Fragments From Floyd

I was sitting in a meeting at the Floyd High School one day recently with my laptop conspicuously up and running.  (I’m not that much of a geek as I am painfully awful anymore at longhand and use OneNote on the ThinkPad to keep legible notes, and set alarms and put things on the calendar.)

But here’s the point: Out of curiosity I told my wireless connection to find wireless access from that high school conference room. In addition to the encrypted high school routers I expected, there appeared a Holiday Inn wireless. That’s weird. The nearest was a good 25 miles away. But then I often pull up this kind of inexplicable and impossibly far-off routers in Café del Sol and such places around Floyd. What gives?

I never understood this, but here’s the scoop: It has to do with the benignly but uselessly “viral” spread of individual computers that have connected to specific “access points” that then appear to others as “ad hoc networks” that look like access points but aren’t.

Read the TechBlog piece for all the details, and next time you pull up the Baltimore Sherton Wi-Fi from your local Blacksburg bagel shop, you’ll know why.

In anticipation of the Mac move I read for months about the relative merits and demerits of Parallels versus VMware Fusion to allow cross platform accessibility on the new machine. When MacMall added Parallels for free, installed and with the purchased copy of XP up and running, that made my decision between the two software programs.

I can’t say I’m unhappy with Parallels (mostly just leaving it the heck alone) and can’t blame it for any program hangs (none in the past few days) or slowness, though I have no way to compare WITH and WITHOUT Parallels to know what effect it is having on machine speed.

Yesterday I got an offer from a VMware rep offering me (as a blogger) a free copy of VM Fusion, which conveniently includes an easy migration utility to move my Parallels Virtual Machine “seamlessly” into the new software.

What to do? VMware has been around for decades doing what Parallels just started doing. On some machines and set-ups, Fusion is faster and more stable. Is it worth a gamble for the long haul, or is it a matter of six of one, half dozen of the other?

If anybody has strong feelings backed by experience, I’d appreciate it so I can decide. Otherwise, I suppose inaction will be my decision. I confess it is nice not worrying about what’s under the hood anymore and being able to just steer and honk the horn and enjoy the scenery and get where I’m going. Now where was it I was going, anyway?

Sorry, this is old news now, but I was in the midst of this terrible change of faiths when this was submitted for the February 08 edition of the Star Sentinel. I am happy to say that I now am thoroughly converted.

I wear a long face this week, reluctant to give ground. My wife has deemed that fifteen years with the same pair of bedroom slippers is long enough. A half-roll of shiny silver duct tape to hold the tops and soles together is just too whacky. She insists that I toss them. I know she’s right. We’ll see.

You should know that I bear this old-fashioned notion to buying and keeping: find a tool that works just right, a shirt that fits, a pair of slippers that know the shape of every bump and bunion, and stick with them like faithful friends until there’s nothing left. Then patch and glue, wire and tape the thing together again; and use it a few more years. Toss away nothing lightly or too soon.

And so for me to be planning to abandon a perfectly functional if increasingly anemic four year old PC for a brand new Mac within the month is to break with my vow of ‘til death do we part. What’s more, this plan is a kind of voluntary divorce that disavows everything comfortable and familiar.

After more than twenty years of Windows PC devotion, this impending conversion carries the portent of a change of faith and normal habit. It will be like riding my horse backwards or wearing my slippers on my ears.

I will be for weeks—maybe months—awkward and fumbling in the new Promised Land, grumbling and inefficient, a lost soul unsure of new liturgy, not settled into the dogma of my new way of life. Waking up to a Mac on my desk that first morning will be to step out of the boat and walk on the water. The faithful tell me to keep my eye on the Great Apple.

Soon I’ll wonder how I ever could have put faith in My Computer, have trusted Device Manager or sought direction from the duplicitous Start Button. I see it now, that hallelujah moment when I will hear nothing but the OS-X angels singing pure Truth.

But oh how I dread the purgatory that first must come—confronting the tangled web I’ve woven of cords and cables; facing the fear that perhaps I’ve sold my birthright for a faster CPU; confessing the powerlessness of a novitiate randomly dog-paddling about the shallow end of the learning curve. Fear no evil; this too shall pass.

To assuage my burden of guilt, the old PC, thankfully, won’t go to the green box. It will live upstairs on my wife’s desk, thus avoiding the issue of how to responsibly dispose of the remains of my obsolete hand-me-down, all the while predestined for the landfill.

And here, a confession: I intend to keep a foot in both camps—to be a technological chimera, a PresbyBuddhist, if you will. The new Mac processors will run both Windows and Mac software. So I can go to heaven AND come back as a Golden Retriever!

It’s a difficult decision. I just know I don’t want to go to Dell when I die. And come to think about it, when I take that last walk down those golden streets to my reward as my hard drive finally conks out, I think (don’t tell my wife) I want to be wearing the tattered remnants of my silver slippers.

