Nemo Finds Nemo in Los Angeles

MONDAY

Los Angeles is a city of vibrant neighborhoods, connected by busy thoroughfares and roaring freeways. I’m rarely afraid of earthquakes, but I trotted under L.A.’s mighty I-405 underpass not to be crushed if the roadway overhead decided to collapse. I have a birthday coming up next month, and I’ll feel much better if I’m able to celebrate than if I’m lying in a pulverized mass of concrete and steel.

Monday it seemed I was the only person on foot in the entire city. The previous day I wasn’t, because Sunday is market day in Hollywood. Ivar Street connects Sunset and Hollywood Boulevards. A weekly produce market fills Ivar Street with color, sounds, and smells in an unpretentious neighborhood atmosphere very different from how the rest of the world envisions Hollywood.

Hollywood is a long way from our home in Tucson, Arizona. Sunset last Friday night yielded the final view we’ll have of the pyro-cumulus cloud billowing from the devastating Aspen Fire destroying old growth forests within our nearby Santa Catalina Mountains.

When Barbara and I departed from home in Tucson at dawn the next day, our green VW Beetle was packed full with clothing and sundries for the entire month of July.

Saturday’s 500-mile drive to Los Angeles was made sweet and swift by hours and hours full of MP3-encoded music (legal, of course) played from our poor person’s iPod, to be discussed at length in a future Nemo Memo (watch this space!).

We unloaded our suitcases at the home of L.A. friends Kurt and Sheila, then Kurt immediately took us on a gastronomic adventure to the Cheese Store of Beverly Hills. Floor to ceiling and wall to wall, hundreds of exotic international cheeses presented an overwhelming array. Kurt put us at the mercy of Norbert, who selected four raw-milk (sheep and goat) cheeses from Europe.

Back in Kurt’s condo our taste buds exploded while we evaluated each cheese. Result :all are amazing, so when in Beverly Hills make your way to Norbert’s niche and you will be delighted. Warning: these are premium, expensive cheeses, so set a dollar limit on the sampler you request, and tell Norbert that “Kurt sent me.”

By Sunday mid-morning we had traversed the length and breadth of Hollywood’s Ivar Street market, and it was time to get $erious about fruit$ and vegetable$. Here’s Kurt hoisting a freshly-harvested sack of Valencia oranges.

In between every few market stalls is a street musician, or busker, wailing and strumming for loose change and dollar bills. The gentlemen with guitar was singing in Spanish to an admiring youngster, who refused to leave when his parents attempted to drag him away.

Barbara made instant friends with a fruit vendor who looked like a Portuguese version of Bill Clinton. Notice fingers grabbing sample tastes of peach and nectarine segments. If you have never eaten fresh, ripe, organic California stone fruit, your life is not yet complete.

A sextet performing bluegrass and authentic country music serenaded us at the far end of the Ivar Street market.

“Hey, Nemo” said Kurt, “can we stop in Amoeba Records for just ten minutes? I’ve never been inside, and I hear it’s pretty good.”

“Not a chance, Kurt!” I shouted, “because it takes at least an hour to find your way through the hundreds of thousands of recordings in dozens of categories.”

Kurt behaved himself, scouted out the massive retail music and video establishment, and departed promptly ten minutes later with a severely glazed expression. Amoeba is one of the world’s few remaining thriving independent music stores. Here’s a glimpse of one corner.

On our way to have lunch at a tiny Lebanese storefront restaurant, Barbara screamed, “Stop, Kurt. There’s Nemo!”

Sure enough, there I was on the marquee, as captured with Mr. AZ Nemo standing underneath.

Next day, on a walking tour of Venice Beach with Sheila, we all purchased clip-on sunglasses from Bohemian John, a clip-on expert. Meeting this guy and watching him size up you and your glasses is worth the entire price of admission.

Sheila and Barbara treated themselves to pedicures. What color to select for the finished products? How about “Beemo green,” to match our VW’s paint?

Heading north along scenic Pacific Coast Highway California Route 1, we observed sure-footed tourists getting cozy with crabs, urchins, sea stars, and sea lions at a pounding beach near Hearst Castle.

Did you ever doubt the world is round? I verified it with this photo, taken from the bluff above a beach near San Simeon.

The highlight of our final day on the coastal highway was a wildflower walk above the Big Sur coastline with Dannie, an old friend and recent arrival in this part of California.

Once we arrived in San Francisco we were invited up to a pool in Marin County by our Bay Area Nemo relatives. Barbara and Uncle Howard were caught in the act of total submission to Thursday’s New York Times crossword puzzle, spending a frustrating hour boiling in the hot tub before throwing in the towel.

A new trail extension of the walk above the Lands End bluffs in San Francisco’s northwest corner is open. This spur heads out to a scary promontory with a sensational view of Golden Gate Bridge and environs. Watch your step!

Thanks for coming along on this first week of our photo tour of California. I’ll have more to report and show you in a week or so.

John Nemerovski

I aught to know what its like. I am a writer myself. I have gone searching
fruitlessly for something to write when there just wasn’t anything. I have
taken dictation from my muse, when she was speaking faster than I could
type. I have gone without sleep, writing, waiting to see what would happen
next in my stories, eager to get to the end to see how it all turns out.

I live in the city. It is a living being, an organism dug into the dirt next
to a river, broadly sprawling under the hot sun. She is not pretty. She is
obscene. She pours out her wastes into the water, and onto landfills that
surround her. Great highways come into her and leave, bearing giant lorries
which carry the sustenance she needs to live day by day. Her arteries are
clogged with people, many of whom see to her needs. Others are parasites,
living off of her like worms on flesh.

I know why she exists. She exists so that I might exist. My life is her
single reason to be. She serves no other purpose. This is no egomania on my
part. The storywriters told me all this.

The storywriters. Shadowy creatures that are not always there, living in
dark recesses and remote rooms of the city, but always, always nearby. They
write. They write in their little books, with bare wooden pencils sharpened
with pocketknives. They write furtively, perhaps afraid for anyone to see
what they write in those little bound books. They sit hunched over, in their
dark overcoats, and with their brimmed hats pressed down so that no one
might see. There is a desperation to their writing, and I know why.

I never saw them for a long time. My life was too self centered, my wants
and needs hid them from me. I was led to write, and eventually, I learned to
write as a consuming passion. It was only after many years that I began to
see them, first out of the corner of my eye at some cheap coffee shop. They
were so anonymous that I mistook them for people. Yet when I turned to look
at them directly, they were somehow not there anymore.

Their presence in my life was like a quiet cancer. You never notice it until
one morning something is there almost unnoticeable. But you notice it. After
a while it is a continual presence in your life, and you begin to feel the
cold doom of the thing. The story writers are like that in my life, but
there is no doctor I can go to for treatment for their presence.

Right now we are at a stalemate, the storywriters and me. I understand that
they need me to live. They understand that I know they exist. What can be
said between us? Their very presence betrays itself in my writings, and they
are afraid. They are afraid because they need me to write about them. It is
how they exist.

They want me to write about them as heroes. The want genuine love in their
lives, and excellent adventures. They do not wish to have anything but a
happy ending, and they are quietly desperate that I succeed in my writings,
so that they may have a wonderful life. Epics they don’t want, but only
happy times where they bad guys are not too bad, and the plots are not too
exerting. This is why my stories tend to be so insipid, never quite reaching
the greatness I desire of them.

Would that they would grant me the same favor, but that is not possible. I
exist to write their stories, and I must live in this gray slum of a city,
torn with crime and pain, because that is where the great writers live and
thrive. God, how I wish I could live in the country, in a cottage, with a
happy chubby wife, surrounded with a green garden and trees, breathing fresh
air.

They would never permit that, of course. I understand that much. If I were
to live in such a place, my writing would suffer. I would write murder
mysteries, or horror. I might not write at all. Or worse, I might write
comedy. Why should I do otherwise? I would be living a life that was
fulfilling and free of pain, and I would have little need to keep these
Storywriters alive or fulfilled.

That is the final horror of my life here in this hellhole. I know I only
exist because they write my life by small chapters into their little books,
sitting in the shadows, hiding silently in the next room. I know they are
there, though. I can hear their stubby pencils making soft little scratches
upon the pages of their little books.

My life may be short, now that they know that I know about them. There are
many other writers here in this world anyway. Too many writers. Who could
ever get published? Being famous, being published, being an Author, has no
bearing on their existence. Such successful Authors don’t exist anyway. They
are only imaginary. Only my writing of their stories matters. These story
writers. Then they can live. Then they can continue to come here
occasionally, into my world, and write their badly written chapters of my
dreary existence, an existence that only a truly good writer could endure.

I guess I look forward to seeing them out of the corner of my eye. I never
look at them anymore. I pretend that they are not there. I do not wish to
destroy this strange symbiosis we share. I am afraid to frighten them away,
or worse, to have them edit me out of their little stories.

Who is real here? Am I? Are they? Does either of us exist in some real world
somewhere? Or are we both a figment of some writer, somewhere, off dreaming
in the desert?

I no longer care. I no longer need an answer to my questions. I only live to
write, and I write to live, as any good storywriter would tell you. That is
all that matters, my fictitious friend, as you set there in you imaginary
chair, reading this imaginary story. May your ending be as happy as I hope
mine will someday be.

Don’t forget to write.

Roger Born

Recently, I noticed a television commercial for BuyMusic.com, a new per-song download store on the web. In the commercial, people sing along, sans music, to Rappers Delight. This is, of course, a direct rip-off of Apple Computer, Inc., commercials for the Apple Music Store. The background is white, with just the people listening to a MP3 player singing along.

Later that day, I receive an email via MyMac.com’s online feedback form from Drew Dallet, the president of Boom-Creative.com. Here is the email from Drew:

Let me start by saying I know this doesn’t relate to a specific article in your publication but I think it deserves to be published — for all the Mac users as well as creative types out there.

Dear editor —

As a graphic designer, marketer, and business owner I’m utterly disgusted by the recent buymusic.com TV spot promoting buy.com’s music store. To think that some agency was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to concept a nationally televised TV spot for buymusic.com and the best they could do was to do an exact rip-off of apple’s simple and elegant music store ads. I honestly believe that the executives at buy.com said, “hey lets rip off apple’s music store’s look and feel for our buymusic.com website and we can then rip off apple’s TV commercials as well!”

It’s an outrage! Up until now I often shopped buy.com for their selection and pricing. I will never again support anything they do. It’s for reasons like this that in a tough economy, great designer firms with amazingly original ideas are having a tough time succeeding.

Sincerely
Drew M. Dallet
President
Boom-creative.com

While I agree with the sentiment Drew expressed, my initial thought process ran something like this:

The entire advertising world seems to me to be incredibly short on creative ideas. How many people could recognize one automotive commercial from the next? One beer commercial from the next? One feminine product commercial from the others? The entire television commercial industry, with but a very few exceptions, have made a carrier out of copying what ever else is out there. So why be upset with BuyMusic.com for doing the same thing?

Flattery is the sincerest form of flattery? Well, if your entire business model, right down to advertising, is to simply rip-off another company, sure. And the more I saw of BuyMusic.com, the more I came to realize just how blatant their theft of iTMS is.

This is not simply fair market competition. This is stealing of intellectual property, as far as I am concerned. It can be argued, and I am sure it will be, that BuyMusic.com sells music via a website, rather than through another propriety application such as iTunes. This is true, as currently only Macintosh users on OS X using the iTunes music player can access and buy music from the iTunes Music Store. But that is like a company furnishing their restaurant to look just like McDonalds, but only placing them in shopping malls, using Donald McDonald (rather than Ronald) as their clown-faced spokesman. That would never fly, and neither should BuyMusic.com.

As for BuyMusic.com advertising music prices at 79-cents a song, Bob LeVitus published an eye-opening article on the subject on his always entertaining Houston Chronicle “Dr. Mac” column on July 25th in which he found “BuyMusic.com’s big marketing push is songs for 79 cents. But it’s a bogus claim. For example, only one song in its Top 100 Downloads section cost 79 cents; all the others had prices from 99 cents to $1.29.

Every song at the iTunes Music Store site costs 99 cents.”

Ouch. Also in the article, LeVitus found:

“BuyMusic.com limits the number of CDs you are allowed to burn to one, three, or 10 burns for most songs, while iTunes Music Store, places no limits on the number of burns.”

“BuyMusic.com sets strict limits on what you can do with the songs you buy. Most are bound to a single PC, so you’re only allowed to listen on one computer, while every song you buy at iTMS can be played on up to three Macs.”

“BuyMusic.com restricts the number of portable MP3 players you can transfer most songs to, while the iTMS allows you to copy every song you buy to all the iPods you own.”

“Étheir search engine didn’t work. I was never able to search the site for a song, an artist or an album. Each time I tried, I got “server not found” messages, and I tried three Web browsers: Safari, Internet Explorer and iCab.”

“A two-song EP by Clay Aiken is $1.98 at iTMS but costs $9.49 at BuyMusic.com.”

There is more, and LeVitus should be praised for this sort of article. I only hope that the truth of BuyMusic.com is learned sooner rather than later. Hey, if it was a really good deal, I would be happy to use the service. I don’t care where I buy my music from, honestly. As long as I can get a good price, it is easy to do, and I do what I want to with the music once I get it. Right now, however, iTMS is, by far, the BEST place to buy digital music for a Macintosh user. Bar none. I have already spent close to fifty-bucks there.

BuyMusic.com is a shameful company. They are thieves. They are about as original as Windows. The look of their website (see pictures below) is a poorly done rip-off of iTMS. Their television commercial is more than a rip-off; it falls into the plagiarism category. Hell, they even copied the FONT from Apple’s commercial!

I hope everyone joins me in spreading the word NOT to use BuyMusic.com to all out PC using friends. If enough people spread the word, perhaps BuyMusic.com will change their ways. Or go out of business, which this company clearly deserves.

Tim Robertson

The Call for a Constitutional Convention

In our country, a clerk making change at a convenience store makes $7.00 an hour in a high-risk situation, and a toll taker making change on a state toll road makes $22.00 with health insurance and pension benefits. The same person making change at a cafeteria could expect yet another different wage and benefit package. We attribute this situation to the free market, but really it’s about power. The unionized toll collector has power, the convenience clerk and the cafeteria workers have less power, relative to the strength of the organizations that they work for, unionized or not.

The Chaos of Free Enterprise

The free enterprise system provides no logic, no justice and no control. Both the worker and the corporations are subject to the whim of a non-sensical marketplace. The stronger the corporation is, the more likely it will be targeted by the union. The “invisible” hand of free enterprise invites both the chaos and the slavery to form. It is the corporate drive for profitability that creates the original chaos, as it tries to negotiate a legal slave wage, and the nascent strength of the unions just makes the chaos worse. All men are created equal, but this system generates inequality. Mutual Responsibility does not require equal pay for equal work, but a more equitable reward for work is a side effect of such a system. A system that rewards each man equally for the same effort is morally better than one that does not.

The Government’s Dilemma

A starting point to making a practical change is to assess how we operate now. Our government has three primary responsibilities: To protect the nation’s borders, to provide for the social welfare of the people, and to act as referee for the competition between private corporations. It is the third role of referee that consumes much of our government labor, and the attention of our free press as well.

