnist John H. Farr is taking a nap right now and can't be bothered with things like figuring out how much he earned last year and how to hide it. In the meantime, he suggests you visit his Zoozone site. The Zoozone has brand-new JPEG-laden FARR SITE columns and features a different New Mexico image every day at FotoFeed , hot diggety!

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