I’ve been asked here and around town this very question. So let me just address it here rather than in comments or emails.

1) The Dell XPS is 4.5 years old, out of warranty, needed a RAM upgrade badly as I increasingly relied on Photoshop and InDesign and file sizes grew, and the PC had all the instability problems PCs have always had. Odds were, I was going to have a melt-down and possibly in mid-project.

2) It has taken me years to acquire and gain command of Windows programs (share and freeware) from third party vendors that should have been built into the OS and in Mac OS-X they seem to have done a fair job of that. (Though frankly it’s only after installing Instant Shot, NeoOffice, EasyFind, and XMenu and a few other add-ons and menu customizations and such that I feel I’m getting back to where I was with the PC.)

3) I didn’t want to go Vista and after a DOA desktop AND a DOA laptop in 2004 from Dell, I didn’t want to go that way ever again.

4) We were becoming a two computer family (the two of us) and the possibility of keeping (versus donating) the PC and putting it upstairs for HER made it easier to justify doing the replacement downstairs for me. And all my image and doc files are backed up on that drive up to the time of the Mac transition.

5) Intel Processors and Parallels tipped the scales. To be able to keep PC apps I’ve come to depend on while learning my way around the Mac was the final push toward Mac. That’s finally working rather seamlessly for me, though it was confusing at first. And just the startup speed difference will add years to my computing life–20 seconds vs 4 minutes on the PC.

6) I waited until I could make the purchase without guilt since I’d added enough to the Computer Fund from book and notecard sales and other little incomes not from my day job. There IS a bit of sticker shock, no doubt.

7) I  was ready for a new challenge, to own a system to grow into over the next number of years (I got this one at baseline everything), and I wanted a more visually pleasing system with the larger monitor (23″).

I ‘ll have to say I think I’ve turned the corner now. It took me a bit more than a week to clear my head and hands of very old habits of touch and thought. And the Mac system I’ll confess was not as transparent and intuitive as I had expected.

And I still have a long way to go before I have all this laid out just the way I want it. But I do have hope that I’ll arrive and that I will continue to enjoy the new logic and blistering speed of this fantastic tool I am so fortunate to use.  May it find worthy work to do.

◊ Country Living: It has its downside. After a young possum failed to move all day in spite of occasional benign torment from the dog, we decided it was ill, possibly infectious and apparently determined to die in place over days. We shortened that period. And of course this has nothing at all to do with PC vs Mac but I thought I’d throw it in.

◊ iPhoto: Should I remove it? It seems to have reproduced ALL of my images (vs making aliases of them) and then won’t let me get directly to them through iPhoto. And yet Spotlight finds those images but the ones in dated folders (the way I’ve been organizing for years) are invisible. This is a real disappointment.

◊ Word Processor: For the first time, I’ve needed to send formatted text to someone and resorted instead to cutting and pasting into an email since I don’t as yet have a designated word processor other the trial of Scrivener I’m using.  (And I wasn’t able to save as pdf which, having the full version of Acrobat 8, is another problem to deal with.) Today I’ll be at Best Buy to get a USB cable for the “free” Epson printer. Should I get iWorks?

◊ Victory: Find out just now how to set default for visible columns in folder windows AND how to make the folder click open a NEW window so I can have two side by side for files transfer. What a small thing, but how very limiting when you don’t know how to make it happen! I’m frankly disappointed with Mac’s file structure navigation. I’m wondering if there are not add-ons that will let a person set up Explorer-like double panes. Sheesh.

◊ Grayscale: I can’t find a way to control my Canon Pixma 5000 printer to make it print grayscale. Should I load the CD that came with the printer even though Leopard seems to be able to control it at least mostly? But I’m sure the CD is for PC. Hmmm.

◊ PhotoShop: When I open PS or InDesign, I see the controls around a “workspace” that is my background desktop image or whatever programs were open in it–versus the clean white empty space I’m used to. How to I change that? It’s gotta be DopeSlap simple. So go ahead. Give me a slap.

So. I may be coming out of the thicket of early confusion in this mega-move to Mac. I managed to actually get some work off this morning–a 500 word piece for Evince, the arts and entertainment  flyer down in the Danville area. I already had a piece on the “nature gap” from the purported future book and an accompanying image (that I converted to BW). Wish I could have dressed it up a bit. Got to get that word processor decision worked out.

I am generally a mild-mannered sort of guy and tolerant of a high level of ignorance, indifference and incompetence. I expect it, in fact.

Cost cutting by quality compromise, planned obsolescence and crappy workmanship, too, I find not surprising.

So why did I go ballistic? Because second only to shipping a printer-fax-copier without a power cord, sending one without a USB cable–there is no excuse, though to the shareholders of Epson, there are reasons.

Free! The printer was FREE with my MacPro. AFTER filling out a maddeningly obfuscating rebate form and NOW to have to drive more than 30 miles to get a fricking cable so I can scan the Adobe agreement…I’m sorry, I am not a happy consumer.