Taxes, by definition, are against the fiduciary interest of a corporation. They want the government to provide all its services for free, regardless of the fact that corporations are a huge cost for the operation of the government. Because taxes are the focal mechanism for the government to exist, corporations (and individuals) fight any tax or expenditure, which does not effect or benefit them directly. As a result, we have a myriad of laws, tax laws, lobbying for loopholes, legal interpretations and judicial decisions. We tax and audit at the level of minutiae. For every pet project, there is a pet fee to fund it. Every fee and every fund is administered and audited at every level of government. Along with this activity there is an entire private infrastructure built around understanding, interpreting, and auditing these same laws, and a judicial branch to decide any conflicts. This is an enormous wealth of human talent, and it is all spent in a bureaucratic dead end. All this activity does nothing to further the basic spirit of man, and creates no real wealth for the nation.

Free enterprise generates a demand for professional lawyers, accountants, auditors and clerks, when we could just as easily have more builders, doctors, counselors, teachers, engineers and scientists. Our collective diversity is our greatest strength. We waste our resources by perpetuating a system that makes numbers written on a piece of paper our primary goal. What Adam Smith described in The Wealth of Nations was the manufacture of products for a useful purpose. We have made the record keeping more expensive than the product it tracks, because doing so serves the narrow self-interests of the participants. As a society, we could work a four-day week, and enjoy our leisure, our family, and our personal interests more, and audit less. Instead we are increasing our workload, and both parents often work outside the home.

The free enterprise model may have fit an agrarian age, when the natural rhythm of the day was determined by the sunset and the seasons. As we have harnessed energy, and our society has grown more complex and inter-related, it has failed the basic test of being rational, much less utopian. It is generating less real wealth and destroying our families. The government’s mandate is to support free enterprise, unchecked wealth and private property. It is powerless to stop the wasteful cycle.

Governing Choices

When our young nation made the change from the Articles of Confederation to the central government as embodied in The Constitution, we made a massive and important change based on the power of the vote. That change codified the social utopian ideals of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. We need the wisdom and the courage to make another fundamental change to our public affairs. We need to change our economic model to fit the ideals of our social life. Our economic model is in conflict with our civil liberties. Free enterprise squanders our wealth, our opportunity and our freedom.

When the government tries to develop enterprise zones, redistribute wealth, formulate tax schedules, encourage consistency, promote research, provide health and retirement benefits, provide defense, fair elections, protect the environment, and arbitrate the checks and balances of commerce, crime and human frailties, it does so because there is no other power to take the responsibilities of governing. If business took on more of the burden of social needs, the government could be smaller and more effective. This system we live under creates government expansion by virtue of the failure of corporate powers to engage in a broader view, which they cannot do because it is against their self-interest.

The Philosophy of Mutual Responsibility

Consider a new formula. Not socialism where the government owns the businesses, not capitalism where the businesses do whatever they can get away with, but an industrial-nationalism where both private corporations and governments are mandated to provide equally.

Core benefits are part of every workers rights, they are not negotiated, they are universal. Free speech and the freedom to worship apply equally to everyone. This system expands it to include health care and the fruit of ones labor. Private property continues, different classes of wealth continue, but free enterprise does not rule the system unchecked.

Whatever the government does for itself, the businesses must also do, and vice-versa. It is an equalization of life’s basic requirements. Business competition is based on the skills and productivity of the employees, not on the ability of one group to manipulate its workers’ rewards. There is no need for labor unions. Health benefits are pooled and equal between private and public corporations.

Union and government jobs often provide a “set for life” mentality that often yields high costs and low productivity. The private sector complains, but seldom offers a better alternative. It is quick to provide a select few with much, and leave the bulk of its employees far behind. Mutual Responsibility eliminates the “set for life” mentality of all three groups.

Everyone who works is vested through a profit-sharing mechanism in the success of the corporation. Likewise, when the corporation struggles, all employees struggle with it. This motivates the middle management to be effective within the corporation, and binds the laborers and managers fortunes together. When the corporation is successful, all the employees are successful with it.

A formula of Mutual Responsibility will improve the quality of life for all. Corporations need to be re-formulated from enterprises for predatory profit to partners in the American experiment. There will also be less poison in our politics. The equaling of Mutual Responsibility will dilute the power of corporations and unions. Like the vote and our other freedoms, Mutual Responsibility will empower each citizen, but not one over another. Corporations are made up of citizens, and have neither a right nor a need to be treated as a separate entity. Corporations do not sit on the jury at a trial because they are not a peer of the individual. Likewise, they should not control the machinations of government, or be held in higher regard than the individual. Corporations should be subject to the same collective rights and freedoms as the individual, as well as the same limitations. The framers of the Constitution did not envision the role corporations would come to play.

Steve Consilvio

Wiebe Fire800 Hard Drive
Company: WiebeTech LLC
Price: $299.95 to $549.95 case only $169.95
http://www.wiebetech.com

The FireWire 800 floodgates have cracked open, with more manufacturers
shipping FireWire 800 products. MyMac’s first FireWire 800 review was the LaCie BigDisk d2.

If you found the BigDisk too rich for your pocketbook, or simply more
capacity than you need, WiebeTech’s Fire800 drive series may be
right for you.

WiebeTech has been around for several years, and it’s acquired a
reputation for innovative storage products. James Wiebe’s small firm does not make the actual hard drive mechanisms, but it packages them in well-engineered cases with great documentation. Many of Wiebe’s products are innovative and unique (the Drive Dock and Forensic Drive Dock) and can’t be found elsewhere. Fellow reviewer John Nemerovski has been raving about Wiebe products for a long time, and now I share his enthusiasm.

The Fire800 is a straightforward packaging of an ATA hard drive in a 9″ x 5.1″ x 1.4″ case: about the size of a trade paperback. Wiebe uses the latest Oxford 922 bridge chips to get the best FireWire throughput from the drive to your Mac. The back of the case has one FireWire 400 port, two (!) FireWire 800 ports, and a USB 2.0 port. Included are FireWire 400, FireWire 800, FireWire 800 to 400, and USB 2 cable, a power supply (the drive is not self-powered) and CD with outstandingly clear installation instructions.

The drive enclosure needs no fan, and the unit is virtually silent. The Fire800 ships with a small aluminum foot that slides onto the bottom side of the case, so the case sits solidly upright. The foot needs to be slid onto the case by the user, but it’s a friction-fit, and no tools are needed.

The review unit supplied to the Weeks division of MyMac labs was a 180-gig version. As with the LaCie BigDisk review, we used the XBench benchmarking application, with the Fire800 connected to my PowerMac Dual 1.42 machine with one gigabyte of RAM.

Here are the XBench results for the Fire800 using the traditional FireWire 400 interface:

Drive Type IC35L180 AVV207-1
Disk Test 86.25
Sequential 71.23
Uncached Write 71.73 31.29 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 73.69 29.98 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 60.57 9.54 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 82.42 35.56 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 109.29
Uncached Write 104.18 1.57 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 130.57 29.95 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 103.38 0.67 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 103.41 20.27 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Here are the XBench results using the speedier FireWire 800 interface:

Drive Type IC35L180 AVV207-1
Disk Test 107.10
Sequential 99.30
Uncached Write 113.23 49.40 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 114.73 46.68 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 67.45 10.62 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 126.47 54.56 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 116.22
Uncached Write 105.48 1.59 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 135.41 31.06 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 104.88 0.68 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 124.74 24.45 MB/sec [256K blocks]

These number are slightly better than those from the LaCie BigDisk

As expected, the FireWire 800 interface provides substantially faster
reads, writes, and access times, especially when doing sequential
reads/writes. Applications launched noticeably faster, and large files
saved noticeable faster. Wiebe’s pricing structure is unusual, allowing purchases of the Fire800 as a bare case, with no drive included. If you have a bare drive, perhaps pulled from an old Mac, you can install it in a Fire800 case, and have FireWire 800 capability for not much money. Also, for those power users who want to grab every bit of transfer rate, Wiebe allows a choice of drive manufacturer and cache size for some models of the Fire800!

If you are in the market for the 200/250-gigabyte drives, the 200/250 LaCie drives are priced competitively with the 200/250-gigabyte Wiebe Fire800 drives. But if you are looking for smaller drives, only Wiebe provides the smaller sizes, or bare cases.

Conclusion

WiebeTech is a great company shipping hard drives with state of the
art FireWire interface chips. If you want a mid-size drive with great
FireWire 800 specifications, the Wiebe Fire800 line is highly recommended.

MacMice Rating: 5 out of 5

David Weeks

Synchronize Pro X
Company: Qdea.com
Price: $99.95 (two year license)
http://www.qdea.com

Keeping files synchronized across multiple computers has been a problem for many years. The explosion of laptops and networks has made the syncing problem even worse. How do you make sure that you have the right version of the right file on the right computer, especially when you travel with a laptop, and may not have easy remote access to your desktop computer?

I’ve been fortunate enough to own numerous PowerBooks, starting with the PowerBook 100, and have tried many different solutions to the file synchronization problem. Over the years, I’ve tried many different file-syncing strategies, from the totally manual, to AppleScript-based solutions, to dedicated file synchronization applications. Take my word for it, use a dedicated application; DO NOT try to sync more than just a few files by hand!

There’s a plenitude of syncing applications for the Macintosh; a stroll through VersionTracker reveals more than 10 to choose from, ranging from free to expensive. Qdea’s Synchronize Pro X is the most expensive. Let’s see how well it works.

Synchronize Pro X has plenty of features. It’s an OS X native program. It allows long file names (more than up to 255 characters), file sizes over 2 gigabytes, and handles OS X file permissions with aplomb.

You can set Synchronize Pro X to archive, backup, or synchronize. You can use it with local disks, over a local-area network, or over the Internet. It can even wake up a sleeping computer using the so-called “Ethernet magic packet,” to allow timed and scripted operations even when the remote machine is asleep when the syncing operation begins. Unfortunately, Airport-connected machines cannot be awoken via the “magic packet,” as the Mac OS powers down Airport cards during sleep. Synchronize Pro X will remember passwords needed for remote login, allowing totally unattended operation. Synchronize Pro X can create bootable OS X backup disks.

It allows file to be selected or unselected from the sync operation by name, file type/creator, or extension.
Files that have been deleted from a disk or folder as part of a syncing operation can be archived, providing a healthy measure of safety in case a file was accidentally sync’ed out of existence. Take it from me, this happens more than one likes to admit.

Normal operation of Synchronize Pro X (hereafter referred to as SPX) means choosing the drives or folders that you wish to work with, and deciding what you wish to do. Laptop owners may choose to sync certain folders with their desktop machine. If you are working with an external hard drive for backup, you may want to make a mirror image of your main hard drive. You may or may not want to delete files that are not on the “source” drive. SPX allows all these choices.

Here’s how I use SPX most of the time.

When I travel, I want certain folders on the PowerBook to be identical with the same folders from my desktop. Because SPX can resolve aliases, (a critical feature for my style of disk organization) I created a “Sync Big” folder on the desktop machine, and a “Sync Little” folder on the laptop.

In the Sync Big folder on the desktop Mac, I put aliases of the numerous separate folders on the desktop machine that I want mirrored on the laptop.

In the Sync Little folder on the PowerBook, I put aliases of the folders on the laptop that I want to be mirrored from the desktop.

I then told SPX to create a backup, using the Sync Big as the “Master.” I set my options to delete files from the laptop that were not on the desktop Mac, not to copy files that were over 750 MB (my Virtual PC hard drive image), not to copy .DSStore files, and to preserve file permissions. Finally, I chose the resolve aliases option, which meant that SPX would work with the original files, not the aliases themselves.
When the backup operation begins, SPX scans the folder and files pointed to by the aliases in Sync Big and Sync Little, comparing the file modification times for all the files in question on both Macs. You’ll see a graphic display of files to be copied, and files to be deleted. SPX gives you the option to make changes to the list of copied files even this late in the process, which few other sync application allow.

When you are happy with what’s going to happen, and let the process proceed, SPX presents a nice progress dialog, showing how many files are left to be copied, with time and size remaining information as well.

At the end of the process, I have seven folders on my PowerBook that are identical with the same folders on my desktop.

When I return home, I use the same SPX document, but simply change the Master checkbox from the Sync Big folder on the desktop to the Sync Little folder on the laptop, and run the process the other way. All my changed documents (email, Quicken, MyMac writings, etc) are copied back to the desktop. If I have deleted anything in a synced folder while on the road, that file is deleted from the desktop, as well.

That’s how I use Synchronize Pro X. There are as many syncing strategies as there are computer users, so your methods may vary.

Other helpful features of SPX are its ability to create bootable OS X backups. I made two bootable backup of my main OS X boot disk with no muss or fuss with Synchronize Pro X.

Mike Bombich’s Carbon Copy Cloner is the most popular shareware app for making bootable backup, and judging from the commentary on VersionTracker, is the main competition for Qdea’s Synchronize Pro X.

While Carbon Copy Cloner is a capable application (I still use it from time to time), it has nowhere near the features and capability of Synchronize Pro X. SPX is far easier to configure, and has more options when deciding what to sync. By comparison, Cloner is more of a “one-trick pony.” It’s great at what it does, but it doesn’t have a long feature list. Synchronize Pro X will meet almost any user’s sync and backup needs.

So, what’s to keep you from running right to Qdea’s web site and grabbing a copy of Synchronize Pro X? Well, the main obstacle is $99.95 for a two-year license, and $49.95 to renew the license after the initial two-year period expires.

Synchronize Pro X is far and away the most expensive sync and backup application, with the sole exception of Dantz Development’s Retrospect. With all due respect to Qdea, Retrospect is in a league of it’s own when it comes to enterprise-level backup work. But administrators of SOHO (small home small office) networks with a small number of Macs may find that Synchronize Pro X may meet their needs, if they don’t need the industrial-strength power that Retrospect offers.

Let’s look at that licensing agreement a little more closely.

If Qdea releases any updates during your license period, they are free.
However, Qdea’s web site and read file information indicates that when your two-year license expires, any new version will require a $49.95 license renewal fee. Let’s look at an example.

1. A license is purchased today (July 2003). Version 3.0.3 is the current version. You can use this version forever, without further restriction, using the serial number issued for the license.

2. In July 2005, you download version 4.1. It still works for you, and you can use this version forever, too.

3. In August 2005, you download version 4.2. This version will tell you that you need to purchase a license renewal to use it. This version won’t work for you, but if you quit it and open version 4.1, it will work just fine.

This licensing model is similar but more relaxed than many software
companies’ models, which are based around selling their customers upgrades
every 12 to 18 months. Qdea says they have deliberately de-emphasized the “new version” syndrome, in which a software company introduces a “x.0″ version as an
excuse to charge again for their software.

Is this worth it? You be the judge. This application is very well crafted, with loads of configuration options. The documentation is excellent. The user interface is attractive and easy to use. Qdea does provide a demo version of SPX. Unfortunately, the demo will not work with folders or disks over 10 megabytes, so it may be hard to test your own real-world scenarios.

There are shareware applications that do some of what SPX does, Carbon Copy Cloner being the best all-around competitor.

Conclusion
If the price and licensing don’t dissuade you, Qdea’s Synchronize Pro X is probably THE most capable sync and backup application around (not including Retrospect). It’s easy to learn (unlike Retrospect) and has a multitude of easy to use features (unlike Carbon Copy Cloner). A better demo version would certainly generate more sales, as the current demo limitations make it difficult to see if SPX is worth your money. For users who have demanding sync and backup needs, but don’t need the awesome power and complexity of Retrospect, Synchronize Pro X‘s $99.95 price is worth it.

