Tonight my wife is away at a conference and I’m on my own. So I made myself some dinner, and watched a movie. I’m outta work, so I have a great resistance to paying restaurant prices. So I went to the supermarket and looked over their ready-made entrées. Bleagh. I needed to cook something real, if I wanted to eat something real.

I knew I had some pasta at home, and a couple of good sausages — Aidell’s andouille sausages, to be specific. Also I knew I had a small can of Contadina tomato sauce. I bought some Swanson’s chicken broth, and a can of canellini beans (that’s white beans, for you non-goombas)

So I chopped up a couple shallots and a big clove of garlic, sliced up the sausages, and put them all in a frying pan with enough olive oil, and some crushed red papper and started them cooking. Meanwhile I started a pot of salted water.

My wife has taught me, with some difficulty, that I must eat some green leafy vegetable with every single meal, or die. I obey this law at dinner time (no chard for breakfast). So I found some spinach in the fridge, and washed it and chopped it.

OK! The stuff in the frying pan looks done, so I add the tomato sauce, beans, and enough chicken broth to keep it soupy. The pasta goes into the boiling water, and I start the timer, 11 minutes for the pasta.

With 5 minutes to go I add the spinach to the other stuff. When the pasta’s done I drain it in a colander, put it in a bowl, dump the other stuff on it, and toss it. Pastafazoo!

Which is southern Italian dialect, in case you wondered, for pasta e fagioli, past and beans.

While all this was going on I had a few nice drinks.

Damn, was that ever good! While eating my pastafazoo, I watched Once Upon a Time In Mexico, which I recommend if you want to watch a mythic fantasy about crime and violence in Mexico.

My wife’s gonna be sorry she missed out.

Actually, it’s Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic, or RFB&D. They have studios all over the country, and one of them is only a few blocks from my house. I’ve been driving past it for years and years, saying Gee, I should volunteer.

I’m one of those people who can read a sentence off the page and get it right, almost every time. Not many people can, as we know from listening to the radio.

But somehow, I never felt like I had the time to spend — until I got laid off from my job.

So a while back I knocked on the door at RFB&D, and said I would like to volunteer to read. They were very nice and explained that you don’t start by reading, you start by directing. Recordings are made by a two-person team: a reader who does just that, and a director who runs the equipment, gets the sound level right and keeps it right as the reader goes through moods and shifts back and forth in front of the mike, follows along in the text and stops the reader when he blows it so they can go back and fix it, logs the session in a carefully structured way so it can be picked up where it left off (usually by a different reader and director) and so on.

There is a lot to it. And even before the reader and director sit down to their work, a “booksetter” goes through the whole book and marks it up in a very detailed way: little penciled notes that say things like “say the page number here,” “don’t read this note until the end of the chapter,” “read this marginal note when you get to this point in the paragraph” … you get the idea. There is a lot to it.

So by now I’ve spent three two-hour shifts being trained as a director, and in another two days I’ll attempt my first shift as a director on my own. Hope I don’t screw it up too badly.

In the three shifts I’ve done, we have recorded parts of

* A psychology textbook about the use of personality-type theory in selecting people to do telemarketing;

* A management textbook about how to build teams;

* A manual covering all phases of what sounded to me like a giant pyramid scheme to market home-care and personal-grooming products, ultimately screwing the lowest tier of salespeople who have no subordinates to screw.

Sounds horrible, eh? But it isn’t. The whole process is fascinating for itself, regardless of the book being recorded. The people I’ve been working with are fascinating people. I look forward to spending some time directing, then taking the reading test to see if I can do reading. I think I can, but I’ve learned enough to realize that I don’t know much about this.

I do have an ulterior motive. When the iTunes Music Store came out, one of its interesting features was the “Audiobooks” section, which offers most or maybe all of the huge Audible.com catalog. And I realized that people are making a living reading books out loud.

Many books are read by their authors, and many others by well-known actors. But quite a few are read by people whose names don’t google in any other context. And a couple of kind people in the industry, when I emailed them out of nowhere, confirmed that yes, sometimes some unknown person just sends a demo CD to to a publisher, and gets hired.

After I develop some chops working with RFB&D, maybe I’ll take a shot at the commercial recording world. But I hope that if I ever get paid to read, I’ll also keep on volunteering. Anyone who has some time and finds this intriguing should really check out RFB&D.

