May 14, 2001

If Apple ever tanks, we're doomed...

WAR IS PEACE
Well, we've been on the road for the past week, visiting friends in Maryland. We stayed with a wonderful lady friend of ours who gave us splendid accomodations on the lower floor of her country home. Most of you would pay plenty to live in such a quiet, pastoral setting (the Land of Pleasant Living, indeed).

The only jarring element in this environment, to me at least, was the Dell computer I had to turn off whenever I wanted to use the phone line it was connected to. That is, I think I had to turn it off. I was never really sure. I was using our hostess's ISP account to connect, and the first time I tried, nothing worked: all I ever got were "Authentication Failed" messages. I must have entered her password two dozen times before it dawned on me that perhaps the account was in use.

I went into her computer room, just down the hall, where the Dell was wheezing away under her desk and a large monitor displayed the kind of bad abstract art screensaver programs popular (?) with PC users. I know nothing about Windows. I touched the mouse and the desktop appeared. Yes! Netscape was running and displaying a current CNN page. The computer was connected, in other words, and that was why I couldn't connect with the iBook on the other phone line using her account information.

LOVE IS HATE
Windows! The first question I always ask myself whenever I encounter the thing in libraries or other people's homes is, why does it have to be so ugly? Wilh all the bazillions of dollars at their disposal, couldn't the Microsofties have hired a color consultant or two? Ugly, ugly, ugly. The icons are ugly. The colors are ugly. The TEXT is ugly. The little boxes are ugly. It is an assault on the senses from beginning to end. There is, truly, no redeeming aesthetic virtue whatsoever. It is a mudpie of pixels. It deserves to be taken out and composted. No wait, that would be bad for the garden. It deserves to be incinerated.

I am not a stupid man. I have been using Macs since day one, and I mean Day One. And I want to tell you, for the longest time I could NOT figure out how to turn that damn Dell off! I even knew that there was supposed to be a perverse "START" menu of some sort that allowed one to stop.. . but where was it? I got so mad I started mousing on everything in sight: clicking, double-clicking, dragging, anything I could think of, until suddenly, somehow, the Start menu or whatever it was appeared across the bottom of the screen. From there it was only a matter of a few clicks. But still a "few," mind you, not just one. If I didn't have a RAM disk in use on both my Macs, a single selection of "Shut down" from the special menu would neatly disengage, quit, and silence everything. One motion with the mouse. THIS makes sense. Clicking on something called "START" in order to stop does not, as has been pointed out many times by much more interface-savvy souls than me.

I cannot believe this is the operating system that runs most of the world. I cannot believe that the company which designed this heap of horror is going to manage everyone's personal finances (HailStorm) on its own servers. I cannot believe that real human beings, made in the image of the Creator, actually claim authorship of this. Yes, yes, I know, once you know how to coax this sludge into doing what you want it to do, you feel mighty proud. Me, I just want to toss the poor Dell into the lilypond outside my window and put it out of its misery.

DON'T WORRY, BE HAPPY
Well, all you Windows users will soon be dancing to the XP boogie, anyway. From what I've heard, it looks a lot like something else. Too bad we can't sue the bastards, eh? But you little guys, watch out: your desktop customizers and Web site graphics might draws fire from the suits with the long yellow pads.

Aw, man. What a week. . .Oh: the iBook!

Yes, the iBook worked perfectly. I finally did figure out how to turn off the ferschlugginer PC whenever I needed to, and the iBook made it possible for me to keep up with most of my chores during the week. But guess what? My Apple Pro mouse is acting up. The infallible optical mouse is doing this lovely thing where it acts as if the mouse "button" is held down, even when it's not. Just before writing this I applied my old tried & true repair strategy, which also released a significant amount of frustration (I trust you can figure out what that was). At least I can report that the mouse is not cracked and has now performed normally for the last ten minutes.

In a few hours I stagger onto a flying sardine can and head back to New Mexico. At the end of a long rocky road, my PowerMac 8600 will be wai\ting for me. It will not be running when I get there, but I will turn it on, fearlessly and full of confidence.

Some things are worth waiting for.

Senior Applelinks editor and columnist John H. Farr hopes you are all well and prosperous and invites you to visit his Zoozone site with its amazing daily FotoFeed feature. . .

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