MacMice Rating: 4 out of 5

David Weeks

There’s been some controversy about the G5, some folks aver that this is a computer so powerful you’re grandchildren will be using your hand me down Mac long after you’ve reached thermal equilibrium, while others proclaim that developers will soon find a way to tax the G5 to the point where you’ll be begging for a G6. Who’s right? How would I know,? I’m a pretty bad prognosticator, I picked soap to win the battle against France. Hence I won’t make a bold prediction about the longevity of the G5 but I will opine on another issue: If you’re spending your own money you don’t need a G5, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t get one.

Let’s get something else out of the way: if you’re spending someone else’s money you still don’t need the pro level colander Mac, but hey it’s their cash. Well that’s probably not right, I suppose there are a few pros who could really use the power of a G5, if you’re mocking up a full scale Lucas movie the G5 is right up your alley. The easiest way to tell if you really need a G5/spaghetti extruder is to see how long you wait on your computer. If you count the time in minutes, then spend your way to perforated glory, if not then you’re probably wasting your cash.

Take your average computer user: let us imagine him as a 34 year old, roundish, six foot three inch, sleep deprived father of a nine month old (the demographics bear this generalization out, trust me). This paste eater mainly uses his computer for the Internet, word processing, spreadsheet stuff and occasional gaming. Now where are the major timesavings going to be? Well word processing pretty much got as good as it was going to get with the SE 30, the requirements for effective word processing are comparatively minimal despite the bloat of some word processors. Suffice it to say using a Griffo Grill to word process is like killing starlings using a USMC M40A3 sniper rifle. Maybe you use a spreadsheet to balance the checkbook, well unless you’ve got a really big spreadsheet going, say a file counting the number of exclamation marks in John McEnroe’s recent book (a kajillion!) then you’re not going to see much of a time savings by using the mesh Mac. That leaves gaming. With gaming, it’s all about gaming right? I suppose, I guess, and well… probably not. Frame rates seem to be a key gaming component but the human eye has a limitation that renders frame rates beyond a certain level essentially superfluous. If you’re getting more than thirty FPS (actually much less) I suspect the air hockey Mac is not for you. You’ll find better value elsewhere.

To summarize: if you’re not getting paid to use a Mac, then the G5 fan-o-matic is not a necessity, or to put a finer point on it, if you can’t expense it you don’t need it. For example, I certainly don’t require a G5, not by any stretch of the imagination. I make a few small videos and I would like a faster Mac for that labor of love but I suspect a dual 500 MHz G4 would be plenty, aww, who am I trying to kid? A single 400 MHz G4 is plenty. So if you’re like me (six three and named Chris) you don’t need the G5 five any more than Bill Gates needs another billion dollars.

But hey, this is America, when did actually needing something become a prerequisite to buying something? If it were how many Porsches would you see? Logic aside let’s face the emotional truth: We all want that matte finish G5. I want one, my parents want one, and my dog wants one. Well the dog might be happy with a top of the line Nylabone. For most semi sentient beings (Windows users and dogs excepted) the porta heater Mac is lust worthy upgrade, we just need some tangible reasons to part with the dough. I’ll go with this one: some day my grand kids will use it (lifted from the first paragraph, hey I am sudden believer!) Not that I have any grand kids but years from now… No, that’s no good my kid will probably use Windows to spite me (much like I root against Notre Dame and Touchdown Jesus to spite my father). Well the coin sorter Mac is sixty-four bit, which is twice as much as the thirty bit computers we normally use. And who hasn’t felt the pain and ostracization of thirty-two bitness? That doesn’t really solidify the point either, though it does seem like a lot more assembly required (someone said to me: ÒSixty four pieces! It’s going to take all day to set it up!Ó they rely on a Casio for their computing needs). Is there a reason to upgrade to a radiator Mac for most of us? Probably not, but you know it’s too much to resist, so raid the college fund, call it an investment in edutainment, and buy one more thing you don’t need. Of course the Flowbe Mac isn’t a necessity but it will be your favorite personal indulgence. Trust me you’ll use it more than that hot tub you installed.

Chris Seibold

Molly, Paul and me

Well, I guess it is official. I now tell people that I am a writer, and that I have a column. This is a radically new self-image for me. Writing is something that I always wanted to do. Now I am actually doing it. I have held my tongue because I did not believe I could add anything useful to the debate. Now I think maybe I can add something of value.

Every time the teacher (that’s you) chooses to, I get to have my work graded and read to the whole class (the web community.) My analogy does not line up quite right, but that doesn’t matter, since I am now in charge. I am a Writer. I can put words is people/s mouths, lie, act stupid, and braketherulesofgrammer. I am omnipotent. What is even better, I do not have to worry about my poor spelling or pronunciation. My wife is always razzing my language failures. I laugh. Einstein couldn’t make coffee I tell her, of course, he did master the tools of his trade. Oh well. I sympathize a lot with the clod who is our President, his father’s Vice-President, and all the embarrassing mediocrity that is the wealth of our humanity. If you can’t laugh at yourself, then you end up crying about stupid things. I stand before you raw and exposed. So what. Does anyone really care? And what if they did?

None of this could have happened without Apple. So again, I owe them a debt of gratitude. Apple technology has really made my life immensely better, especially the laptops. I also love my new iPod, much more than I would have expected, even though I’ve had it for only a few weeks. Remember the commercial with the geek-thin kid who says he feels powerful? I know just how he feels. Of course, we all know how power corrupts….

Have you noticed I always do these weird personal introductions before getting to the meat of the essay? It seems to drive a lot of people nuts. I do it because I want to remind the reader to realize that an essay is just an idea written by one person at some specific moment in time. It is not perfect, or complete, or a definitive principle that will last forever. The printed word has no more authority over our life than a casually spoken word, but people fall into the trap of giving it more value. In the Bible, the only things that really matter are the Ten Commandments and Jesus’ command to Love One Another. Everything else is just a man’s exploration in understanding. It may be insightful, inspiring and divinely given, but it is just one man’s account. If you read between the lines, you will find that the thing I write most about is Loving One Another. Separately from it being hard to practice all the time, it is also a difficult command to understand. I do believe it is a command we are all challenged to live.

Some people think writers should be objective. I AM NOT ONE OF THEM. Nope, I think the whole point of writing is to say something. It can be smart or stupid, but it damn well had better challenge the reader. My feeling is that it is better to be loud and wrong than quiet and right. If you look at how Congress operates, you know that is how life seems to work. Of course there are different genres of writing, and with some forms of writing or topics, it may be grossly inappropriate to challenge the reader. Fortunately, I am not writing in that genre, so you won’t get much of that playing it safe crap from me. I didn’t hold my tongue all these years so I could engage in blah-speak. In fact, I have already told my wife what I want my epithet to read: I tried my best, to be wise, funny and kind, now it is your turn. I want to challenge the reader even when I am dead and gone, like Philoxenos challenged Thomas Merton.

Some people do not get the chance to challenge others. Not because they did not want to, or because they were uninterested, but because they are murdered. This week, here in Massachusetts, the remains of Molly Bish were found. Molly was just a kid, sixteen years old, and working as a lifeguard, when she disappeared 3 years ago this month. Her family now has a small amount of closure in their well of grief, her bones to bury. The tormented soul who stole her life remains unknown.

We all know Molly. She is a friend, a daughter, a niece, and a neighbor. Her story is the chaos of our lives: the thing we do not want to happen. It is the car accident, the illness, the slip and fall that unmask the raw edge of our humanity. It is the cross we fear to bear.

We do not get to choose the burdens in our lives, they are thrust upon us. While some burdens are more tragic than others, no one escapes them. Burdens are a natural part of our humanity. Even if we get everything we ever wanted, time will catch up to our body and us will deteriorate. No amount of planning or wealth can create a burden-free life.

The Bish family has tried to use their pain wisely. During the last three years, they have advocated for children, promoted identification kits, and lived a public life of amazing strength despite their personal grief. They challenge parents and society to think and protect the children. They want to spare us all the pain and chaos they have had to endure.

Paul is a customer who came in to buy some t-shirts the other day. He had not been in for a long while, which is unusual for him. He works doing reach-out for a poor inner city neighborhood, trying to keep kids on the straight and narrow path. His work is not very different from that which the Bish’s do to protect children.

I don’t know Paul’s personal history, or why he chose his career path. This time when he came in, he was wearing an ear bud. I assumed it was a radio or walkie-talkie or something, so I asked, “What are you listening to?” He told me that he was going deaf, and that it was a hearing aid. He couldn’t afford to buy “real” hearing aids, but under the Americans with Disabilities Act, his employer (a community health center) had to accommodate his disability. They did so by purchasing this iPod like device sound amplifier.

Both my daughter and my mother wear hearing aids, so when he said he couldn’t afford them, I knew what he meant. After wearing her original ones for seven years, my daughter had just replaced hers. Big bucks.

I couldn’t help thinking, again, isn’t this an amazing economic system we have built? The burdens caused by a criminal or by our health are beyond our control, but how is it that Paul doesn’t have hearing aids for both ears like my mother and daughter? There is plenty enough of chaos that we cannot control, but what about the chaos that festers which is man-made? Are we so unwise that we cannot solve an obvious inexpensive problem? Would we deny a blind man a cane, a crying baby comfort, or a hungry person food?

YES, YES, YES! We would do all types of similar things, almost by design. We create an artificial pecking order of pain. If your number comes up in the chaos lottery, you might get some help; if not, you are on your own. Since Paul’s number did not come up, he does not get hearing aids. They are sitting on a shelf somewhere, unused.

The criminal who murdered Molly committed both a moral and an economic crime. Obviously the moral crime and loss of life is most important. The cost of the formal investigation, the volunteers search time, the media, the emotional chill that occupied us, and an economically productive life were all lost in her murder. The cost of any one part of this economic crime is many times greater than the cost of the hearing aids that Paul needs.

Paul’s loss of hearing is part of the chaos of things that he doesn’t want to happen. Compared to the Bish family, he is very lucky. In terms of planning, for both of them the chaos was an equally unforeseen event. When Molly went missing, the state directed all its resources to locating her, without too much regard to cost. For Paul, the regard for his problem was limited because of the cost. Obviously, a missing girl requires an immediate draconian response. As it is for a sailor lost at sea, the window of opportunity is short, and the more time passes the worse the situation. But did we really expect that no one would develop hearing problems this year? We know the rhythm of chaos, yet we ignore it.

My late sister won the chaos lottery. She developed kidney disease and worked for the phone company. Not only did she have great medical and disability benefits while she was sick, but the state of Massachusetts underwrites kidney illness. She was among the early long-term successes to receive a kidney transplant, and lived a preciously difficult 20 years with my fathersÕ organ inside of her. Her doctor was awarded a Nobel Peace Price for pioneering transplant technology. Everything that could be done for her was done.

In the hometown of the Nobel Prize winning doctor an intersection is named for him. This man, like Paul, spent his life working for the betterment of others. We should not name streets after people, we should name them after ideas and concepts, as a reminder that there is always a road or a path to our ideals, and that there is more than one way to get there. My sistersÕ name was Grace, our society needs more grace. Be Graceful Boulevard is an address I would like to share with my neighbors. Let us meet sometime at the intersection of Love and Family.

So what of Paul and Molly? Paul probably won’t be getting his hearing aids any time soon, and the Earth will soon swallow up our beloved Molly. We will start a new day, and a new battle with everydayness, and hope that the burden of chaos will pass over us again. There is so much fun stuff that we have yet to have, and chaos is so imposing.

In Voltaire’s, Candide the character Pangloss would say, “Whatever is, is best.” He was in an infinite loop, doing the same things over and over again. Whatever bad thing happened was okay, whatever good thing happened was okay. His role was simply to tend to himself, and wrap himself in a convenient fiction of morality, where no corrective action is ever necessary. Many people think like Pangloss, that if we take our own lumps magnanimously, then that frees us of a need to concern ourselves with another person’s chaos. Love One Another is a command of inaction according to this interpretation.

Still, I weep for Molly, and I feel bad for Paul. Our bravado culture of self-reliance is a trap. The self-policing mechanism of free enterprise enslaves us to the same Panglossian stupidity and immorality. We are a community, or we are nothing. We cannot stop the chaos, but we can lighten its burden when it arrives. What we do for fear of death, we can do for life. To stand idle while chaos reigns is foolish and immoral.

I recently posted an essay called, On Life, Death and Living…and Dixie Chicks. Did you chance to read it? I describe conservatives as lazy thinkers and liberals as stupid. That would seem to imply that I must then be a know-it-all. I’m not, I just think our politics are at an intellectual and moral dead-end. No one is listening to the other speak, but both sides have plenty of good arguments. They must, since they swap sides on the issues constantly. There is an assumption today that anything anyone says is colored by his or her political view. As soon as someone has a scent of that person’s politics, a reality distortion field goes into effect. I went in search of finding a moral solution, for a common ground of our humanity. I am a proudly naive optimist. If we can agree on a single fundamental moral question, then we can grow that consensus and our experience to arrive at broad agreement on a number of constantly divisive issues.

The question I asked is whether it is better to kill or be killed, from strictly a moral perspective. It was, I thought, a very simple question, with an obvious moral answer. What I found instead was that conservatives have trouble hearing the question. I pulled a thread of commonality through McCarthyism, the Clinton investigations, and the anti-Dixie Chicks criticism. The same thread explained Islamic terrorism, suicide bombers, the Vietnam Conflict and explored the moral dilemma of war. As much as anything I have ever read, it explains the perpetual divisions that mark human affairs. It was a call for intellectuals to speak loudly and clearly about the issues they have taken the time to ponder, and called on citizens to sacrifice more, and respect the power of their vote for the revolutionary change that it is.

The Democrats probably liked it because it seemed to attack Republicans, and the Republicans were so enraged by certain characterizations that they missed the point to the entire essay. For those who missed the point: IT IS NOT ABOUT POLITICAL PARTIES. It is about conservative MORAL choices and liberal MORAL choices. We all make both, both political parties make both. My argument is that if we just make liberal MORAL choices, then many of the conflicts we fight will cease to be.

What I also discovered is that those who shout loudest about liberal moral relativism are already guilty of moral abandonment. The liberal morals are consistent and patient and forgiving and self-sacrificing. The conservative morals are absolute, impatient, and hateful. Complex cerebral schemes are constructed to justify a cocoon of superiority and expediency. Hate, killing, and rage all co-exist easily in a conservative morality. Morality suspended to defend morality is the devil. One cannot love with hate anymore than one can hate with love.

The political parties have aligned themselves around a chaotic mixture of greed, need, and opposing moral choices. Like two planets caught in a gravitational orbit, whenever one party changes its moral position to match the other, the other party shifts its gravitational pull to the opposite effect. This is the cause of our political distress. Our morality is out of balance. Recently President Bush called on Israel to stop attacking Palestine in retaliation of suicide bombers. It was good advice. Die First rather than Kill First. The problem is, when he was confronted with the same choice, he made the same choice Israel did, to Kill First.

We all choose to believe in God. My essay, Interpretation of the unknown, does not really prove that God exists, despite my best efforts. If we can make the positive choice to affirm God’s existence, then we can likewise make the conscious positive choice to Die First, which is the only proper expression of morality. By agreeing on this one fundamental point, we can reconstruct our society.