So, most every portable computer I’ve ever used (all Macs) has had a problem about its little rubbery feet. They come off. No, I take it back, my old Graphite iBook didn’t have the problem, but you know what I mean.

On the older models, the feet were stuck onto the surface with some kind of adhesive that always failed, leaving a nasty sticky spot on the bottom of the computer. On white iBooks and metal PowerBooks, the feet snap into little expensive-looking metal sockets, and this is a better design but still not good enough. The feet still pop out if, for example, they are dragged across a surface that offers a lot of friction. And if it happens often enough they either get lost or break.

It happened to me with my trusty iBook. First I tried various lame experiments about gluing the broken foot back into the socket. No luck. I didn’t want to use superglue or epoxy or anything that drastic because there’s a screw craftily hidden inside the socket, that might have to be unscrewed for repairs. And all the rubbery, removable glues I tried just wouldn’t stick at all.

So I went looking for a replacement. I tried the local low-level Mac repair place, and the guy there said they were out of them but he would order them and it would take 24 hours. Ha ha ha! I went in 48 hours later and found another guy who said only high-level Authorized Repair Stations could get the feet.

Next I went a-googling, and found out that Apple sells the feet in 3-packs, but only to resellers. And the resellers will sell you a 3-pack for $19.95. About this point, smoke began to come out of my ears. After adding tax and shipping, I figured I’d be spending close to ten bucks for the foot I needed, and another twenty for the two I didn’t need.

At that point I did what anyone else in my position in this day and age would do: I went to a web discussion board to bitch and moan. How inelegant and non-classy and dumb of Apple, I fumed. Why not sell 10-packs to retailers for ten bucks, and then the retailers could sell one foot for five bucks, or whatever, and make everyone happy? Man, I could run Apple SO much better than Apple does.

A bunch of people told me to go buy stick-on rubber feet at a hardware store. What?!?!? Stick big clumsy ugly generic feet on my sleek and lovely iBook? Never!

One guy said I should make a video of me going around town putting up signs denouncing Apple for mistreating its customers. /8^D

But then another guy said “When I had the same problem, I went to the Apple Retail Store and the Genius gave me a new foot and a bottle of water.”

Well duh.

I marched on down to the Store, hung out at the Genius Bar for a while watching a new space-bar being installed, then told the Genius my problem. By the time I finished my sentence he was opening a drawer and fishing out a shiny new iBook foot, which he handed over with a smile. Hey, if anyone from Apple Retailing is reading this, that was Eric at the Palo Alto store.

Those stores do a lot more than just ring up sales at the cash register. A while back my wife had some technical problem that I couldn’t help with, and I told her to go down to the Store and ask the Genius. She was too lazy: she just called up the store and asked whoever answered the phone about her problem. And got a cheerful and correct answer. Just think about that in the context of all the miserable tech-support experiences we read about and experience all the time.

Sorry for rambling on about it, but this was a really refreshing experience for me and I just wanted to give the Apple Store credit for completely reversing my attitude about those little rubbery feet.

By now I’ve seen several dozen statements about how the Spanish are cowards, how the terrorists won in Spain, etc. I don’t think so.

The Spanish elected a conservative government for reasons that had nothing to do with invading Iraq. Then our government convinced the leadership of the Spanish government to participate in the invasion. This was extremely unpopular in Spain — something like 90% of the voters were strongly opposed to it.

At the time, someone made a prediction: all these governments that joined the “coalition of the willing” did so against popular opposition, and they will be in trouble the next time they have an election.

Fast forward one year. The heavy fighting is over, and Spanish forces didn’t take heavy casualties. Spaniards are feeling like it’s going to be over pretty soon. It looks like they’ll forgive the conservatives for getting them into the war, and reelect them.

Then the bombs go off. And the Spanish government comes up with a series of lies, each more transparent than the one before, trying to make out that the bombs came from ETA, because they’re thinking about that prediction from a year earlier. The lies collapse, and the voters are pissed off, and they punish the government for going against their wishes in the first place, and then lying to them. The prediction comes true.

That isn’t cowardice, it’s democracy. If it’s an “Al Qaeda victory,” it’s one that was set up by government getting into a war that the voters didn’t want.

Remember, it’s not our election, or our government, or our country, or our casualties. It’s another sovereign country with its own agenda, whose leaders made a bad call and got involved in our war.

OK, so it’s already Wednesday night. So sue me.

