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How High Did You Say? {puff-puff-pant-puff...) Yard
work  Why, it's so nice right now, I don't even mind that the landlady is bringing a potential homebuyer around in the morning. I know we have to move, anyway. It'll either be this one or the next one who bites. My lovely wife is jetting back to the States from the U.K. later this week and we'll have to deal with all of this. At least she's had the opportunity to spend time in a place that's more expensive than here, hoo-hah. At any rate, there will be some changes. My honey is fed up with living out of a storage unit and wants a bigger place, her own place preferably, that no one can boot her out of. Sounds good to me. If I'm nice, she might even let me share it. Otherwise I can always camp out with the sage monkey squatters living in cardboard boxes on the other side of the gorge: "Hey man, where can I plug this thing in?" "Uhhh...." While she's been shunting from B&B to B&B in the land of her ancestors, my Leicestershire sweetie has had to rely on Internet cafes to access her Webmail. This has brought her into involuntary intimate contact with the world of Windows, and her reaction would make a great adjunct ad campaign for Apple's "Switch" theme. Something on the order of, "My GOD what are you DOING?! Get the hell over here RIGHT NOW!" She only found one iMac-equipped 'Net cafe, though surely there are others. And there was one other revelation (besides the evil horror of PCs): she had to shell out the pounds, yessiree. If you're used to getting unusually short email messages from the Motherland, now you know why. "Ouch! "[Bugs biting my ankles, moving inside]  Stupid
editor tricks This is just a tiny bit of what I run into on my daily 'Net ramble, which as it turns out has completely supplanted mass media "news" for me, at least so long as I stay away from CNN and read between the lines at NYTimes.com. Even then I miss some of the good stuff. This very evening I received an email pointing out this article on a Quebec Web site: "MSN 8 sera payant." That's right, it's in French. ("You in de min-or-i-ty, Yankee scum.") Here's what my correspondent claims it says: "Microsoft is apparently going to integrate the next version of Internet Explorer with other software and services, and institute a charge for the package...the next version of Explorer will be called MSN 8 Internet Services and will include improved virus protection, software for editing and sharing photographs, access to the Encarta online encyclopedia etc. The article does not say what the price will be, or whether it will be a one-time or annual subscription charge." Good Lord! This is news, isn't it? So why haven't we heard about it? Maybe it's a hoax. Maybe Apple isn't going to charge for dot-Mac, either. Maybe lust-crazed burros are stampeding in the halls of Redmond. Beats the hell outa me. All I do know is that if it's really important, Rather and Brokaw won't say a word.  Wilderness
cure, avec blog The Williams Lake trail started at 10,200 feet. Ye gods. For the next 3 and a half hours I was up there, all right, in a land of moss and trees and rocks and soft damp earth. There were millions of wildflowers (truckloads of columbines). I saw a marmot and bighorn sheep. I tried to make it to a ridgeline above Williams Lake (11K+ feet?) where I could see flocks of ravens hovering in the wind blast and got maybe 20 minutes away when it started to rain. Dang! And I was just crossing the timberline, coming out of the woods, after a VERTICAL climb up from the lake. I mean "vertical," too, the kind of climbing where with step #1, your eyes are looking at where step #3 will be. Coming down in the rain was adventurous, to say the least.  No, I am not in shape, and yes, I am still sore. But I'm going back, and the next time I'm making it to that ridgeline. The trick is to start off early in the morning so you get there before the afternoon storms move in. In the meantime, I discovered something new & wonderful about the Internet and got hooked all over again. Salon.com is hosting Weblogs now, so I ran right over and got me one: it's called FarrFeed and features excerpts from current writing projects, spontaneous commentary, and who knows what else. I've decided I haven't begun to tap the networking possibilities of this medium and hope to remedy this with a new blog in a public place. I think we all could do with more communication and less consumption, if you know what I mean. It might just help regain some of the ground we've lost to corporate greedheads and digital copyright "protection" hoodlums, and that would be just as cool in its own way as a sweaty slog in the Sangre de Christos. See what you can do with this thing while it's still here! Senior Applelinks editor and columnist John H. Farr hereby declares self-promotion to be utterly essential for his survival and is happy to provide the following links:
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