The chaos of our lives can be viewed optimistically or pessimistically. The conservative view is pessimistic, the liberal view is optimistic. One is impudent, the other omnipotent. Morality is the courage and strength to do the difficult. Kill First is a fair-weather morality, based on fear, it is as relativistic as relativism can be. It fails every challenge. It serves neither God nor man. Unfortunately, it is also a strong impulse.

Chances are, you may be wondering why anyone would have the audacity to suggest a Constitutional Convention, especially in light of our current politics. Mao had his Little Red Book, Karl Mark his Communist Manifesto, Thomas Paine had Common Sense, Chernyshevsky had What is to be Done? Words can change the world. Nothing is more important than the ideas in our heads. The whole point to free speech is to speak loudly, with the hope that the best ideas will be recognized. Whatever we choose to do will be an imperfect solution, since we ourselves are imperfect, but that does not mean our lot can’t be made better.

This essay is to give a reflection of the ramblings in my head. Yes, it is all psycho-babble. Whatever genius I have will be proven to be folly some day. I’m not Mao. Not only do I have self-doubts, but I can envision why and how I should be wrong. What I suggest is only a small step. Compared to what should be known by each man, I know only a little. My philosophy is a distillation of only what I have had the opportunity to learn. What I don’t know or can’t imagine, I cannot accommodate. I have some keys that seem to make sense. They are morally and economically consistent. Nevertheless, the chaos of everyoneÕs life will continue. Those with a poor or troubled spirit will always need a helping hand, and demand and consume greater attention and resources than those with a strong spirit. A Second Constitutional Convention needs to be part of our continuing evolution. America is a leader in the world, we should have the courage to take small steps. We have a global responsibility to lead wisely, and a debt to pay to the Native Americans and American slaves.

Imagine a world and a life better than the one we live in now- a world where hate and murder and killing is rare, a world where the deaf can hear mechanically, a world where the simple problems are solved, and we are free to explore our human spirit. Whatever philosophy or religion we embrace, we must embrace our imperfection with it. To think we know the truth means we have yet to begin the journey.

I am a mundane man living a mundane life. I am a church-going shopkeeper leading the exemplary life of hard-work and self-reliance. Political conservatives would describe me as the perfect American citizen. I do not believe this Panglossian interpretation of free enterprise that suggests I am virtuous. The real heroes in our society are Paul, the Bish’s in their advocacy, and the good doctor who spent years in search of a cure. They sacrifice themselves to a Die First moral choice. They plant and nurture seeds, rather than demanding the fruit of the harvest. That is the heroic example of Love One Another.

A society based on morality is a challenge for all of us, and the rewards are much greater than personal wealth. By empowering the real heroes, rather than entrepreneurs, we will have more real heroes. Much of the chaos that man suffers is man-made. The chaos caused by the criminal, Mother Nature, and time will always be with us, but our strength as a community is greater than our strength as an individual. Youthful exuberance and selfishness, a form of both lazy thinking and stupidness, will always exist, because personal journeys begin anew every day in maternity wards. People like Paul will always have a job in challenging youth to think beyond themselves and adopt a Die First philosophy. It takes time to grow morally mature.

The mistakes and wise choices of the past have given us the opportunity to make a different choice, as they always do. The current domestic and international political situation requires that we do something big, and it would be best if we do it quickly. 9/11 was a challenge. My essay, Slavery to Utopia, is a challenge. Can we create a society where to Die First is always the first choice? Can we achieve an 80/20 consensus and peace between men? Can the adults of this world lead the children, or will selfish youthful exuberance and moral confusion continue to define our nation?

I am a writer. I do not write for the art of writing, but for the politics of the moment. Our American destiny has been to challenge the world as much as ourselves. The time has come to do it again.

Free Will is best expressed as a personal challenge, a willingness to choose the difficult and carry it through to the end. Parents and soldiers are everyday examples of Free Will.
Free Will is choosing to Love, regardless of the cost. Free Will is the courage to make a moral decision, but which one? To Kill First or Die First?

Kill First is self-preservation and power and complacency with the status quo. It seeks to divide rather than unite. Die First is radical. It is an intellectual passion that overrules our emotional anger. It is an emotional purity that overrules our intellectual fears. The moral and political challenge I write about has Love at its center. It is a revolution against hate, against selfishness, against fear. Can America lead the world with high moral principles? Can we defeat terrorism with an example of our renewal? I believe we can. We all lead mundane lives, and this is the challenge for mundane people everywhere.

Steve Consilvio

I gingerly walk down the step, almost tripping. I feel as though I am losing my balance. I feel a rush a wind and I look up, what is it? A car drove by. I would have never seen it coming. Then suddenly my cat, on a leash with me on the porch, makes a sudden move, she peeks over the bushes, almost standing on her hind legs. I don’t know what she’s looking at. She chases flies and hears them upstairs while she is downstairs – I most definitely do not hear them when downstairs. She has some keener senses than me. So I look up. A dog! A boy is walking him, ignoring the local leash law. "Hey I have a cat here," I said, probably so loud the whole block could hear me, I do not know. "You need to put that dog on a leash." "OK" he said and went on his way putting that dog into the legally necessary leash. I fall back in my chair in on the porch. If it had not been for my cat I would have jumped out of my skin when that dog came around the corner.

I make sure that my iTunes ear buds are crammed as deep as they can go into my ears. I reach for my pen and a tablet, and the book I am currently reading, taking notes. I am going back and rereading some of the classics of my profession; I am restudying some of the major works I have not touched in a while due to teaching and life’s responsibilities. The current fare? Kant’s "Critique of Pure Reason." Yeah, I am sure that makes you, my reader, all excited. But I am an academic philosopher and believe that one of the best ways to do my craft well is to spend time with others who have done it very well indeed. So I am reading Kant’s three ‘Critiques’ again. I have a commentary by my side. I pick it up and lay on it my lap and carefully place my ruler under the last sentence I just read before being interrupted by the dog incident. I continue.

But that feeling of imbalance is still with me. I feel topsy-turvey even. Is this what Christ felt like walking on water? Oh, wait, he already knew what it would be like because he knows all things – no surprises there. But I am mortal, so I am surprised everyday. I just feel detached in some way. I can’t quite put my finger on it. It just seems that objects around me are more "out there" tonight than they have been for a while; everything looks farther away from me for some very strange reason. "It must be my reading selection affecting me," I think to myself. After all, I am sitting here, trying to reflect on my own self-reflection, trying to visualize the necessary conditions of cognition by separating everything empirical from what I sense and looking to see if any a prior principles remain, as Kant tells us to do. (Please note: To read philosophy well you must assume the author’s stance, as it were, becoming the author to understand why these thoughts were plausible to him at the time of writing; only then will you understand him him, and so only then can you critique him well and fairly.)

Anyway…

Kant said we have access to appearances, but not to the "things-in-themselves." We are forever an instant away from reality because it is mediated by how our mind organizes and shapes perception, and he knew, as we all do, that there is no logically necessary connection between the way the mind presents perceptions to us and the object that caused those perceptions in the first place – all perception could be misperception. It is, I tell my students, like wearing rubber gloves and feeling satin and then canvas – we feel we are not getting all the information we could get if we did not have the gloves on. They sort of impose themselves between us and our object like an unwelcomed guest at a party.

Anyway… Back to the iPod…

"OK" I say to myself, and I lift up the iPod to see what’s playing. Bach’s keyboard concertos. Good. The music (vibration) is going directly into my ears through the ear buds. I start taking notes of what I am reading, but for some reason the pen feels awkward in my hand. I lift it up and look at it. It’s okay, it’s "all there" as it were. I brush the awkward sensation off like a fly.

We bought a new iPod while in Chicago a while back. We HAD to buy an iPod! We were visiting the new Apple Store on Miracle Mile – a beautiful store. It was the marriage of my favorite city and my favorite computer, per my last article. My wife had an older 5 GB iPod that went dead. I bought a 10 GB one when the new ones came out. I like the slim-line and the no moving parts bit. I liked the calendar and notes. I mean for me, for ME, that’s about all I use my Palm V for anyway, for I walk around most of the time not knowing what day it is or what time it is. I have also been wanting a Firewire hard drive to move things – ok, data, if you must be exact – around from one computer to another.

We are a two person three computer family. You do the math – someone has an extra computer. Kind of. We have created a kind of Détente in the household. I have an iBook, my wife got the G4 after I got the iBook. And in December I bought a 17 inch iMac which is the "community" machine in the house – we both can use it, have our ‘accounts’ on it, but our real personalities are on our own computers, the G4 for her and the iBook for me. So as not to become actually and completely schizophrenic from talking like this, we are in the market for another portable and then the household will be completely happy: Each of us will have a desktop and a portable. It would be computer Heaven in this house. No more of my wife and I grabbing our respected "sides" of the iBook and yanking like Medievalist torturers limbing some poor chap with four horses.

Anyway, Back to the iPods, Which I was Talking About…

I bought a 10 GB new one. My wife’s 5 GB old one went crazy. So we bought a 30 GB while in Chicago so that my wife would get the 10 GB iPod. Got it? I swear, she’d dress just like me too is we were the same size as me, she gets so many hand-me-downs. But she is fine with it. She at least understands that the computing power sitting on our desks or on our laps will never be fully used by us, even at 800 MHz. We are not shooting movies over here you know. Anyway – those darn iPods have a way of slipping out of my attention – we are now a two iPod family and since there are only two of us the machine to human mathematics is equinumerous. So we are happy as far as iPods go anyway.

I started using my iPod mostly as a hard drive. But there was one other thing I did with it. My car stereo has an AUX line in. So all I have to do is get a male-male cord and just like that I am playing my iPod through my car stereo. Thank goodness too. I have had CDs who just could not make it out of the car alive after surviving the extreme (cold and hot) Midwestern temperatures we have here. Heck, it was 104 degrees here today! I made the mistake a few years ago of buying a CD holder with PLASTIC envelopes for the CDs. Do you know what happens to plastic envelopes on CDs in cars when the thermometer reaches 102 degrees? That’s right, they mate. The plastic melts and sticks to the CDs. Taking out the CDs is a lot, I imagine, like an orthopedic surgeon taking out loose bodies of bone when he ‘scopes’ a knee. Not good for the CDs. Not good for anyone. But I have found that if you are careful, and lucky, you can take a CD that has plastic melted all over it, put in the CD tray, the Mac recognizes it and it pops onto your desktop. Then you just grab the sound files and drag them to the desktop and you have saved the music’s soul though its body is lost. There is, in a way, a disembodied afterlife for those CDs.

(Just a note: Navigating an iPod’s menus while driving is NOT a safe thing to do. Friends don’t let friends drive fidgeting with their iPods. I have heard of some dashboard mounts though.)

Back to the iPods Again…

I use it most for transferring files between computers and playing music in the car, saving the souls of CDs. I loved it! Migrating files from the iBook to iMac was a breeze. And sometimes it even told me what day it is. I could have all kinds of music in the car with only a small, tiny little iPod. No more CD deaths. The problem now though is that I forget the controls are on the iPod not the stereo in the dashboard. I turn the volume down and it doesn’t go down. I look at it until I recall that the iPod is the AUX thingy again, the controls are there. I start weaving around traffic. God I am scatter-brained!! But this brings me to my point, the point I started the article with…

I feel unbalanced. I reach out with my arms so as to reach for a banister when going up stairs. I feel removed from the world tonight out here on the porch. Something is interfering with the totality and unity of my sensual cognitions. I feel caught within myself separated from the external world, trying to reattach to it, like Kant or even worse Descartes’ egocentric dilemma!

Last time, in my previous article, I questioned the wisdom of cutting off one of my senses with an iPod. It’s very strange. When I put on the earplugs of my iPod, I feel disconnected from reality. I have in essence taken away one of my senses: hearing. And I am beginning to realize how much I use it when I am interacting with the world. I did not see the dog coming except the cat’s cue to me. Unless I felt the wind blow by me I didn’t see the car coming. Did you read that? I said: I didn’t SEE the car coming because I did not HEAR it. When I hear something I turn and look, after all. I depend on hearing a lot more than I thought I did after it was taken away by my iPod. There are a lot of auditory cues I am missing in my environment and it makes me feel awkward. I did not realize how much I relied on my hearing.

When we were in the Apple Store there was a girl there with an iPod in her pocket and headphones on. "THAT is what I want," I thought to myself. I don’t particularly like these ear buds, they are a hassle, man, with the covers falling off and being too big to cram in my ears… and so on. I NEED headphones I thought. Yet, how could that girl, I wondered, have those headphones on and walk up and down Michigan Avenue with the crazy taxis and throngs of people? Does she run into people? Walk on red lights? Trip over things? She must rely more on sight than usual and take cues from what other people are doing, like stopping at a crosswalk, like I took the cue from the cat. She must have just gotten used to it I guess. She must have habituated and compensated for the lack of hearing I thought. I don’t know.

But good grief, tonight I was missing dogs and cars because I had my ears plugged up. I looked down at the book I am readings and sudedenly – Kant had it! That’s what’s going on. I do feel trapped in a world of appearances: sensations themselves mediate my perception, and so perception is not directly caused by the object of my perception, and if it is not directly caused by the object of my perception then I do not have direct access to the object of my perception, and if I don’t have direct access to the object of my perception the object of my perception might be different from the sensation of the object that caused it, and if my sensation of the object that caused it might be different from the object then I might not be able to have knowledge of the object that caused my perception, and if I am not able to have knowledge of the object that caused my perception (if there is such a thing), then I end up a skeptic, or a solipsist, lost in a sea of confusing zapping and zooming sensations racing around me. Oh God! Maybe I will just get used to it? Train myself like that girl at the Apple Store.. And in the car, I can’t hear sirens or horns or trains… I need to get another job – this philosophy stuff is driving me nuts. Yet it’s all I know how to do? What am I going to do, wait tables? But at least I might have tripped over a philosophical argument for not talking on a cell phone while driving!

Anyway…

It’s like looking at starlight from a star that has long since died but the light is just reaching us – it looks like a star is there, but the star is dead, long gone – appearance is one thing and reality is completely different; in my present case, though on an infinitely smaller scale, it took time for those sensations to cause my perception and the object could have changed by then, or they themselves were changed by the trip from the object to my pupils. But where would we draw the line as far as what is the ‘right’ distance from an object to be able to perceive it properly?

I have to stop thinking about these things…

Okay, okay, I’m alright. Let me sit down. I better lay off the Kant for a day or so. I had the same problem with Berkeley, and don’t get me started on the phenomenologists! Philosophy just makes you stand against the world in a very odd manner, but as a professional I have gotten used to it, I think. Or is it this whole ‘digital lifestyle’ thing that is getting to me? This digital life has all kinds of implications for me and the way I live my life. iPhoto, iMovie… well, you see what senses these might unsettle. Thank goodness I have a digital hub for the lifestyle, my iMac, that I can use as an anchor to reality, I hope; much like Descartes has God help him out of his egocentric dilemma. Or maybe I should lay off the iPod until I get used to losing one of my senses and I can start using visual, and other, cues. Man… I’ll just have to…

…think about it.

Prof.
David K. Schultz

• Product Name: Fire-i
• Company: Unibrain
• URL: http://www.unibrain.com/home/
• Category: Webcam
• Price: $99
• Requirements: OS X or OS 9 Mac with FireWire
• Rating: 3 bounces – Lustworthy

Webcams are among my favourite computer accessories because they are inexpensive and versatile. They can be used to take stills of adequate quality for webpages and the like, and as movie cameras they are great for recording family events for burning to CD and sharing with others. I’ve used webcams to film kittens for a cat breeder, to produce movies for kids to share with their parents, and to photograph astronomical equipment for my web site. But my favourite use of webcams is for simple astrophotography. Although inferior to cooled, long-exposure CCD cameras, webcams do have the benefit of costing far less and being simple enough to get good results with almost at once.