We live in Palo Alto, and our daughter is in college down in Claremont. So we got in the car at the crack of dawn Friday and drove six hours. Fetched up in Claremont around noon and of course the kid was in chem lab until at least 5:30.

So we got some lunch, and walked around the campus a little, and then went up to the Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden, almost next door. Now for you who don’t know lovely Claremont, it’s at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains, in what the Firesign Theater used to call the Fort Stinkindesert National Monument. There’s some water in the ground because of the mountains, but make no mistake, it’s desert country.

The center part of the gardens is irrigated, though, and last weekend it was wall-to-wall irises. With California poppies and all sorts of other wildflowers mixed in. It was truly gorgeous. When the desert blooms, there is nothing else like it. And it’s full of songbirds, while the college campus and the surrounding burbs are full of crows. Really.

We met our daughter and had supper in the college dorm. That’s all I have to say about that.

Saturday we drug the daughter back up to the Botanic Garden, and ventured past the irrigated part into the drier country. Saw the Crucifixion Thorn trees, no kidding, a strange sight. They look more like something out of Doctor Seuss than something from Mel Gibson. The songbirds were singing, and one in particular: a thrasher was sitting up on a tree top, singing his crazy head off. He’s a relative of the mockingbird, and sings just as loudly and sweetly, but a little less looney (those of you who have had a mockingbird sing outside their bedroom for the entire night will know what I’m talking about.

You can tell a thrasher when you see him (if his singing leaves any doubt) because he has a long beak that curves sharply downward. When he feeds, he thrashes the ground with the tip of his beak to dislodge little edible things.

Then our daughter had to work, so we jumped back in the car and, in a striking act of madness, drove to Joshua Tree National Park to see what was in bloom there. Answer, yucca trees and joshua trees and thousands of tiny wildflowers. Even more wonderful than the Botanic Gardens, because no one planted any of it.

That evening, a movie — a special treat for a college freshman with no car. We saw Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and I tell you, you should see it. If you don’t like it, well, it’s my fault for telling you to see it. But I’m telling you.

Sunday we went to Easter brunch at the Mission Inn in Riverside, one of those only-in-Southern-California places that is 70 or 80 years old and yet looks like they built it two years ago for a movie set. We stuffed ourselves til our eyeballs bubbled, dumped our daughter back at college, and drove six hours straight to Palo Alto where we could sleep in our own bed.

So that amounted to six hours in the car every day for three days straight, plus doing stuff every day. Monday I was tired and Tuesday I came down with a virus where I felt like I was fixin to die. But Wednesday I was OK again, go figure.

So that’s how come I’m telling you about Easter weekend on the Wednesday after.

So I’m reading all these blogs and forum posts and news items etc. about using iMovie to remove the DRM from a song downloaded from iTunes. A lot of people seem to think this is a Big Fat Deal.

Well as soon as I saw the first story about this I said, Hmm, interesting! And I tried it out. Here’s the deal.

1. Import the song from iTunes into an iMovie. You can do this by drag’n'drop from iTunes to iMovie. Takes a couple of minutes for an average song.

2. Export from iMovie to QuickTime. Use the “Sound to AIFF” option. Takes another couple of minutes.

3. Export from QuickTime to a file. Use the “CD-ROM” quality option.

4. Import back into iTunes, using drag’n'drop from the Finder to iTunes.

Alternatively, you can just burn to a CD, then rip back into iTunes. Here’s how:

1. Select the song in iTunes, and click the Burn icon. Follow the bouncing ball to burn the song to a CD.

2. Select the CD in iTunes, and Import. Done. Takes a lot less time.

If it’s more than one song, the CD route is the only way to go, folks.

This whole thing is such a huge yawn.

So yesterday, after much waiting and puckering up, I got the cataract removed from my right eye and a replacement lens implanted.

It’s in the Scriptures, you know: If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out. ;^)

I had it done by an eye surgeon who has done thousands of these operations (she did six others the same day as mine) and, more important, is an old friend. Her daughters were in preschool with mine, and they were friends, and I’ve seen her take care of small children. It turns out that inspires a certain kind of trust.

I showed up at the outpatient surgery at 1:00 pm, sat around for half an hour, and was taken inside and laid out on a gurney. A nurse put stuff in my eye to numb it and to dilate the pupil. I was asked several different times by different people what I was there for and which eye was to be operated on. It’s a system for avoiding horrible mistakes. At some point, someone stuck a sticker above my right eye. But a couple more people asked which eye, even so.

