January 1st, 2000
6:03 AM

Sitting in front of the television watching a rerun of an old M*A*S*H episode, the scene changes from Colonel Potter’s office to the CNN newsroom in Atlanta, Ga. Sitting behind the anchor desk is none other than Capt. “Hawkeye” Pierce dressed in Korean War-era army fatigues. Looking somber, Capt. Pierce reads from a paper he holds in his shaking hands. “This just in from the White House: President Clinton has just issued an alert to the citizens of the United States of America. The statement reads as follows:”

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A couple of you regular My Mac readers may have noticed that I’ve been absent from these pages over the past two months. For an excuse, I thought about telling you that I was on a secret assignment at the behest of our illustrious publisher, Tim Robertson, to discover once and for all who’s really behind this Y2K thing. But then I realized I would have to report my discoveries, which I don’t have. So I won’t tell you that.

A good excuse that I’m sure you would buy is that my real, feed the family, pay the bills job has kept me away from home more than usual and I’ve been unable to devote the amount of time it takes me to knock out one of these monthly meanderings. Entirely plausible, but not the truth.

I even thought about telling you that my iMac suffered a major discombobulation and has been in the shop for two months, but I’ve never heard of an iMac suffering any kind of discombobulation, let alone a major one, so I doubted anyone would believe that.

In the end, after realizing that I’m a very poor liar and that my readers deserve better, I’ve decided to come clean and tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. So here it is:

On October 1st, 1999, I was abducted by a pair of female aliens who transported me against my will to what I assume was their spacecraft parked on the far side of the moon. These two lady aliens probed my brain and poked my every body orifice with something that looked like a Roto-Rooter tool. The probe left me weak and kept me in a hallucinatory stupor for days or maybe even weeks. I’m not at all clear on the time frame.

During the whole time I was held captive the two aliens never spoke to me nor to each other. But somehow I knew their names. The tall one was Misty and the short one was Terrabelle. How strange is that?

When Misty and Terrabelle returned me to my home, I felt used and abused and very nauseous. My wife didn’t even miss me. She thought I had been away at work and only made the offhanded comment that I really should call home more often when I’m on the road. When I told her of my ordeal she listened very sympathetically, not saying a word till I finished. She then took my hands in hers and said, “You poor dear, that sounds terrible. Maybe you should go lay down for a couple of hours before you take me shopping.”

The nauseating feelings persisted for days afterwards until I finally hobbled into the doctor’s office and told him how I felt and what had happened to me at the hands of Misty and Terrabelle. I don’t think he believed my story, but he ran some test on me and said he would have the results the following day.

That next day the doctor called and informed me that I was eight weeks pregnant. Boy, was I surprised. So was the doctor. I mean how strange is that? Me, a guy, eight weeks pregnant! What the hell do I say to my wife?

Anyway, that’s not your problem. I just wanted you all to know the truth about why I’ve been missing from the pages of My Mac for two months in a row. I apologize for this but as you can see, it was beyond my control.

Now that I’m back I’ll try to recap some of what’s been going on in my little world of computing.

For one, Steve Jobs no longer calls me for advice or even just to say hello since I failed to return a dozen or so of his voice mails while I was away with Misty and Terrabelle. Now he won’t return my calls. Rather childish, don’t you think? Hey Steve! I was abducted, for crying out loud! I couldn’t get back to you. Don’t be such a crybaby and give me a call.

Bill and Melinda Gates tried to contact me before announcing their $1,000,000,000 donation to start the New Millennium Scholars Program for minorities. I wish I’d been around to take that call because I’d have advised them to hold off on the donation and first hear what Judge Jackson had to say in his Finding of Facts report. It looks now like Billy might be having to pay out large sums of money due to his monopoly. Unfortunately, it won’t be Monopoly money he pays out.

Two months of not checking my email resulted in a major mailbox overflow thanks mostly to those advertising spammers who keep sending their junk mail. Listen up, spammers: I will die before any of you gets one red cent from me for any of your stupid, unsolicited services and/or products. So get the hell out of my email!

I still haven’t found where to insert the floppy disks in my iMac. I’m beginning to think that the good people at Apple forgot to install a floppy drive in my box, but I’m still searching so don’t email me and tell me where it is, I want to find it on my own.