Until recently, the majority of Mac-compatible webcams have been USB devices. The main reason for this has been the widespread use of the Universal Serial Bus (or USB) version 1.1 interface by both Apple and the various PC manufacturers for their computers, making it cost-effective for webcams that support both operating systems to be produced and distributed. The USB interface is convenient and reliable, but it is relatively slow, with a maximum data transfer rate of about 1 MB per second. This creates a bottleneck between the image data the webcam is collecting at one end and the computer receiving the data at the other. What USB webcams do is to compress the data before sending it down the USB cable; that way they keep the actual amount of data being sent manageable while trying to keep the image quality reasonably high. Up to a point, this works, but if you try to record high resolution movies (say, 640 by 480 pixels) in full colour and with a decent frame rate (around 30 frames per second), the compromises the camera has to make become very evident. What normally happens is the frame rate drops to keep the image quality of each frame within the parameters desired, so instead of a flowing, real-time movie you only get more of a slide show effect, with only five or ten frames per second. Aggravating the problem is the compression, which is lossy, so that while each frame appears reasonably detailed, small features can become blurry. This is especially obvious if you are using the webcam on a microscope or telescope where the target object covers only a small part of the CCD, and you want every scrap of image fidelity you can get. Basically, with USB you can either have high resolution or a fast frame rate, you can’t have both. The solution is to avoid the USB bottleneck by using FireWire, a much faster interface (400 MB per second) that allows both high resolution and rapid frame rates.

In this Corner… the iBot Pro from Orange Micro

The iBot, imaged using the Fire-i

The design of the iBot is conventional in many regards, a spherical camera on a mount, though with a FireWire cable hanging from the back instead of a USB one. Focusing is accomplished by turning a blue ring around the lens, but unlike many such focusers (including that on the Fire-i camera), this ring is comfortably stiff and textured, so that the action of turning the focuser is positive and accurate. The iBot feels very solid, in part because of the sturdy FireWire cable it comes with, but also because of the heavy metal foot-shaped stand it comes with. This foot is certainly whimsical, and combined with the cheerful eye-like design of the camera body, makes the iBot one of the most friendly-looking bits of Mac equipment around. The stand works well, and keeps the camera pointing where you want it stably and reliably even on a polished desk, through sheer weight alone more than anything else. The “arms” of the foot that hold the camera body squeeze inwards slightly, holding the angle of the camera very tightly, so even if you focus the camera it won’t slip down from wherever it was pointing before. What the stand doesn’t accomplish is allow the user to clip the camera onto a monitor or laptop screen as is the case with the Fire-i camera or for that matter many of the USB webcams such as the Philips ToUCam. On the other hand, the extra weight it gives the camera and stiffness of the camera within the mounting makes the camera very nice to use placed on a desk, and combined with the included headset and the nicely designed focuser, this is easily one of the nicest webcams around for videoconferencing.

The iBot Pro package is remarkably good value given what’s included. It includes the iBot camera, which can be bought separately for $99, OS X and OS 9 drivers from IOXperts ($20), and a headphone-microphone headset for video-conferencing. Okay the latter is pretty cheap and cheerful (about on par with the headphones you get given on airliners) but it’s usable. Utility software includes the BTV Pro ($40) movie and frame capturing application, two applications from ArcSoft for image and movie editing, Video Impression and Photo Impression ($50 a piece), iSpQ’s VideoChat ($40) video instant messaging software and finally iVisit’s Video Conferencing Software (free download). All told, that’s a lot of decent software for a measly thirty buck surcharge over the regular version of the iBot.

And in the Other Corner… the Fire-i from Unibrain

The Fire-i, imaged using the iBot

The Fire-i camera is much smaller than the iBot and lacks a microphone. It also eschews a conventional stand in favour of a very robust clip at the back with which the user can attach it to an LCD screen or laptop monitor. The clip is cushioned on the inside so shouldn’t damage anything it bites onto. It’s less obvious to me how the thing could be fixed to a traditional CRT computer screen or an older iMac, though. Another problem is that connection between the clip and the back of the camera rotates, and with the weight of the FireWire cable pulling on one side of the camera, the webcam did tend to slant over to one side, which could be annoying when videoconferencing. A more obviously useful and innovative aspect of the Fire-I design is that it has two FireWire ports, one of which is used to plug the (supplied) FireWire cable from the computer into, but this still leaves the other one free. This is great, because it means you can daisy chain FireWire devices if you have a Mac with only a single FireWire port (as is the case with the iBooks and many of the PowerBooks as well as older PowerMacs and iMacs). You can even plug in another FireWire webcam, as I did, and record the same thing from different angles. The fact the FireWire cable that comes with this camera is detachable is nice, because it can always be pressed into service with other devices. As every experienced computer user will tell you, you can never have too many spare cables! Another interesting design feature is the existence of a DC power input. The power supply for this isn’t included with the camera, but details of what’s needed are on the FAQ at Unibrain’s website or it can be bought from their online store for $13. For most users however the FireWire cable will provide all the power that’s needed.

The Fire-i webcam comes with just two applications, and these are trial versions at that; for full functionality the user will need to pay the extra $20 to register the bundled copies of BTV (the basic version, not BTV Pro) and $40 for the iSpQ VideoChat videoconferencing software. Both applications come as OS 9 and OS X compatible versions. Admittedly, the Fire-i is thirty dollars cheaper than the iBot Pro, and the $99 basic iBot also comes with just the trial version of BTV Pro rather than the full application. But on paper at least, if you don’t have any of these applications, and think you’re going to need them, the iBot Pro bundle is much more attractive.

Round 1: Field of View and False Colour

When the cameras are sitting side by side and focused on the same target, an immediate difference in the width of field taken in by each camera can be seen, presumably due to differences in the lenses used. The iBot records a wider field but with much more obvious curvature because of its substantially wider field of view (look at the shelving in the background), whereas the Fire-i takes in a narrower field with no obvious curvature at all.

One flaw common to both cameras was false colour, though this was most noticeable using the Fire-i camera’s default settings. This false colour is a result of the compression mode used by the
camera and can to some extent be reduced by switching compression modes. Varying the video preferences also helps whatever the mode, for example false colour becomes less apparent when the gain is turned down, and isn’t really detectable in frames smaller than 640 by 480 pixels. Even at its worst, false colour is a feature of sharp, bright edges against darker backgrounds, rather than softer, more uniformly illuminated objects like faces or people.

The iBot (left) takes in a wider field of view, but at the cost of curvature, but false colour is obvious on bright objects with the Fire-i (right).

This shot of my PowerBook taken by the iBot really shows off the curvature in its field of view.

The wider field of view of the iBot could make it a bit more attractive for situations where the camera is being used as a simple camcorder type of device, for example for recording groups of people. But if you’re looking for a webcam to be used as much as a cheap digital camera for taking still images of things to put on a webpage or into a catalogue, the curvature in the field of view could be problematic.

Round 2: Image Quality and Frame Rates

Image quality of both cameras was good, though not camcorder quality by any means. I didn’t feel the images were any brighter or clearer than those from a decent USB 1.1 camera. To be honest, I feel the advertising on the iBot that highlights the fact these webcams use the same FireWire technology as digital camcorders was a bit misleading since they don’t offer anything like camcorder image quality. What FireWire does allow are faster frame rates than is possible with USB 1.1. Image quality is instead a function of the design of the webcam, in particular the CCD and the lens. Of the two, the Fire-i struck me as being the better imaged; in particular was remarkably good was as a short focus ‘macro’ camera, as shown in the close-up of my keyboard below.

A close-up view of the keyboard of my Ti Book.

Round 3: Bundled Software

Both cameras come with a version of BTV, a time-limited trial version with the Fire-i and a registered copy of BTV Pro with the iBot, though it is limited to use with the iBot camera only. BTV is a fine application, very easy to use, though endlessly configurable giving the user lots of potential for experimenting with things like colour balance, gain and frame rates. The Pro version adds some extras like the ability to stack frames on the fly for noise reduction, AppleScript support, motion detection and more.

The two processing applications, Photo Impression and Video Impression, that come with the iBot are impressive. While they won’t replace Adobe Photoshop or iMovie, they are very fair substitutes for lightweight work. Photo Impression has a slightly annoying interface eschewing the Aqua interface for its own full-screen interface. But it works, and the feature set is surprisingly good, covering all the basic retouching and editing tools. Video Impression has a similar sort of interface but not full screen, and allows the user to slot transitions in between successive movies, text captions, and soundtracks.

Photo Impression is a nice image editing package a big step above AppleWorks and a useful OS X application for lightweight graphics work.

Video Impression includes movie grabbing tools (top) and a variety of tools for adding transitions, captions, and so on to make longer movies by sticking together shorter ones (bottom).

Round 4: Low Light Conditions

I tested both of the cameras in low light conditions, by which I mean a desk in a room at night with just a table lamp for illumination. Surprisingly, performance wasn’t at all similar here, the Fire-i camera being well ahead of the iBot. Both cameras did suffer from a strange defect in the images they recorded, the left hand third of the frame being darker than the rest of the frame. This was inexplicable to me. Whatever its cause, the Fire-i suffered much less, and with some tweaking of the video settings (particularly the gain, exposure and shutter speed) remarkably good performance in low light conditions could be obtained. In comparison iBot images remained rather washed out and grainy.

Under low light conditions, the iBot delivered relatively grainy images (top) compared to the Fire-i camera which seemed to work acceptably well with the default settings (middle) and even better with a bit of tweaking to the video settings (bottom).

Round 5: Astrophotography

Because the Fire-i was on loan, I couldn’t take it apart and remove the lens, but the iBot was used for some astrophotography, and the results were satisfying. It should be mentioned that the focusing ring on the iBot can be wound out completely (with a bit of force towards the end) and with it comes the lens. One of Steven Mogg’s webcam adapters can be screwed in; he produces ones especially for the iBot but I happened to have a Philips ToUCam adapter that worked perfectly. Performance seemed well above that of the ToUCam and about as good as the Logitech 3000 camera. The colour and contrast of the shots I took of Jupiter were perhaps a shade inferior to those I’d taken with the Logitech, though it was difficult to be absolutely sure about this because Jupiter was lower in the sky than would be ideal at the time I was writing this review. Performance on the Moon and stars was impressive though, with decent resolution of tight doubles like Epsilon Bootis. All in all, a camera well worth considering for astrophotography. As for the Fire-i, given its better performance in low light conditions, it should be even better, but without being able to take it apart and test it, I can’t say for sure.

The iBot delivered useful movies of astronomical objects, such as these of Jupiter, the tight double Epsilon Bootis, and the Moon. Processed with Keith’s Image Stacker and Adobe Photoshop.

And the Winner is…

If you were looking for a basic webcam with decent performance that came with all the accessories and software you’re likely to need, then I would have to recommend the iBot Pro simply because of the uncommonly strong bundle of software that it comes with. I’m just not a fan of hardware manufacturers including demo or trial versions of shareware applications with their products. I much prefer the approach taken by Orange Micro where a modest increase in price is used to cover the cost of a useful suite of software. For the user looking for a complete imaging and editing package, the extra thirty dollars for the iBot Pro is money well spent. The design of the iBot is nice and well suited to videoconferencing.

However, the iBot taken as a webcam alone doesn’t perform as well as the Fire-i as an all-round imager. The Fire-i works well in low-light conditions and in close-up, and the images are flatter and more contrasty. The design is clever, with the extra Fire-Wire port and removable cable, and though I wonder about the lack of a proper stand and a microphone, on my laptop the clip works reasonably well. I don’t like the focuser on the Fire-i as much as the one on the iBot though, it’s just a bit too loose to feel positive. Of the two cameras then, the iBot Pro package is certainly the more compelling, but the Fire-i camera must get the nod as the better performer.

Augustine said that ‘lust’ was "inordinate desire.’ He was half-right. Lust is defined not by kind but by degree: It is reducible to desire, it is a desire. But what makes one desire lust and the other not? I think it is a question of degrees, not kind. It is merely a normal desire taken to an extreme degree. Instead of ‘inordinate’ I prefer to speak of ‘unbridled’ desire. That is lust. Lust is desire that runs loose like an ill-mannered child in public. Lust is certainly a symptom of that 20th century ‘mental illness’ psychologists call ‘borderline personality.’ Though some say it has nothing to do with borders or lines, one thing is sure – the borderline is extreme in all he does; there are no limits, no borders to what he can do; he is intense in everything. The neurotic will think about stealing your car; the psychotic will steal it and drive it home’ the borderline will steal it and drive it across country. He can’t just have half or a little, he must have all. He would not buy a single Mozart symphony but the complete symphonies. I know, that’s what I did the other day.

Yes, lust is defined by degrees not kind. I might even say that lust is ‘borderline desire.’ And just like any mental state it is generic. That is, you can lust after many kind of things; there are as many ways to lust as there are humans. There is food-lust, work-lust, sex-lust, Apple-lust, lazy-lust, music-lust and on and on. Yet because of this multiplicity it is sometimes hard to see how distinct lusts are in fact tied together, made of whole cloth as it were. There are different species of lust, but they are still of the same genera. To wit…

I was at a Barnes and Noble at 3PM in Chicago. I saw a complete set of Mozart’s symphonies I had been wanting for some time. So I bought it. I am in fact collecting the whole works of Mozart; if it were not for Mozart I am not sure I could face some days; he gives me courage, delight, inspiration, fun. His light and happy melodies born of an undying pathos have saved me many a day. You see, I have trouble converting my sadness, or whatever it is, into something beautiful, which is basically what an artist does – converts pathos into beauty, can see beauty where others see only pain, because of this conversion process, this metamorphosing it into something new. Mozart does it for me.

(Oh, and then there’s Bruckner. Don’t get me started on Bruckner! His Adagios will slay you, cut you right in half. Bruckner was not a physically attractive man, and often doubted his talents (standing as he did in Wagner’s shadow). Do you not think there were times he was in despair and felt misunderstood? But he converted that into wonderful music. The Agagio of the 7th Symphony (he heard of Wagner’s death midway through writing it and so added some ‘Wagner Horns’ in the middle credenza) will tear your heart out, and anyone who does not fight back tears when listening to the Adagio of the final and unfinished 9th symphony could hardly be counted as human.)

Celebrating the 4th in Chicago’s Grant Park

This complete set of Mozart’s symphonies was expensive, no doubt. But the desire was so strong it would have been vain to fight it. IT simply took my will with it. Lust is so indicative of a weak will! I just gave in.

Now fast-forward to downtown Chicago at 7PM at the new Apple Store on the Miracle mile. Just seeing the Apple logo was enough to get my heart beating. I thought my chest was going to explode. My favorite city and my favorite computer in the same place!!! And I was there. Should I get that new Powerbook I’ve been wanting?