At some point I was lying there with my eyes closed, as per instructions, and I heard Dr. Chang (not her real name) talking with someone about whom to work on next. She said “Whichever one is fully dilated first, I’ll take that one.” I won the race, and was wheeled into the OR.

Now, this was not the kind of OR you see on TV. No cluster of sweaty docs and nurses arguing with each other and waving electroshock paddles around. No one hollering “Push another amp of epi!” The anesthesiologist explained that he was giving me a light dose of sedative, just enough to relieve anxiety. But they didn’t want me to go to sleep, and there would be no pain. They didn’t want me to talk, because that makes the head move, but they wanted me to speak up if I was in discomfort. I could hear Dr. Chang’s voice too, then she came into view in a surgical mask and bonnet, and placed a hood of some translucent plastic over my eyes. She pushed something into place that held my right eyelids fully open, and put in more drops. But from this point on, everything happened from the side and I could only see blurry lights.

At some point I felt some pressure on my eye, nothing worse than when you press the heel of your hand against your eye or rub your eyelid with your fingers. The blurry lights moved around and the blurriness changed, and I could hear people speaking quietly, saying things like “OK, a little more” or “There we go.” Every few minutes a blood-pressure cuff on my arm would inflate.

There was a weird noise, halfway between bad electronic music and whale songs. eeee-yaaaa-woooo-aaaa-waaaaa-yowww-wwwoww-wwoww-yeee-zoop… Later I learned this was audible feedback from the ultrasound machine that was being used to destroy the lens of my eye (with its cataract). Helps the surgeon know exactly what is happening at the tip of the ultrasound probe. This went on for quite a while.

The sound stopped, and there was more waiting while the blurry light moved around.

Dr. Chang had made a very tiny incision at the edge of my cornea, and inserted a thin tube through the incision and through my pupil. All the instruments passed through this tube, including fiber optics so she could see what she was doing. Now (though I didn’t know it yet) she was passing in the new lens, an acrylic plastic jobbie with two springy arms to anchor it within the remaining shell of the lens capsule. It was rolled up like a doobie to pass through the tube.

Suddenly, the blurry lights became sharp images of what I suppose were the actual lamps shining into my eye. I heard Dr. Chang say “There it is.”

When she removed the tube, the incision immediately healed on contact. No stitches required. The plastic hood came off my eyes and I could see — very blurry through the right eye, as I had been told to expect.

I think the operation took about 45 minutes. Half an hour later my wife picked me up and drove me home. The worst discomfort was the tape being yanked off my arm when they removed the anesthesiologist’s IV tube.

My vision in the right eye was quite blurred, because of swelling. I had a good appetite and made up for fasting since midnight before the operation. During the evening the blurring decreased, and by the time I went to bed I was feeling pretty doggone pleased with the results.

This morning (the first morning after) I woke up with the right eye very blurred, but it cleared rapidly over the first couple of hours. I saw Dr. Chang again this afternoon, and she confirmed that everything was going as it should. Right now, my vision is generally better in the right eye than in the left, which also has a cataract (less severe). I fully expect the right eye to be really really good as soon as my glasses prescription is updated in a week’s time.

The thing I didn’t expect is that I am now getting just a lot more light into my right eye. The cataracts came on so slowly that I didn’t notice how dark and yellow everything had gotten. I only noticed the cloudiness and distortion. But now if I close my left eye, everything is bright and white is white. When I switch to my left eye, everything is a lot less bright and white is yellow.

Moral: getting old is still not for sissies, but eye surgery these days is really slick. I have something to add to my Thanksgiving message: Big thanks to all the scientists, engineers, and technological innovators who have so stunningly enriched and improved our lives!

By the way, it’s not cheap, unless you’re on Medicare. I may wait until I’m on Medicare before I get the left eye done.

David

… or as the great Jacques Anquetil put it, “on ze biceecle, you ‘ave all-ways to soffeur…”

I’m on the slow road to getting fit again after a two-year (or more) bout of getting out of shape for various bad reasons. I’ve been working out in the YMCA gym for a few months, but that’s isn’t the same as riding the bike.

