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Software, Indians, & Upside-Down (No one's complained about the layout yet?!?) Jaguar
Jiggies I have all I need now (finally!), including a graphics card to boost the VRAM to a total of 36MB. There's plenty of memory (448MB), two decent-sized fast SCSI drives, and Lord knows I've waiting long enough. All this will be happening on my venerable five-year-old 8600, long ago upgraded to 450MHz G3 level. Yes, that's slow these days, but it seems plenty fast enough for me and has to do in any case since I'm way past broke. I do however now have a fresh used 17" monitor to go with a new G4 whenever I'm lucky enough to get one, probably not until we're all talking about G5s, hohoho. Anyway, I don't need any convincing. I was convinced months ago. I just need the will. Interestingly, installing 9.2.1 on one of the hard drives was a piece of cake. The 8600 is unsupported, actively so I should say, because you can't go above 9.1 on this machine without the help of a clever utility I found. As soon as I can find a spare three days to download the 9.2.2 update through my dialup connection and take care of that, I'll be able to do the OS X conversion. Others have managed this on 8600s without any hassle to speak of, so I'm going to see what I can do. If I ruin everything, I'll just have to get a new computer or update Applelinks with the iBook. At the moment, though, the most aggravating problem on the horizon is sorting through all the crap on the hard drive to be cleared for Jaguar. If you're like me, most of your Zip disks are filled with four-year-old shareware demos. (I was also going to say that if you're like me, you're in big trouble, but that would be beside the point.) I could use CDs, but it's hard to find the time to back stuff up because the Que USB CD burner ruins ever disk recorded faster than double time. But hat's what I'll do, I suppose, instead of flinging the whole mess onto a spare hard drive, which I don't have anyway. Funny how this all works out. This way I'll be forced to decide whether that three-year-old app I copied from so-and-so but never really used needs to be put to sleep on a CD or whether I just have to have it on the drive. (See, I can talk about computers if I want to.) Sheep
Shuffle "The day is an occasion for huge throngs to gather at the Pueblo. This being New Mexico, that means Hispanos, Anglos, Indians, and tourists. The thousand-year-old settlement is jammed with Indian craftspeople, food booths, and a kind of crowd you won't see anywhere else, all milling about together in the dust: Road warriors on acid, frontier hookers, middle-aged Mayans, sage monkeys, designer gauchos, Santa Fe slummers, mountain men, lowriders, even a few real cowboys. There may also be more caravan queens with dusty naked navels and Wild West wannabes with jewel-encrusted ponytails here than anywhere on earth. Tourists are easy to spot because they usually forget to wear hats or carry water, and if they're wearing sandals they always have very clean toes. Mix all of these in the hot sun with an even larger crowd of ferociously proud Norteño and Native American families from all over the Southwest and you have quite a party. No alcohol, though, and no cameras, either (both strictly forbidden)." The pranksters I'll see today won't be wearing floppy shoes and rubber noses. They will be doing everything they can to deflate pretension and generally break up normal ways of being, however. The koshares, or sacred clowns, are a kind of elemental force that wouldn't be tolerated at a church picnic, although they stand for something quite divine. These guys are the antithesis of "proper," and it's a sight to see them part a crowd just by walking into it. Real spiritual energy doesn't fit inside a box or a book, and that's just one thing being expressed here.'d love to tell you more, but a) you probably wouldn't believe me, and b) I could stand to sell a few more e-books. Speaking of which, I had great fun using Acrobat to make this particular PDF sing. The first edition of the book didn't even have bookmarks or internal links, but this one sports a table of contents that actually jump right to the specified pages. Fun stuff. Silly
Summary The Sunday New York Times has a long article about the horror that may befall Intel Corporation if its latest processor, poor ole Itanium (a name doomed to be misspelled and mispronounced), isn't adopted by the server-producing masses. I also read that Ford Motor Company's stock has fallen by more the 40 percent in recent times (I didn't know that) and figure a number of other companies are in the same circumstances by dint of a) a recovery that isn't, b) war jitters, c) funny accounting fears, and d) the antics of our local koshares. I don't know, of course, but the Dow Jones started off this day by falling 200 points. My 90-year-old aunt says she's going to live until the market comes back to where it was when she last claimed she was a millionaire, several fortunes ago. Ooookay. I have an artist friend who put a big chunk of savings into mutual funds several years ago and really needs it now -- oops! That's all for now. Sorry there aren't any pictures this week, but sometimes a fellow can get preoccupied and let things slide. Time for some fry bread and a clown break, anyway. Senior Applelinks editor and columnist John H. Farr is off to the Pueblo. FARRFEED.COM -- Salon Weblog GRACK! updates will now be included in the all-new FARR SITE NEWS newslist. To join up, just CLICK HERE and send a blank email. (Current year's columns just below)
"GRACK!" is © copyright 2002, John H. Farr, all rights reserved
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