The model is the CFX 7400. No USB cable. Just so you’ll know. And several levels of Epson customer so-called support knows I am not one bit happy with their CHEAPNESS.

Now the whole world knows. And I feel better.

Sigh. Shutting things down as normal last night, and the machine hung. The little disk spun and spun on the screen and nothing happened. Kill it at the switch.

This morning, the system seems to operate normally except that the desktop image only appears behind the menu bar at the top of the screen (and also just before shutdown) while the entire real estate of the desktop otherwise is a glaring unpleasing white.

I haven’t a clue how to go about problem solving on this machine and OS yet. And worse, because the Western Digital My Book Studio 750GB hard drive is not playing nice (hear that, potential buyers?) I have no Time Machine backup of what was once a pristine system.

Meanwhile, my productivity chart for the past week looks like the Dow Jones. I had intended this morning to begin the search in the image archives for a possible book cover (no, there isn’t actually a book yet, only drafty parts). I’ll let you know if I come up with something and probably as always ask for your votes.

Sorry to be a whiner, and thanks so much to the Mac crowd that has been kind to offer encouragement, links, and ideas. Keep’em coming!

Yesterday I discovered the beauty of Spaces and that has helped my productivity considerably. I think back of how many blind alleys and stumbles it took me to become proficient with the PC, and by comparison, I’ve raced through years of learning on the Mac in the less than one week I’ve had it.

Doesn’t mean I can’t still crash from time to time. Gonna see if my buddy Doug can make this HD work on his machine (and if not, send it back under warranty) and get my machine Time Machined ASAP and that will soothe a lot of worries.

If there are any regular readers (are any among them truly regular?) you might remember that on more than one occasion, our arboreally-named yellow lab Tsuga, has exhibited the most neurotic behavior on hearing computer tones.

He especially dislikes the DINK of instant messages. And now with the new Mac, there are odd noises coming both from the speakers (which I cannot for the life of me remember to turn off each time after listening to YouTube or such) as well as from the sound card in the CPU.

His paranoia has reached new levels with this to the point that for the first time in his 4.5 years here, he has run frantically up the forbidden stairs in an attempt to escape the dreaded tiny sound. And this is not okay. We need to maintain our relatively dog-hair-free zone on the second floor, and besides, he goes UP with much more grace than he comes DOWN the steps, and lord please, no hip dysplasia.

So here’s the plan: I have a yogurt cup full of dog biscuit pieces on my desk. And every time I fail to prevent the dreaded noise and he begins his agitated panting dance around the room, he gets a treat.

With a great amount of luck and dogged (ha ha) persistence, can I condition my subject to approach rather than to avoid?

Or will he eventually train me to shut off all “sounds” in program preferences; keep the speakers off; and never let the yogurt cup run dry?

Don powdered wig. Motion to chamber musicians to begin. Take one stop forward, one step back, bow and flourish. Cuss and spit.

So the disk drive tray opens. Finally. Adobe Creative Suite 3 is loaded. Finally. The moment of truth: download and install the Mac version of Nikon Raw plugin and prepare to achieve warp speed. Tilt.

It asks me to verify my qualified upgrade path. Fine. I got all that in place with a call directly to Adobe before I made my decision to order two weeks ago. They found my registration numbers and it was all cool, requiring only that I pony up the $400 for the upgrade.

But today online, my CS2 reg numbers are not recognized. Okay. I have a month to make it right. Way things are going, I hope that’s going to be long enough.

But I did manage to get a raw image downsampled to save-for-web routine blog size, though getting to the blogimage folder will take some streamlining. Baby steps.

Now at this point, on my PC any day last week, I’d simply have clicked on the upload to Flickr widget and have you a clickable larger image. But not today. Soon. Maybe.

There’s this accidental damage to the international internet nervous system which was bad enough.

But THREE cables severed in a few days?

(CNN) — An undersea cable carrying Internet traffic was cut off the Persian Gulf emirate of Dubai, officials said Friday, the third loss of a line carrying Internet and telephone traffic in three days.

Dubai has been hit hard by an Internet outage apparently caused by a cut undersea cable.

Ships have been dispatched to repair two undersea cables damaged on Wednesday off Egypt.

Okay. This post also is my first with an image since getting the Mac on Tuesday. I miss SnagIt. Is there an app to resize, apply borders, drop shadow etc without opening up PhotoShop?

Oh did I mention: without using the Mac keyboard, I can’t open my Superdrive bay to insert the Photoshop installation disks–the cost of my non-Mac ergonomic keyboard? Surely there’s a solution. Tra-la.

Addendum 11 a.m: Just in case some other poor NOOB soul has a similar exasperation for a superdrive that won’t open on a Mac Pro, I finally found this tip: hold down the mouse key during a APPLE/RESTART. That seems to have put the “smart” drive back on the map. Macs are intuitive, are they? Well, not entirely.