So three-four weeks ago a friend asked me to ride with him on a 70-mile trip through the Santa Cruz Mountains. Maybe 5000 feet of climbing. Now only a few years ago I used to do this ride all the time, but that was when I was fit. OK, gotta try it again at some point…

So we start grinding up Page Mill Road, to the highest ridge-top we’re going to hit, about 2000 feet. By the time we’re at the top, I am hurting a little, but now there’s a long descent. Down Alpine Road to La Honda. Yeah, it’s all downhill, but that doesn’t mean a chance to relax. The butt is still on the bike seat, the hands are still bearing weight on the handlebars, and the feet on the pedals. A boy can get a few cricks doing this. And before we get to Pescadero, there’s Haskins Hill and then a few little sissy hills to pedal over.

We stop for lunch in Pescadero, eating a big fat sandwich at the deli. It cuts the fatigue. Then it’s Stage Road to San Gregorio, a couple of 500-foot climbs, and we’re at La Honda Road, ready for the grind back to the ridge-top.

Half way up, the pain begins. First it’s fatigue, then it’s soreness, then (baad news) muscle cramps. We stop in La Honda to sit and cry and buy liquids from the Bandit Store and guzzle them down. But then we still have to grind on up to the summit. More pain, more cramps in the thigh muscles. Ugh.

Finally, after what seems like hours of soffeureeng, the summit. At this point we’ve been in increasing traffic (it’s Labor Day Weekend) for quite a few miles, and it’s a stinking two-lane road with shitty shoulders, and did I mention that it it’s HOT? Oh yes, hot. Plenty hot. But now it’s downhill all the way to Portola Road. Nothing to soffeur about except having a string of 15 SUV’s on my tail, and having to find a place where I can slow down and let them pass without getting run down in the process. About five times on the way down.

And when I got down to Portola Road, where there were no more mountains to climb before getting home, but my thighs were still cramping, it occurred to me that if there were a nice van or truck to pick us up and drive us home, that would have been fair. But there wasn’t.

So now it was just a few miles to home, over little wussy slopes no one would ever worry about, except that we were deep into soffeureeng by this time, and we hurt all the way home and it seemed to take hours. But at last I got home, drank a whole lot of liquids, I mean a whole lot, and lay down and went to sleep.

I lost six or seven pounds doing that.

Fast forward a few weeks, and the same friend (oh yes) is running his annual Ride Up Mount Hamilton, which he organizes for the benefit of his friends so they can all ride from about 400 feet to 4000, in 18.5 miles, then turn around and come down. Oh, and there are a couple of shortish descents on the way up, which become longish climbs on the way down.

By the way, this is a beautiful ride. I mean it. The mountain is wonderful and wild. At certain magical moments, you get your glimpses of the objective: the lovely domes of the Lick Observatory on the tippy-top of the mountain. Then they disappear again, to reappear if you endure a few more miles. I’ve seen deer, bobcats, tarantulas, and wild pigs by the road. The views out over the Santa Clara valley are gorgeous and terrifying, because you’re looking down off a vertical precipice with no shoulder and no guard rail, from a road built for mules to haul telescope pieces up to the observatory.

Anyway, by the time I hit the last five miles — where it actually gets steep — I was hurting again. I fell in with a young woman after helping her with a flat tire. Well, I thought she was young. It turned out she was 39, just fit and healthy. Well, 39 is still young compared to some of us. But we kept each other company up that relentless mountainside, and although at two miles from the top I felt like I was fixin to die, I made it without stopping.

On the way down I did have to stop twice, to uncrick my neck and massage the sole of my poor left foot which has some kind of problem with the pedal. But I enjoyed the descent nevertheless. Got to the bottom of the mountain and found all the folks who came down way faster than I did.

Getting my strength back is a long and arduous process. But I can’t afford not to do it.

My wife mentioned to me tonight that there are Americans who think we should not be celebrating this day in the traditional way. Namely, Indians who see the holiday as a celebration of the conquest of North America by Europeans. That’s certainly the implication of the way it’s taught about in the schools.

Well personally, I’m down with the Indians. Yet I celebrate Thanksgiving, which to me has nothing to do with the bogus story about Pilgrims inviting Indians over for lunch. I celebrate the Thanksgiving that Abe Lincoln declared, an occasion for giving thanks — for, well, what I have to be thankful for. So here goes.

First, I give thanks to the people in my life who have given me everything I have and everything I am. There are a lot of them, from family and friends all the way out, by way of teachers and colleagues, to living and dead writers and musicians and painters and playwrights and moviemakers and other artists.

I give thanks to my countries: The United States, where I have lived for most of my life and am a citizen; Costa Rica, the country of my birth and earliest childhood; Yugoslavia, the lost dream of a union of Slavs, where I spent an unforgettable year as a small child; Italy, where I roamed the city of Rome as a boy; and Brazil, where I spent the most exciting of my teenage years.