My wife has more or less forced me to quit using my iMac’s Speech Recognition capabilities, at least while she’s in the house. She complains that I talk to my “damn” computer more than I talk to her. So in order to regain the tranquility I desire at my keyboard I quit talking to both of them.

Shortly after returning from the moon I participated in my first online auction. Yep, I registered at eBay.com and put in my bid on a battery-operated fingernail clipper. The entire auction process was so exciting that it wasn’t until the high bid reached $982.50 that I noticed I was the only person bidding. Looking back, I think I may have overpaid for the item, but it was a fun experience.

While trucking on the east coast in September and playing catch-me-if-you-can with hurricane Dennis, I found my first truck stop that had a computer room available for public use. It was a Petro truck stop in New Jersey. It was nice to see the trucking industry finally coming around to meet the cyberspace requirements of the over-the-road trucker. Unfortunately, I did not see one Mac in this otherwise pleasant room. I would have gone in and given the tech on duty a hard time about his Macless computer room, but I wanted to beat the bus load of old people coming through the front door to the buffet line.

On my way back from the east coast I took a day off in Memphis and spent it visiting Elvis Presley’s humble abode, Graceland. While walking through his house I couldn’t help but notice that the man didn’t own a computer. Thirteen televisions–but not one computer. Elvis would have liked computers as he was a gadget kind of guy and I’m sure he would have chosen the Macintosh. I tried to interview Elvis about this when I noticed him scurrying about in his front yard disguised as a squirrel, but he declined my interview.

With the 500 Mhz processors out now, one must ask, how fast is too fast? I figured out the answer to this question so you wouldn’t have to. The answer is: 1,587,232 Mhz. Anything beyond this speed will reverse the polarity in the processor chip and cause disruptions in the continuity of the throughput path resulting in a significant slowdown, if not reversal, of the chips processability.

With newer and faster processors hitting the market every few months I decided to be the first on my block to upgrade my 266/G3 iMac to the as yet un-released 866/G5 chip. No one believed I could do this but I made it so by simply changing the information in the hardware overview in my system profiler. Piece of cake!

That’s all I know this month. Have a Merry Christmas, and if the world don’t end on Jan. 1st have a Happy New Year also.

Pete Miner
pete@mymac.com

Continued from the September issue

Pete’s excuse:
[I apologize for missing last month's issue, especially since my most recent columns have been linked together as a continuing story. I know it was very un-cool on my part to take a month off right in the middle of an ongoing saga, but such can be the life of a truck driver. However, I place all blame for my absence on the Canadian Government and its inability or unwillingness to bolster its own dollar. You see it's..., well, it's a long story is what it is, so you'll just have to take my word for it that the Canadian dollar is the reason I have been unable to spend much time at home, let alone work on my column. A PowerBook would solve this problem of mine, and in fact I am about to purchase one. Unfortunately, it will be going to my daughter who is away at college and "just has to have one!"

Anyway, for those of you who still remember where I left off in September, here is the final installment of "2019".]

Monitoring Site #7243

While Stan and Emily were monitoring ship traffic on the third floor of Monitoring Site #7243, someone else was monitoring air traffic on the fourth floor. The second floor was responsible for monitoring railroad traffic and the people on the first floor were keeping an eye on the ‘truck only’ highways crisscrossing their respective grids. A small part of the fifth floor housed the supervisors who randomly monitored the monitoring going on below them and theoretically took charge when something went wrong. (I say theoretically because nothing has ever gone wrong with the system since the first few days following the system’s startup in 2009.) The remainder of the fifth floor is dedicated to off-planet monitoring. These people watch over the thousands of global positioning, communications, and weather satellites circling the Earth. These satellites choreograph and maintain the even flow of all commercial traffic moving about the planet below them.

Stan and Emily’s workday consisted of six boring hours of watching their monitoring screens as small diamond-shaped blips entered, moved across and then either exited the screen or pulled into a dock of one of the harbors in their grid. When a blip first enters your grid you are required to identify the vessel, noting time of day the vessel entered your grid and its present speed, and then verify its course and destination. This information is available by touching a stylus to a five digit code that is projected on the screen below the diamond blip. Doing this brings up a full screen, real time, color closeup satellite image of the vessel, displaying all its pertinent information.