My wife had her injured iPod with her and took it to the Genius Bar to see what might be done with it. His diagnosis? "Apple will charge you $250 to just look at it, so buy a new one." Now THAT was stroke of genius! The lust was swelling up in me, dripping off my chin and nose like sweat. What the Genius had done is given to the Appleluster what he seeks 24/7, what he prays for every minute – an excuse to buy. An excuse is a justification to buy, to indulge the lust, to satisfy the desire, to poke a hole in my body and let the pressure out. So I said, "OK, I get educator’s discount here, so let’s get a new iPod." I have a 10 GB one. I would get a new one, and hand the 10 GB one to my wife so she could have a new one. I asked her what she thought. The answer was amazing – self-deception? No. But pure self-justification and talking us into by transforming a luxury into a need, "Well, I do really use it a lot when I exercise." Excuse number 2!! IT was the obvious solution. The jump in logic with this way of thinking, the chasm between premises and conclusion, was so great it only made sense on an astronomical scale of measurement. As Bertrand Russell said, "The worse your logic the more interesting your conclusions are." Got that right, Berty. Talk about a sin qua non! It is AppleLUST not AppleREASON after all. I mean rationality is not the motivating faculty here.

Chicago at night

(BTW: advertising seeks to build excuses for us, right? It tries to latch on to our vanity and make a necessity out of luxury, or a want into need, however you want to state it. Somehow, some way, this is the message. Think about it…)

Meanwhile I was looking at iSights and asked how I could connect it to an iMac since I had only seen it with a Powerbook adapter. "Oh, it comes with three adapters: one for the portable. One for iMacs and one for Studio Displays" the salesperson said.

Excuse number 3!! Served up on a silver platter to me.

Back to the iPod. We got a case for it. Why? It was nothing but basic, sensual primitive lust – because the leather smelled good and looked good. Period. In reality Applelust needs no reasons at all. They are merely psycho-social rationalizations so that we can live with ourselves and hope that others will see us as rational. That’s all. That is, the excuses I had had been accumulating were meant to fool me and others watching me (like my wife).

Now back to the complete Mozart symphonies. Recall that I am writing about the generic nature of lust and who that can keep us from seeing that many diverse kinds of lust are really tied together. I very quickly saw, as I was at the check-out counter, that my Applelust, more specifically, my iPod-lust, was affecting my Mozart-lust and visa versa. It’s this ‘digital life’ thing you see. It’s all connected just like iLife. Not only did I have Mozart’s complete symphonies, I could have them with me at anytime at any place as I wished now that I had the new iPod. Whart good is an iPod without music anyway? Good grief, Apple is even getting me to believe that Mozart is no good without an iPod! Yet I bring my love of Mozart to the table, into the store. All the Apple Store did was give me a new way to satisfy my Mozart-lust. So in a way my Mozart-lust caused my Applelust. It was two-way caution plain and simply, just like dualistic, Cartesian theories of the mind-body problem.

So what did I learn from all this? Nothing. Goethe said theory is grey but reality is green. So what? My Applelust keeps growing with every Mozartian sonority I hear; and my dependence on Mozart keeps me looking for ways to keep him close at hand all the time, just in case I need him. You never know. What did I learn? I learned what this ‘iLife’ and "digital lifestyle’ means for me. Just think of those who had to hear a Beethoven symphony once, live, there were no records or CDs or MP3s, and the only thing they had was memory. Now, I have no use of my memory in some respects, or none that I can recall anyway. I can take this beauty with me everywhere now. I can listen to Bob Dylan as I walk the busy streets of Chicago and see firsthand all his warnings. Does all of this make life more enjoyable? Does walking around with phones stuffed in my ears bring me closer to Nature, closer to the really real? Does blocking my senses allow me to engage my world more handily? Not sure, but it sure leads me to think that soon we will be talking about a ‘digital world’ not just a digital life. For our technology in many ways changes how we view reality, and the digicality is what’s really real now.

Look out, you may be digitized next.

A Look at the new Apple Store in Chicago on North Michigan Avenue

Looking down the stairs at the entrance. What a gorgeous store.

As you would expect, Mac software selection is excellent.

Our first in person view of the iSight.

The iSight from a different angle.

And of course, you can’t visit an Apple Store without buying something…

Ah yes, a new iPod and the iSight.

Prof.
David K. Schultz
Publisher, Applelust.com

Switching To The Mac: The Missing Manual
by David Pogue
PoguePress/ O’Reilly and Assciociates, Inc. , Sebastopol, California
434 pages, black and white
ISBN 0-596-00452-4
$24.95 (USA) , $38.95(Canada)

This is the second book John has asked me to review on the subject of switching to a Mac. Perhaps he is trying to tell me something. Believe me, I need no subtle encouragement. My inferiority complex grows daily as I peddle artwork knowing was created on a PC – while all my clients are using Macs. (I have, of course, told no one of my dirty little secret). But ten years ago I needed AutoCad and 3dStudio and there was no support for them on the Mac. So I invested in these programs back when they would run only in DOS and, later, when they converted to Windows, thinking all was okay.

And I spent years trying to master this software and loyally upgraded each time another version was developed. Finally, I figured out how to make a living using AutoCad and, particularly, 3dStudio in combination with Photoshop. Now I’m stuck.

And to make matters worse, AutoDesk, the company who makes AutoCad and 3dStudio, has grown almost as arrogant and insensitive as Microsoft. For example, I skipped an upgrade because, quite frankly, it wasn’t worth it. So now, when I investigate upgrading again, I’m told that I’m out of the loop and have to repurchase the software if I want the latest version! The continual upgrading of software is generally a good thing. However, when one version can’t read the files of another and the developer starts to bully you into buying its upgrade, it’s time to move on and, I guess, that’s where I am now.

Sorry to begin a review with a rant but I never miss an opportunity to whine. It seemed an apropos way of starting. Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual is a good reference book for ex-Windows users who have recently acquired a Mac. The title implies that ex-Windows users need a separate manual to make the transition. Maybe that’s a bit of a stretch – I wouldn’t know. But I’m fairly sure that whatever manual comes with the Mac doesn’t make many comparisons with its Windows counterpart. The Missing Manual does. It’s divided into four sections. The first is a general overview of the interface beginning with differences between it and Windows and progressing into the desktop with all the nuances that make the Mac unique and preferable. Sure, there’s bias here, and probably justified. (Are there any books out there on switching from the Mac to the PC or why PC users should stay where they are?)

The second section of the book describes the process of physically moving one’s computing environment from the PC to the Mac – files, software and hardware peripherals. Included are various ways to move data files and email stuff and how the Mac views and treats this data. The process is explained clearly and simply – definitely valuable information for the Mac converts who might otherwise think he or she would have to start over from scratch. There’s a chapter devoted to numerous programs such as those from Adobe, Macromedia, Intuit, etc. al. with brief descriptions on their functionality on the Mac and ability to read files from either platform. Not addressed are sound editing, CAD, rendering programs or games. Given that the Mac excels graphically and musically, this would seem to be a formidable oversight.

I also found it curious that no mention is made of the financial drain associated with repurchasing all this software – the fact that Mac programs read files created by it’s PC equivalent is well and good, but if you’re going to really put the Mac to its graphical test, you’ll need programs that will do it justice, namely those from Adobe – and they don’t come cheap…

The chapter on hardware seemed scant and, at times, rationalized. There were hints of driver and cable incompatibility that I found a little disturbing, given my antiquated collection of peripherals. I was also left with the impression that scanning would be a bit of a hassle. While solutions and work-around’s are offered, cost was not mentioned.

There is a good section of getting connected on the Web with lots of information on setup, email and so forth. Again, descriptions are with the ex-Window user in mind.

The last section deals primarily the system itself – logging in, preferences, networking, etc., together with descriptions of the programs and utilities that come with the machine. These are well written and easy to follow and present a compelling argument in favor of the Mac over the PC.

While a good supplement for new Mac users – particularly those coming from the Microsoft environment, the book is really limited to that market. Furthermore, it appears to target the relatively unsophisticated Windows user who would have a fairly simple software library. It is probably not the best book for one who is considering a switch other than as a basic overview of the Mac’s capabilities as it does not completely address the issue of new software requirements or hardware incompatibility. All the illustrations are in black and white (makes the book less expensive) but, as such, presents nothing visually dramatic that would distinguish the Mac over the PC. A couple of side-by-side color screen shots as a center supplement to the book would do a lot I would think. Nevertheless, this is a well-documented book full of good information on using the Mac.

MacMice Rating: 3 out of 5

Wynne Stevens

The Call for a Constitutional Convention

The Modern Society and our Agrarian Beginning

Adam Smith described a system where some work little and receive a lot, while others work a lot and receive little. It did not take into account the plight of the slaves, accept perhaps as property, and is a model based on an agrarian society. Its primary analysis was an explanation of how commerce would prosper more effectively without a king as the primary arbitrator and hoarder of wealth. The king controlled everything, and claimed ownership to every item, even every apple on every apple tree. We have reached the same point today, except this time we are a modern society and the corporations have assumed the role of the king. Copyright law and the litigious nature of our society show how aggressive we have become to claim an equally perpetual ownership.

As the small farm agrarian nation has receded, the federal government has driven an expansion of power in our private lives. The right to vote, to due process, and a great body of law have all served to both empower more people as well as enforce limits of individual power. With the rights that the government conferred, it also has grown in power. For every right it expanded, it has assumed the power to regulate. So as we as citizens have grown more accustomed to more power, we have also grown accustomed to a stronger do-all federal government, capable of both granting favor or imposing restrictions, based upon your point of view.

Industrial society has made our interdependency stronger, which in itself has become a source of power. Corporations lobby and drive our laws and priorities based on their self-interest. The plight of the worker and society in general is left as an afterthought. All legislative battles are between large corporations and the forces of the people at large, usually in the form of labor, smaller businesses or a specific industry, and the forces of the government interests.

In an agrarian society there was no national grid of power, transportation, communication, food, health care, banking, insurance, entertainment, news or distribution. In today’s society, national enterprises are becoming more and more the norm. America is not homogenous politically, but it is culturally and economically. The power of the individual industries and companies has become equal to or greater than the power of the federal government.

Politically we have been long divided. Not simply democrats versus republicans, but city versus country, employees versus employers, industry versus conservationists, franchised versus disenfranchised. These oppositions are not singularly by chance, the free enterprise system perpetuates it. It is a “check and balances” that the founders envisioned. In an agrarian society, their vision and fear was the dominance of one state or a group of states over another region. The Civil War is a testament that their plan failed. Slavery was defeated in favor of the utopian ideals as stated in our founding documents: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. The free enterprise system was unable to arrive at a just solution then, and it is unable to arrive at a just solution now. Self-interest is not a utopian ideal. While its existence must be accommodated in a political solution, our economic ideals should be the same as our social ideals: utopian. For our social life we have the Bill of Rights. For our economic life we need a Bill of Mutual Responsibility. Relying on the alleged balancing powers of free enterprise, rather than articulated utopian principals, is what has perpetuated our economic divisions. For us to be effective, we need to break the vested interests from the cycle of wasteful priorities. The free enterprise system needs to be replaced by one of Mutual Responsibility.

Too Much Responsibility

At some point, and some would argue it was long ago, the federal government will be doing more things than it can do well. The war on terror aggravates this situation. Likewise the states, lacking the resources of the federal government, are underpowered in this new nationally homogenous industrial society. With the rise of security concerns, two million citizens incarcerated, and a legal process that serves as an aggressive weapon, we are growing perilously close to losing the stability of the middle class. Much of the activity of our government serves the interests and the competitive nature of corporations. Eisenhower warned of the military-industrial complex, and his plea was ignored. A government of the people, by the people, for the people may well perish from the earth if the power of the modern day slaveholders continues unchecked.

Politically there are three main groups at play: corporations, labor and government. The political parties, for the most part, serve either labor or the corporations. The people have a vote, but within this framework it is diluted by those with greater resources. Since the political parties serve those with the resources to support them, the parties have come to resemble advocates for either the “Labor Corporation” or the “Industry Corporation.” It is a battle between two narrow self-interests that leaves many Americans unrepresented.

Our social utopian ideal of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness can been seen as under attack by the free enterprise model. Self-government is being defined and executed on a national corporate scale. There is no local control, individual rights or freedom, independence of action or liberty. As we exit our agrarian society, we find ourselves controlled by an industrialized nationalized cultural and political power. It is an Orwellian system. Our destructive habits have more power than the players engaged in it. By “working the system” corporations are empowered to exclude those without resources from enjoying self-government, but they themselves are helpless to change the system. Many representatives leave Washington because they cannot bear to be a part of the system. For the wealthy, philanthropy is the only way to correct the system.

The novel 1984 was not about Big Brother deciding everything, it was about thought control and Doublethink. It was not enough that people live as slaves, it was required that they actually believe their slavery to be the best situation possible. It was death to a utopian vision for allegedly practical reasons. Specifically, that we should serve the model, rather than the vision. In this sense, we have all becomes slaves to free enterprise. This resulting form of slavery will be more complex to stop than by a war with muskets. We need to replace our entire legal infrastructure.

Back to the Beginning

Any new utopian-inspired formula must also begin at the federal level, for it is there where all our wisdom, rights and freedom resides. But if checks and balances no longer work, then what will? The answer to motivated self-interest is mandated Mutual Responsibility. Self-interest, as the founders believed, is a power that can be harnessed. Voluntary duty to self-governance, which augured no critical consequence in agrarian times, needs to be mandatory in an industrialized nationalized society where resources are concentrated. There are many examples of mandated Mutual Responsibility that the government currently imposes, for example, pollution control and health codes. Free enterprise has no element of citizen duty.

What is required is an expansion of corporate responsibilities and a narrowing of corporate freedom. Rather than issuing unfunded mandates on the states, the government must issue corporate mandates to effect social responsibilities. The social burdens placed on government are caused by the failure of corporations to value anything other than profit. To relieve the burden on the government, corporations must be a partner with social responsibilities.

Government is experiencing a cyclical failure. It is too busy dealing with the problematical social effects free enterprise causes, and the Corporations resist any change in their philosophical responsibilities. Like the slaveholders of the past, the corporations will give up the right to unchecked immoral profit unwillingly. Unlike 150 years ago, this will not be an armed conflict between different regions of the country. We can accomplish this utopian change with a series of simple votes.

The objective is to find the balance where the government continues its natural expansion of personal rights, but simultaneously contracts in size and scope, and shifts many of its social burdens to these new industrialized national cultural private powers that the corporations have become. We can trust private industry to do what is good for itself, to be motivated. What we need to do is grant them the power they have, but also extract from them a new Contract of Mutual Responsibility.

Steve Consilvio

Bravo Disc Publisher
OS X Compatible
Company: Primera Technology, Inc.
Price: $1995.00 for CD-R; $2495 for DVD-R/CD-R
http://www.primera.com

INITIAL COMMENTS BY NEMO

David Weeks unpacked, setup, and installed everything necessary to batch-process quantities of professional-level custom CDs, using high-speed burns and imprinting high-quality labels using Bravo, by the time Nemo arrived at Weeks’ home office. David said the procedure was straightforward, with help from Primera’s well-written printed Quick Start Guide. This manufacturer wisely includes both the necessary FireWire 400 and USB cables, but provides only one special printable 52x CD-R blank. “For two grand, they could be a little generous with the media,” says John.

(According to Primera, “Actually, we ship 2 silver and 2 white printable surface discs with each Bravo purchase. You should have received 4 discs, not one.”) Nemo’s point precisely. How about a special introductory offer so new purchasers can blast through a 50-pack for around $25.00?

All disks, ink, and additional supplies are sold from the Primera web site and through Primera’s channel of distributors and resellers. Media can also be purchased from any major media manufacturer. “Looks like a closed shop situation,” says Nemo, “but that’s fine under the circumstances.”