I am thankful for my colleges, Caltech and Reed, where I had the pure good fortune to get an education unlike anything I ever expected.

I am thankful to History, which has placed me in so many moments that I would not have missed for anything: the end of the Second World War, the Cold War, the Vietnam War and the struggle against it, the countercultural revolution of the 60′s, the dawn of personal computing and its first 25 years, and yes, the toxic, murderous, and slow (but accelerating) rise of the American Right, beginning with Reagan and still continuing. Who would want to miss these stories, including the scary ones?

Thank you California, my real homeland, most beautiful of American states, most diverse in people and ideas, most forward-thinking. Thank you, Nisei and Sansei Japanese-Americans, an astonishing culture into which I was lucky enough to marry.

Thanks Apple, for a quarter-century’s opportunity to contribute to the most vital and interesting part of the technological revolution.

Thanks to my bike, that simple subtle supple steel contraption that lets me fly the mountain roads, and my guitar, the wooden organism that gives me permission to sing.

There’s more…

David

The announcement by Google that they will begin digitizing and indexing the contents of the world’s great research libraries — a step in the direction of the “global virtual library” — inspired Andrew Leonard of Salon to think of Jorge Luís Borges’ wonderful story, “The Library of Babel.”

Leonard found the full text of the story on his first Google search (“Borges would be so proud,” says Leonard), at this url:

http://jubal.westnet.com/hyperdiscordia/library_of_babel.html

(His column is a good read, at http://www.salon.com/tech/col/leon/2004/12/14/google/ but Salon makes you jump through hoops unless you are a subscriber.)

Anyway, I was moved to produce the following summary using Mac OS X’s Summary Service:

There are five shelves for each of the hexagon’s walls; each shelf contains thirty-five books of uniform format; each book is of four hundred and ten pages; each page, of forty lines, each line, of some eighty letters which are black in color. There are also letters on the spine of each book; these letters do not indicate or prefigure what the pages will say. I know that this incoherence at one time seemed mysterious. Before summarizing the solution (whose discovery, in spite of its tragic projections, is perhaps the capital fact in history) I wish to recall a few axioms.
…
Five hundred years ago, the chief of an upper hexagon (2) came upon a book as confusing as the others, but which had nearly two pages of homogeneous lines. He showed his find to a wandering decoder who told him the lines were written in Portuguese; others said they were Yiddish. Within a century, the language was established: a Samoyedic Lithuanian dialect of Guarani, with classical Arabian inflections. The content was also deciphered: some notions of combinative analysis, illustrated with examples of variations with unlimited repetition. These examples made it possible for a librarian of genius to discover the fundamental law of the Library. This thinker observed that all the books, no matter how diverse they might be, are made up of the same elements: the space, the period, the comma, the twenty-two letters of the alphabet. He also alleged a fact which travelers have confirmed: In the vast Library there are no two identical books. From these two incontrovertible premises he deduced that the Library is total and that its shelves register all the possible combinations of the twenty-odd orthographical symbols (a number which, though extremely vast, is not infinite): Everything: the minutely detailed history of the future, the archangels’ autobiographies, the faithful catalogues of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of those catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of the true catalogue, the Gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary on that gospel, the commentary on the commentary on that gospel, the true story of your death, the translation of every book in all languages, the interpolations of every book in all books.

Footnote: What, you don’t know about Summary Service? It’s in the application menu of most well-written OS X applications, such as Safari. To try it out, use Safari to find a nice long scrolly web page that contains the text of a single long article. Select All, then go to the Safari menu and choose Services–>Summarize.

Try it, you’ll like it! David Pogue said this was his favorite OS X feature. Why does Apple keep it a secret? Of course, the Library of Babel also contains all possible summaries of every book, many of them generated by Summary Service.

OK, it’s Monday night after MacWorld. Other people who were there are writing about their thoughts on what they saw and heard. Me, I have to start off with my Upper Respiratory Tract Infection. See, you go hang out with thousands of people at close quarters Tuesday and Wednesday in January, you have a significant risk of showing up on Thursday with The Virus That’s Going Around. I did, for one.

It started eating on the back of my throat on the train to San Francisco, Thursday. It was getting worse, so I bailed out and went home again around 3:00. And that was the end of my MacWorld. Bleagh. Friday, Saturday and Sunday are just a blur of drugs and snot to me now. I thought I was gonna fall through my own backside and disappear.