All monitoring people are required to notify their supervisor if they detect a deviation of more than one half of one degree in a vessel’s automated course. In all the years since being assigned to the third floor of Monitoring Site #7243, Stan and Emily had never once had to notify their supervisor, nor had they ever heard of anyone else having to do so. Nothing had ever gone wrong.

Stan had not adapted well to his obviously unnecessary job. He considered it nothing more than a B.G. Enterprise/NWG sponsored ‘make work’ program designed to create employment for the millions of people whose jobs had been taken over by the more efficient, more productive robotic technology that Bill Gates and company had perfected and were continuing to introduce into nearly every aspect of their ongoing global techno-industrialization.

Stan had once told his wife, “Our jobs are as unimportant as it is for us to sit and watch the grass grow in our backyard.” When Emily had answered with a look of puzzlement, Stan clarified by saying, “At least with the grass, we get to make the decision at some point that it needs to be mowed.” Emily agreed that their jobs could not be described as intellectually challenging.

Today, sitting in front of their assigned monitors, Stan and Emily went through the identification and verification procedure for each vessel in their grid as was required at the start of every new shift. Emily presently had six blips on her screen and Stan had eleven. Emily finished her identifications first and sat back quietly waiting for Stan to finish his. When her husband sat back in his chair, Emily smiled and said, “Here we go again, another day, another purchasing unit.” Stan smiled, but Emily knew he was not amused. She knew he hated coming here four days a week. But if they wanted to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table, they didn’t have a choice. The NWG assigned you a job; you didn’t get to choose one.

Embedded Chip facility-Livermore, Ca.

At the same time Stan and Emily were preparing for another long day of boredom at Monitoring Site #7243 on the banks of the Hudson River, a man named Steve Jobs was racing his fingers over a keyboard at the main input terminal of the Embedded Chip production facility in Livermore, California. Jobs was sending new, overriding data via satellite to a number of embedded navigational systems around the globe–something that was not supposed to be possible. The data he was inputting would, when initialized, send the B.G. Enterprise transportation industry into chaos and turmoil. Jobs was grinning as he worked the keyboard, thinking of his boss Bill Gates and what his reaction would be when he saw his flawless global distribution network fall apart right before his eyes. “It’s payback time, Billy!” Jobs muttered to himself.

It was Steve Jobs along with a secret team of his brightest technicians from the now defunct Apple Computer Company that had designed and developed this new generation of removable and re-programmable embedded chip technology. The term ‘embedded chip’ was actually a misnomer, since the chips were easily removed and attached onto any of the self-running systems in use at the time. But the term remained, mainly because no one had thought to change it. Jobs and his team had initially designed this new chip to neutralize the effects of the Y2K bug that had threatened to wreak havoc around the globe at the turn of the millennium. And in fact, had the chip been made available to the world in mid-1999 as Jobs had planned, it would have greatly reduced the resulting catastrophic effects of what actually did happen in the year 2000, now commonly referred to as “The Dark Year.”

Although his new chip had been finished and readied for mass distribution in ample time to eliminate the majority of the foreseen computer problems that were predicted to pop up when the calendar jumped from 1999 to 2000, Steve Jobs and company were faced with one last hurdle that prevented them from releasing the new chips in time to do any good. That hurdle was named Bill Gates.

As founder and CEO of a company called Microsoft, Bill Gates had also been developing a Y2K chip at the time. Although his company’s chip was plagued with so many bugs and glitches that it wouldn’t have seen mass production and distribution until the summer or fall of 2000, Gates wasn’t about to miss out on the windfall profits that would go to the first company that provided a solution for the Y2K dilemma.

Not being accustomed to finishing second in any of his endeavors and unable to persuade Steve Jobs to abandon Apple and come to work for Microsoft, Bill Gates accused Jobs and his company of stealing hundreds of thousands of lines of proprietary code from Microsoft, allowing Apple to unfairly surge ahead in the race to be the first company to provide a solution to the Y2K problem.