While clicking through the company’s links, Weeks came across refurbished units priced as low as $1295.00 US for CD units, and $1995.00 US for DVD-R/CD-R machines. Nice prices! This site has plenty of helpful and interesting info, so prospective purchasers should look around and learn as much as possible both before and after obtaining a Bravo.

We received a 50-pack of blank inkjet printable surface disks for our evaluation, and they cost $32.50 for a spindle-pack. Bravo’s capacity is 25 at one session (50 disc capacity with kiosk mode), which you can see in progress in the accompanying photo provided by Primera. Bravo is a prosumer product, and professional units with greater capacity are also available from this company. In a small office or private recording studio, Bravo falls somewhere between the ultimate megageek burner / labeler and a high-quality, world-class duplicator.

Opening the Quick Start booklet to “Creating a Disc,” we launched Discribe Robot OS X 5.1 to create a data disk of David’s MP3s from his iTunes Library, totaling 400 MB of legal song dupes. Bravo displayed “LG CD-RW 52x24x52 At FireWire” in the burner panel, which is the speed of the CD-RW drive.

We identified a misprint or two in Primera’s Quick Start booklet, but nothing serious. For example, step 6 should read “Click Design Image” instead of “Click Design Disk.” Glancing through the 300 included front label image templates, John was impressed and excited by the variety and quality.) Over 800 additional pro-level “.bmp” images are available at additional cost.

Here’s a photo of David loading Bravo, prior to our first serious burn and print. Once the process begins, the machine picks up a blank disk, places it into the (lower) CD-RW drive, then burns at a true 52x: 407 MB in 58 seconds, which is fast. Discribe authoring software displays typical progress and countdown info, using “Burn Proof,” just like the more familiar Roxio Toast.

Once data burning is complete Bravo ejects the disk, lifts it, and moves it into the upper drawer for printing. Sounds emerge as from a typical ink jet print mechanism, but quieter, since everything is covered by the clear, dark dust protection panel. We observed Bravo’s print arm moving back and forth under the smoked-plastic Lexan cover.

Next the printed, burned, completed disk is placed into the output well, opposite from the blanks. “Is that slick, or what!” says Weeks. His new custom music mix played perfectly in his mighty G4, and in a standard CD player. Bravo is not a supported burner for iTunes, but mounts and plays discs just fine.

We proceeded from this single test procedure to create real-world custom-labeled audio CDs from a Nemo production dating back over 30 years (to be discussed in a future Nemo Memo, so watch this space). Beginning with a 1200 x 1200 dpi TIF image file we created in David’s HP scanner we cropped and saved as a 120 x 120 mm file (1200 pixels per inch), as instructed by Primera, Discribe performed “Copy a CD” originating in Weeks’ G4 CD-drive. We were allowed to “Choose Image” and agreed to record before printing, to conserve ink. Each label image width needs to be less than 4096 pixels, if you were keeping score.

Primera provides 30-day free tech support, followed by a reasonable fee of $10 per call per incident during normal Central Time business hours. Fax and email support are free of charge.

WEEKS ADDS:

Discribe cannot title disks or tracks in our reviewed version 5.1. (Primera says, “5.2 is shipping now and this change should be made by Charismac with version 5.3.”)

Discribe sometimes grabs control of the internal drive, and prevents the user from inserting or ejecting CDs from the internal drive. Quitting Discribe returns control of the internal drive to the user. This is a problem that was acknowledged by Bravo Tech Support.

(Primera responds: “This is not intermittent. At some point Discribe has to unmount a CD in order to read raw disc data. This is a fundamental requirement under OS X from the initial Apple release. Discribe prevents a disc from mounting so it can read all sectors on CDs.”)

While Discribe allows you to save documents (the CD contents and configuration) you have to specify EACH time if you want a label printed, and if so, which image is to be used. Also, the document does not remember the Page Setup settings, which have to be specified each time. Mac documents are supposed to remember the Page Setup settings. (Primera tells MyMac.com, “You can actually set all of the page set-up options and then click Ôset as default,’ Also, Charismac hopes to remove the label printing specification in version 5.3.”)

During the dupe run of Nemo’s special CD burn, Discribe “unexpectedly quit.” I had to restart to get proper operation back; logout/login would not do it. (MyMac.com just learned that “Charismac is also trying to determine the cause of the unexpected quit and hopes to have it resolved with version 5.3.”)

The Bravo can be used as a standalone reader/writer CD unit. You do not have to have the USB plug in for this; that’s for the printing function.

Nemo’s disc duplicated in five minutes, and the printing took about 1+ minute. Moving disks internally takes some small amount of time.

Tech support is very good (Steve) but expect a wait, and the call is not toll-free. I did not try email.

SUMMING UP — BRAVO!

Don’t take our gripes too seriously, because we are delighted with the excellent quality of music or data reproduction, and overjoyed with the appearance of our custom printed labels. Bravo’s hardware is robust, attractive, and well designed. Documentation and support are top-notch, especially considering today’s degraded standards.

Charismac’s Discribe feels like an application in progress, yet both Primera and Charismac are working to bring their software up to the quality of their hardware. Why is Bravo using Discribe and not Roxio’s Toast? Probably because Charismac was prepared to work closely with Primera to develop a custom solution for a broad range of users.

Weeks and Nemo RECOMMEND Bravo Disc Publisher for users who need highest-quality multiples of custom-labeled CDs. If you fit this profile, the substantial cost and modest learning curve will be well worth your purchase of this exciting new class of product.

Publishers End Note:
After submission of this review, MyMac.com’s publisher, Tim Robertson, questioned the ink situation for this unit. The question was: how easy is it to purchase new ink or ink cartridges for this unit? As anyone who uses an ink-jet printer knows, your ink will run out in the middle of a print job. If you are on your last ink cartridge when this happens, how easily can you get a replacement? What print technology does the unit use? Here is the reply from Primera Technology, Inc.:

The true desire of the Bravo Disc Publisher is that you can burn and print multiple copies hands-free. You can start a job and walk away. Printing full-color graphics directly onto the surface of the disc is an added feature.

Ink cartridges can be purchased from any of Primera’s distributors, resellers, on Primera’s web site and directly from Primera’s sales department. Primera sells in more than 85 countries around the world. Primera uses a remanufactured, redesigned Lexmark print engine.

MacMice Rating: 4 out of 5

John Nemerovski

OWC Mercury FireWire 800 3 Port PCI Card
Company: Other World Computing
Price: $79.95
http://www.macsales.com

When Apple introduced Macintosh computers with the new FireWire 800 standard, my first thought was GOOD! Faster transfer speeds! Then I thought, shoot, I only have two FireWire 400 ports. How can I expand my Mac to FW800? Enter: The OWC Mercury FireWire 800 PCI card.

The Mercury FireWire 800 PCI card sports three FireWire 800 ports. It is easy to install. In fact, there is no drivers needed, thus no software to install. Unfortunately, the OWC Mercury FireWire 800 card only works under Mac OS X 10.2.3 or later. So for those OS 9 users out there, this is simply yet another wake-up call to make the switch of OS X.

The promise of FireWire 800 is speed. This PCI card, however, will not let you transfer data any faster than a FireWire 400 drive. The problem is not the card, but the PCI BUS. Which begs the questions; if you need the speed of FireWire 800, and this card does not deliver that, why buy the card?

Putting that question aside, the card itself does function well. I had no problem at all with the card, and in fact appreciate OWC making FireWire 800 available for older Mac computers. Here are the specifications on the OWC Mercury FireWire 800 PCI card from the company site:

System Requirements: Macintosh with 33-MHz/64-bit PCI slot. Power Macintosh Blue & White G3* or later, all AGP Power Macintosh G4 systems fully supported. FireWire 800 requires Mac OS X 10.2.3 or later, Mac OS X 10.2.5 or higher recommended. FireWire 800 is NOT supported under Mac OS 9.
FireWire 400: Must use 9 pin to 6 pin adapter cable (not included). Macintosh with 33-MHz/32-bit PCI slot. FireWire 400 requires Mac OS 8.6 or later. If used in a 33-MHz/32-bit PCI slot, FireWire 400 speed will be maximum attainable.
FireWire 800 (1394B), backwards compatible with FireWire 400 (1394A)
FireWire 800 – (3) 9 pin ports
PCI Slot Requirements – PCI 2.2 compliant PCI slot, 33-MHz/64-bit recommended for best performance.
One-Year Warranty

All told, if you have a need for a FireWire 800 card, and are running Mac OS X 10.2.3 or later, you will be happy with this card. It performs as well as it can with the inherent limitations of a PCI slot, so keep that in mind. I like the card, and can see uses for it. On the other hand, a better solution would be a combo-USB 2.0 / FW800 PCI card in the same price range.

MacMice Rating: 4 out of 5

Tim Robertson

OWC Mercury Elite Pro FireWire 800/400 + USB 2.0/1.1
Company: Other World Computing
Price: $479.99
http://www.macsales.com

Imagine 250GB of storage space on an external drive. Now add in the ability to connect the drive via FireWire 400 or 800, as well as USB 1.1 or 2.0. Make the drive a respectable 7200RPM with a 8MB Data Buffer, as well as Oxford922 chip-set, and you have one mean drive.

Coming in at a price-point of $479.99 US for the unit reviewed, you get a lot of drive for that price. You can, however, spend as little as $249.99 for a similar drive, with most of the features as the reviewed unit, but with 80GB if hard drive space and only a 2MB Data Buffer. Other World Computing has seven different drives in the Mercury Elite Pro line, so chances are you can find a price to feature drive to suite your needs.

We here at MyMac.com are in love with the Mercury Elite Pro! The read/write speeds are fantastic in real-world situations. Files under 50MB transferred in a blink of an eye when connected with both the FireWire 800 and 400 ports. Without a USB 2.0 port on our test Macintosh G4, we cannot comment on that aspect of the connectivity, though logic would suggest you would see similar transfer speeds as FireWire. Connecting the drive to a 1.1 USB port worked just fine, but transfer speeds were very slow. The fault, of course, is not the Mercury Elite ProÕs, but rather than USB 1.1 transfer speed.

The drive itself comes wrapped in a long, but thin, hard durable plastic sheath. It ships with four plastic clip-on legs, which will keep the drive either vertical or horizontal on your desk. If there was one item I had to pick that I disliked about the drive, it would be the very bright, almost neon blue light on the front of the drive. While computing at night, the blue drive light actually distracted me from my monitor often, which is saying something as I use a 23Ó Cinema Display. I would advise a less-bright light on future external drives, or at least the ability for the user to turn it off or dim it.

Ports, ports, and more ports. The Mercury Elite Pro comes with the following built-in ports:

(2) FW800 9-pin ports
(1) FW400 6-pin port
(1) USB 1.1/2.0 port. (Connectivity depending on USB on your computer)

The ports are located on the back on the unit, as well as the power port and power switch.

All Mercury Elite Pro models come with an impressive 2-year warranty. We would love to see more manufactures offer such a long warranty product. At the price of these drives, and their connectivity, an end-user should expect to get at least a few years service from these drives.

One feature we found surprisingly refreshing, after using many external drives over the years, was the quite operation of the Mercury Elite Pro. This cannot be understated, as users who require a lot of storage space, and connects multiple drives together as either stand-alone or RAID drives will attest, these units can become quite noisy. Compared to an EZQuest Firewire drive sitting right next to it, the Mercury Elite Pro was virtually silent.

The Mercury Elite Pro is compatible with all Macintosh operating systems from 8.5 Ð OS X. We tested the unit under both Mac OS 9.2.2 and Mac OS X 10.2.3, and it worked flawlessly under both.

The Mercury Elite Pro ships with FW400, FW800, and USB cables.

All in all, this is a fantastic drive, one you or your company will be very happy with. Already compatible with the newly announced PowerMac G5, the Mercury Elite Pro should serve your storage needs for years to come.

MacMice Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Tim Robertson

Big Disk d2 USB 2.0 & FireWire 800 Hard Drive
Company: LaCie, Inc.
Price: $449-$1099
http://www.lacie.com

LaCie, the hardware vendor with that funny French name (it means “the company”) has come out with a series of capacious hard drives that use the new FireWire 800 standard.

The Weeks division of MyMac.com labs spent several days with a review unit, and came away with some interesting conclusions about FireWire 800. Friend and fellow reviewer John Nemerovski opened the Big Disk d2 shipping box with me. If you put any stock in first impressions, you’ll be a big fan of the d2 drive. The sleekly gorgeous hard drive enclosure is brushed aluminum, and it has a great tactile, non-skid feeling. Even if you have sweaty palms after paying the (expensive) purchase price for this baby, its grippy feel will prevent you from dropping it. Appearance and Setup

Use both hands, and make sure you observe OSHA lifting guidelines when you handle the d2, as it is HEAVY. This is just the opposite of the featherweight Weibe Tech and SmartDisk drives we have reviewed in the past. I’ve not yet had the opportunity to take the LaCie drive to work to see how well it functions as a wheel chock for a Boeing 757; that report will include a detailed analysis of LaCie’s warranty repair coverage.

The unit is large, but not bulky, measuring 6.3 x 6.8 x 1.7 in.

Once Nemo got over his initial “WOW,” and came down from the ceiling, we connected it to my dual 1.42 Power Macintosh. You won’t have to run out to your local Mac dealer, as everything is included. The d2 ships with a FireWire 800 to 800cable, a 400 to 800 cable (for use with Macs without FireWire 800) and a USB 2.0 cable for PC owners. Also included is a nice stand that lets you position the d2 standing up on its side.

The power button is a cool fluorescent blue color, and it throbs sensually as the drive inside spins up. The unit has no internal fan, and it did not run hot during testing. How big is Big?

The second surprise was the storage capacity of the drive. MyMac Labs had been expecting a 200 or 250 GB drive, as that’s all the product literature mentions. When our drive icon mounted on the Desktop, and proudly proclaimed itself as “Big Disk 391″ Nemo hit the roof again. 391 gigs unformatted comes out to just over 372 GB formatted. To put this amount of space into perspective, my MP collection of 1600+ tunes uses 29.5 GB. My collection of 1150 digital photos uses 3.7 GB. The video of “The Matrix” uses 7.4 GB. 60 minutes of raw digital video streams take 13 GB. “Big Disk” is the right name, especially the capacious 400 GB model.

I don’t even want to think about losing 400 GB of important data due to a disk crash. The horror, the horror…. Fail to back up at your peril. How many floppies would it take?

There are other high-capacity hard drives for sale, but not many others include both FireWire 800 and USB 2.0. A substantial part of the price of this expensive unit must be attributable to the new FireWire 800 interface. How does it perform; it is twice as fast? Performance

The original FireWire 400 specification says the maximum transfer speed is 400 Mbps (megabits per second, not megabytes per second). Some of the fastest hard drives can bump up against this ceiling. FireWire 800′s doubling of the maximum transfer speed will provide more “headroom” for fast drives, especially RAID arrays. The drive mechanism shipped with the Big Disk 400 would be constrained by a FireWire 400 interface. But the average user will NOT see transfer times cut in half. If you copy zillions of small files from disk to disk, the file system overhead will reduce your effective transfer rate. In contrast, if you move small number of huge files, there is less overhead, and you’ll make better use of FireWire 800′s speed.