But now it’s Monday night, and I’ve begun to feel approximately human again, so I can share a few thoughts.

………..

I’m on record in various venues as not believing the rumors of the Cheap Headless Mac and the Cheap Flash iPod. As my old man said, that’s why they put erasers on pencils.

I think Apple adjusted all the dials on the Mac Mini very, very carefully. It has enough good things — tiny size, cool running temperature, decent performance, nice price — to make it a real contender.

And it has just enough disadvantages — stingy memory, no user serviceability, modest performance — to keep it from cannibalizing the iMac sales. The rest is marketing, and if Apple does that well enough, I think they have a winner.

Why didn’t I believe the rumors? Well, I thought it was not in Apple’s DNA. I was wrong. Let’s move on.

I didn’t believe the flash iPod rumors because I was sure they couldn’t include a display at the price point they were aiming at, and the only theory I saw was a text-to-speech interface. I knew that would never fly.

So did Apple. Instead, they chopped through the Gordian Knot of “how do you select a song” by saying “You don’t have to!” It’s a stunning insight. If you only have a couple hundred songs, well hell, just play them all. In sequence, or shuffled.

Yeah, to make sense, the songs all have to be appropriate for what you’re doing when you start listening. So that means you have to set up the Shuffle for the next time you’re going to use it, using iTunes. I’m gonna work out, load the Shuffle. I’m gonna drive on a trip, load the Shuffle with something else. My wife would never do it, she hates to “spend time running iTunes.” My daughter won’t do it either, she wants to pick songs one at a time.

Me, I’ll have fun doing it. And I think there are a million other potential Shuffle users just like me.

But you know what really convinced me?

I was sure the price would have to be $149, and I didn’t think low level user would pay that much. When I watched the Stevenote and saw $99 on the big screen, I gasped. That’s the Magic Number. That’s Under A Hundred Bucks! For Eight Hours of Music Without Recharging the Battery!!!

Slam dunk.

I knew Jef at the time when he was starting the Macintosh project, but I never heard all that much about it from him. He had so many other things to talk about.

I had just started at Apple as a technical writer, and he had just turned the Tech Pubs department over to its new manager, Phyllis Cole. He maintained a strong interest in Apple’s publications, though, and was friendly with all the writers. He’d have us over to his house lunch, or he’d drop by our offices and hang out for a while. He was a very easy guy to get to know.

He was actively interested in so many things! He was a musician, and played a number of different instruments, including a pipe organ that he built himself. He built and flew radio-control model airplanes, and was always trying to figure out ways to incorporate digital logic into them — something that’s now becoming part of the off-the-shelf technology.

Jef loved innovation of every kind. He would show off his sprayed-foam roof to us writers, and his inductive cooktop. He was always writing. He wrote all kinds of stuff — articles about aerodynamics and model airplane design, about human interface issues, humor, travel stories, book reviews, you name it. To meet a large and remarkably diverse mind, check out his web site at

http://jef.raskincenter.org/home/index.html

Don’t miss his article about “Eating B’dang B’dang.” I mean it. And look at some of the other stuff too. It’s all great.

Yesterday I spent some time at Macworld, listening to Andy Herzfeld tell stories of the Old Days at Apple. Any time you get a chance to hear Andy tell stories, pull up a chair.

When they used to demo the Apple at Homebrew Computer Club meetings, the big attraction was Steve Wozniak’s beautiful Integer Basic interpreter, which ran rings around Microsoft Basic. However, Woz had not yet designed the tape-drive interface. There was no mass storage at all.

So that meant that before each meeting, Woz had to plug in the Apple ][ and type the interpreter into it. About 4K of machine code, all in hex of course. Now, he didn’t totally memorize it, though he got better and better. Still, some of it he was actually re-creating as he went along.

Now Woz could type at superhuman speed, especially in hex. But as he worked, the rattlerattlerattle of the keys was interrupted from time to time by a pause of several seconds with Woz staring at the keyboard, motionless. Then rattlerattlerattle some more, then another pause, and so forth. Finally someone asked him what the pauses were.

“Forward branch” said Woz. See, every time there was a forward branch in the code, he had to do the next few (or not so few) instructions in his head before he knew what offset to put in the forward branch instruction, then go ahead and type in the instructions he had just done in his head and continue from there.

I don’t think I could program that way.