Even if you don’t have the fastest Macintosh, you’ll find that a faster hard drive will often improve your computing experience, as slow hard drives result in long boot times, slow application startups, and generally lackadaisical performance. A fast drive can seem like your Mac has a new lease on life.

MyMac.com readers are not the sort to read page upon page of benchmarks, so I’ll only quote a few statistics from the XBench benchmarking application, and a few practical tests. The numbers

Results 88.66
System Info
Xbench Version 1.0
System Version 10.2.6
Physical RAM 1024 MB
Model PowerMac3,6
Processor PowerPC G4x2 @ 1.42 GHz
Version 7455 (Apollo) v3.3
L1 Cache 32K (instruction), 32K (data)
L2 Cache 256K @ 1417 MHz
L3 Cache 2048K @ 237 MHz
Bus Frequency 167 MHz
Video Card ATY,RV250
Drive Type LaCie Big Disk G372

Disk Test 88.66
Sequential 82.34
Uncached Write110.29 48.12 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 111.90 45.53 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 49.12 7.74 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 97.86 42.22 MB/sec [256K blocks] Random 96.03
Uncached Write 91.48 1.38 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 101.00 23.17 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 85.68 0.56 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 109.30 21.42 MB/sec [256K blocks]

For comparison, here are the same test numbers on an AcomData external Firewire 400 drive, an inexpensive external drive.

Disk Test 80.17 Sequential 69.05 Uncached Write 70.58 28.71 MB/sec [256K blocks] Uncached Read 77.47 33.42 MB/sec [256K blocks] Uncached Write 93.87 21.53 MB/sec [256K blocks] Uncached Read 92.92 18.21 MB/sec [256K blocks] (End of benchmarks page)

Clearly, the Big Disk is substantially faster in these synthetic test than the garden-variety FireWire 400 drive. But Mark Twain said, “There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.” How does LaCie’s d2 Big Disk perform in real life?

My iTunes Music folder has 5,102 MP3′s and is 29.76 GB. I copied it from my internal drive, a Maxtor 200 GB drive with 8 MB cache, to the Big Disk, and then to the Acom Data FireWire 400 disk.

12 min 34 seconds to copy the Music folder to the Big Disk. 18 min 20 seconds to copy the Music folder to the AcomData drive.

My Virtual PC 6 hard drive container file is 796 MB.

29 seconds to copy to the Big Disk 29 seconds to copy it to the AcomData drive

I then duplicated the 796 MB VPC 6 file on each drive.

37 seconds to duplicate it on the Big Disk 56 seconds to duplicate it on the AcomData drive. So, some operations were faster, and some were not. Conversations with La Cie technical expert Mike Mihalik corroborate this. Many factors affect disk read, write, and transfer speed. My overall impression of the Big Disk performance in day-to-day operation is that it feels faster most of the time, especially when copying lots of large files.

Conclusion The d2 Big Disk provides a staggering amount of storage space. The 500 GB model should be able to accommodate your files for the rest of your natural life!

The FireWire 800 ability will provide faster disk operation for most (but not all) disk activities. Since Apple is shipping most new Macs with FireWire 800 as standard equipment, an investment in this drive will last into the future. You pay a premium price for the Big Disk, but you get a product from a reputable vendor that stand behind its products, FireWire 400, 800 and USB 2.0, and great styling. The hype behind FireWire 800 is typically overstated: claims may not reach the theoretical limits, but that’s normal. The LaCie drive is faster for most operation most of the time.

Conclusion

Pricey, but worth it.

MacMice Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Nemo’s comments

I have more experience testing, reviewing, and using FireWire external drives than do most people on the planet. I know a fine product when I see one, and I have tremendous respect for companies that go the extra distance and expense to deliver a first class out-of-box experience. My G3 iMac 400 DV is no match for David’s new monster G4, but within a few minutes of using this LaCie evaluation unit I began to take for granted its excellent design and speed. Quantitative tests are almost irrelevant at G3/FireWire400 transfer speeds, yet I sensed Big Disk moving everything faster and opening all files more quickly than any previous drives that passed through MyMac.com labs.

To reiterate and expand on David’s well-considered comments above:

* Cost, weight, and capacity are massive, but desktop footprint is modest when Big Disk stands on its perfectly balanced metal footplate. Use it!

* Remember when 1GB seemed like so much hard disk space you could fill it with years’ worth of multimedia files? Big Disk does contain a lot of storage, but you will soon fill it simply because you’ll feel the need to do so. Start saving!

* Ingenuity, versatility, and style add value to this single-purpose product; if those attributes matter to you, then the extra $$$ involved will be justified. Otherwise, wait for something cheaper later in the FireWire 800 product cycle. * LaCie doesn’t make many clunkers. Their goal is to be the industry standard in each category of hardware they enter. With few exceptions, Nemo considers LaCie products “best of class” in head to head comparisons. Just like David, I’ll find countless uses for LaCie’s d2 Big Disk until the eventual day when FedEx pulls our evaluation unit from my pleading arms. Highly recommended, rated at:

MacMice Rating: 5 out of 5
Fantastic product! Well worth your money and investment.

– David Weeks MyMac columnist and reviewer

John Nemerovski

The Call for a Constitutional Convention

Historical Stalemate

Legal evolution is slow because the worker-slaves are too busy working to focus or fight to change the system. Their position as worker-slaves highlights their inability to challenge the system. The seeds of revolt, ironically, are often planted by the wealthiest. Most revolutionaries come from the middle and upper classes. They are the ones with the time resources and self-confidence and education to challenge the status quo. The slave-masters are convinced their actions are just because society requires the goods and services they produce, but their children often see a world of indulgence. The first generation uses the system to be successful, but some of the following generations try to change the world. Buddha was among the first to resist the life of luxury. The bourgeois planted the seeds of the Russian Revolution. The Rockefeller’s, the Kennedy’s, and Osama bin Laden are all from families of great wealth. The easy life of tennis, lounging by the pool, and polishing expensive autos was as boring 4000 years ago as it is today. The inner voice of Hope that we all share speaks louder to some than it does to others, but not all revolutionary utopians are peace-loving and wise.

Despite our modern world and its preceding 4000 years of history, we are losing sight of our utopian vision. We now define ourselves based on numbers written on a piece of paper and filed in a drawer. If our bank balance shows $0 we are sad, if it shows $1,000,000 we are happy. When we go to a hospital, if we have the correct numbers written on the paper, all tests are given and special care and consideration to our ailments. If, however, we do not have the correct numbers written on a piece of paper, we are at best patched up and released. Future ailments, chronic problems, known but not immediate issues are ignored. The infrastructure to deliver healthcare waits ready and able, the investment in training and capital has all been made, but without the correct numbers on a sheet of paper, you do not get the best chance for a healthy and pleasant life. Without wealth, you are regarded as expendable, your pain less important, and your demise less sorrowful. In the slow march toward utopia, is this really the best that modern man can accomplish?

Free Enterprise

Modern medicine is the result of thousands of years of knowledge, trial and error, and a multitude of experiments. Many approaches have been tried and abandoned over the course of time. Some mistakes are repeated, but revolutionary approaches have also changed the course of its practice. We all benefit when vigorous attention and high standards are applied to the art of medicine, and when we are all allowed access. Our economic life should be no different.

The free enterprise theory that grips our country fails to address either the primary concerns of civilization or proscribe a healthful remedy for justice. In 1776, Adam Smith wrote “The Wealth of Nations” extolling the marketplace as a mediator of competing forces. The Founding Fathers set in motion a social revolution with the idea that all men are created equal. But the economic theory it was paired with has been proven to be completely wrong. The marketplace is a slave market, and what has changed over history is the way the slaveÕs laborers are bought and sold. The alleged free hand of capitalism is a theory that parallels the healthful effect of bloodletting by use of leeches. In the 18th century, Charles Darwin died as a result of this practice, despite his insight to scientific evolution. Free enterprise is a bloodletting of our moral soul, and America stands in the place of Charles Darwin.

Adam Smith stated:

What we have seen in our brief history is the opposite of his characterization. We have generated a hundred-fold increase in provisions, and some consume the provisions of thousands, if not of millions. Yet we are increasingly “abandoning … infants, … old people, and those afflicted with lingering diseases, to perish.” The difference is that rather than abandoning people in the wild, we warehouse them in neighborhoods of poverty and blight, and let them slowly expire by the lonely glow of a television light, addiction, crime, ill health and pollution. The so-called savage nations were a more utopian community than ours. They lived with a respect for Hope and Love, and acted from a sense of communal duty. The Native American society was more balanced than ours, but they were annihilated by the armed warriors of reason and claimed Christianity. A common refrain regarding free enterprise is that a rising tide of wealth floats all boats, but for those struggling without a vessel or a life jacket, it is sink or swim. We have created a new worldwide slave class, and it is growing in numbers every day.

Moral Virtues

The first moral choice of the American founders was the genocide of the native inhabitants. Our “civilized and thriving nation” followed a pattern as old as history. Our drive for property would not be checked by any adversary. Like the Egyptian Pharaoh, we considered ourselves god-like and superior. We have now used technology to cast a global shadow of slavery and self-adoration. As nations emulate the American economic success, they are bound to emulate our errors, too.

If mankind is on the long road towards utopia, and democracy provides the social framework for Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness, then changes need to be made to the free enterprise model to further advance our Hope. Since Hope is a shared consciousness, we all know the elements of utopian society. What are the goals of our willful evolution?

Since mankind cannot accomplish radical change without lethal force, another step toward utopia must be based on things which can be accomplished peacefully and which answer the most important of our basic needs. These things are two, both physical and spiritual: food and health, education and worship. Of course, in exchange for these gifts from society, the individual must work. In work, each must willingly provide these same gifts to others in society that he also accepts. The solution is a system of Mutual Responsibility regarding our most basic needs, and, it builds on our social experience in building government and worship communities.

The Four Cornerstones

America has all the cornerstones in place for advancing our utopian beginning. Our nation is abundant in its food supply, we have a network of quality medical care, research and teaching facilities, we have public education through high school and a myriad of colleges and universities, and a body of law that vigorously protects ones freedom to worship. The only thing that halts the progression to a more utopian society is the free enterprise model.

Steve Consilvio

I received the announcement a week ahead of time, along with some other spam I regularly receive. Let me say that it’s a damn good thing I check that junk mail box, just in case. The letter was colorful, and straight to the point, as mail from Apple tends to be.

It told me that the newest Apple Store would open at the Chestnut Hill Mall, on Saturday, June 14th, at ten AM. In all these years of being a Mac fan, I had yet to attend one of their retail store grand openings, so since this mall is only a few miles away from my residence, I simply figured, “Why not?”

Let me explain a few things: I don’t like shopping malls. I don’t like the way people behave in parking lots at shopping malls. I’ve used the expression “Shopping Mall Nation” a few times, and I don’t mean it kindly. The Chestnut Hill Mall is located in Newton Massachusetts. Newton is a very rich, snobbish suburb, and the Chestnut Hill area is among the most snobbish, elitist, and arrogant parts of this city, which is just outside Boston. But, Apple chose to expand their retail operation by putting a new store here, and it’s only a few miles away, so I must say, “Thanks Steve”. (I just hope the rent on this prime retail space is not going to soak all the profit potential. ) So, for this occasion, I broke one of my own personal rules, and went to the mall. (Hey look, they’re my rules, and I can break them, OK? )

The grand opening was at 10 AM, and I arrived at about 9:20 AM. I deliberately parked on the side that was opposite the location of where the Apple store would be. Not too bad an experience, with this part of the lot more than half-empty, at this time. I headed on into the mall entrance, and scooted down to the lower level, near Filene’s. Spotting the Apple store was easy: I just looked for the line, and there it was. The line started at the Apple Store’s doors, and went down the mall, around a corner, and out a mall entrance. Now, here’s the best part of this: I generally don’t like waiting in lines, but on this occasion, I didn’t mind it at all. I’ve never seen people waiting in a line in such good spirits. Lots of people were wearing Apple logo t-shirts, pins, watches, and baseball caps. People were talking, joking, and laughing. A few were talking about their systems, and a few had iBooks open and operating right there in line. The good mood was infectious. I felt like I was at a party. (Now tell me, Does Dell have anything that even comes close to this? I know, I know; The defacto Mac Basher response to that would be “Dell has a gazillion market share, and outsells Apple a gazillion to one!” This must be said with bulging eyes, and throbbing forehead veins. Otherwise, the person saying it cannot officially join the ranks of cartoonish Mac Bashers. Again, does Dell have anything that even comes close to this?)

The line continued to grow, almost getting to the opposite end of the mall. For a second, I was concerned that I might not get one of the coveted free t-shirts, with the location of the store on it. But I roughly counted maybe 300 hundred people between the doors and myself. Apple was going to give away at least 1000 t-shirts on this day, according to the announcement. A quick look behind me revealed that the line was now indeed getting very long, rounding the end of the Mall Structure. I hoped they had more than 1000 t-shirts on hand.

At about 9:55, the line started to move, a lot at first, then in small steps. Mall security guards were watching carefully, to make sure the store didn’t exceed its maximum limit. This is very understandable. Massachusetts has some of the most strict fire codes in the land, and for good reason. (For an explanation of that, just do a search on “Cocoanut Grove”.) As people went in and then left, more people were admitted. I made it into the store at about 10:15.

The store was packed with people, and there was a lot of buying going on. People were busily examining everything, software, iMacs, G4 towers, cameras, iPods, and printers. At the register, I saw a Ti Book being packaged up for a waiting customer. (The man has good taste.) There was an enormous amount of interest in the 17″ Ti books as well. Store employees were very attentive, and I only wandered for a few moments, before being asked if I had any questions, or would like to see something demonstrated. And this store employee really meant it too. It wasn’t that distrusting “Can I help you?” bit, I generally get in other retail stores.

So, what did I purchase? Well, I treated myself to a 15-gig iPod, which was my main purpose for going there, and a copy of the just-released Disk Warrior for OS X. Oh yes, I did score a free t-shirt, complete with the Apple logo, and the words “Chestnut Hill’ just below the logo So for today, I had a happy retail experience.

So, a lot of customers and apple fans, up early on a Saturday morning, waiting to get into a new Apple Store, and enjoying it. People behaving as though they were with a large gathering of old friends. The crowd crossed all lines I could see: Black, white, old, young. Single people, and families with kids. All brought here, out of love for a computer platform and the company that produces it. Not too bad, for a company that we are told time and time again only has a three percent market share. So, I must ask, does anyone actually believe that crap? I mean, something smells bad, and this time, it is not Park Street subway station on a steamy summer day. Here is a company which clearly makes a superior product, and yet, we are told by “well respected Wall Street analysts that “Apple only has a very small market share”, and well, you know the rest. I think it’s time for someone to look at these analysts, and say “The emperor has no clothes.”

I would like to wish everyone out there the very best Fourth of July Weekend. Have a fun, and safe, time. And if it rains, well, I’ve got a 15-gig iPod to play with, among other things.

Bruce Black

The below pictures are a few taken of the Springfield Lions, the little league teams sponsored exclusively by MyMac.com. “It is important to give back to the community” said Tim Robertson, the founder and publisher of MyMac.com. “We have to encourage these sorts of community sports programs, as we feel it helps build character and life skills. We are happy to sponsor the Springfield Lions, as well as our time, to the team.”

We will post more pictures as the baseball season progresses. If you are interested in watching a game, please email Tim Robertson for game times! And remember, cheer for the Lions!

Tim Robertson