Although Gates’ allegations were totally false, they were enough to put a halt to the timely release of Apple’s chip.

While the legal battles raged on in the halls of the slow moving American judicial system, the first day of the new millennium came and went, bringing with it the reality of what many had feared. Power supply stations shut down, bank records were lost or deleted, airplanes and trains quit running due to a perceived lack of maintenance, people depending on government social security checks were sent computer generated letters telling them they were either dead or not even born yet, and numerous other malfunctions occurred within the computerized infrastructure of the world. And nearly all of this could have been avoided had Steve Jobs been allowed to distribute his Y2K chip as planned.

By the time the suits and counter suits between Microsoft and Apple had been settled, the devastating impact of the millennium bug had already been felt throughout the world. Governments, banks, and businesses coped with the problem by reverting to manual record keeping. Power stations and other manufacturing plants were slowly brought back on-line under manual operation, effectively slowing the economies of the world to a crawl.

In July of 2000 Bill Gates had finally succeeded in getting his company’s Y2K chip up and running, and in a surprise move dropped all litigations against Apple and its CEO. By using the vast public relations and propaganda machine of Microsoft, Gates was able to convince the computing masses that it was Steve Jobs and not him that was responsible for delaying the timely release of a Y2K solution. The world responded by beating a path to Microsoft’s door to purchase his working, although technically inferior, Y2K chip.

Microsoft enjoyed record profits from the sale of its chip and the world slowly returned to its pre-year 2000 computerized state.

After the Y2K debacle, Steve Jobs swore he would do whatever it took to topple the ever expanding empire of Microsoft and its self-appointed king, even if it took him the rest of his life. He made this promise privately, to himself.

Publicly, Jobs acknowledged his defeat at the hands of the Microsoft tycoon, but promised the Apple stockholders that he and his team of developers would be back to unveil a new generation of computer chip that would make the profits that Microsoft reaped from the Y2K chip look like chump change. However, this was not enough to keep him–for the second time in his life–from being removed as the CEO of Apple Computer Inc.

Shaken by his company’s vote of no confidence, Jobs humbly relinquished his CEO position but remained working for Apple so that he and his team could continue their work on the development of what would latter become known as the monitoring chip. This chip would become the single largest breakthrough in the computer world since transistors took the place of vacuum tubes.

Over the next several years Bill Gates went on a buying spree the likes of which had never been seen before. He started in the communications industry, buying out every major radio and television station he could get his hands on. He then moved into the manufacturing, construction, and transportation industries. Towards the end of the first decade of the 21st century the conglomeration of B.G. Enterprise had become so big and so powerful that it was taking over whole government agencies such as NASA, the U.S. Postal Service, Department of Energy, Department of Transportation, and even the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Gates accomplished all of this by turning each and every buyout into a more efficient and profitable entity than it had been previously. When he encountered resistance from the political or judicial fronts, he offered incentives that couldn’t be refused.

Well on his way to controlling the entire economy of the world, Bill Gates still lacked the one thing he needed and wanted most: the monitoring chip that he knew his old nemesis Steve Jobs had developed and was still perfecting but was stubbornly refusing to sell. Gates had made several attempts at producing his own chip but could never attain the 100% degree of reliability or accuracy that was needed for such an integral piece of his global computerization plan. He had to have the chip Jobs developed, and the only way he was going to accomplish that would be to persuade the stockholders of Apple that unless they accepted his generous offer of 10 times what their stock was worth he would crush their company and they would end up with nothing. His threat worked and Steve Jobs surprisingly put up very little resistance, asking only that he be allowed to remain in charge of the monitoring chip. Gates readily agreed and gave Jobs free rein over every aspect of the chip, a move he would later come to regret.

In the years leading up to 2019, Bill Gates found more and more uses for this seemingly self-evolving monitoring chip that Steve Jobs was constantly perfecting. Once the monitoring chip had turned his whole global conglomeration of businesses into the smoothly run, highly profitable entity of B.G. Enterprise, Gates focused the power of the chip towards the human population of the world, thinking he could make life better for all by controlling the actions of his fellow man. This idea of his turned the monitoring chip into, The ‘Monitoring’ Chip. It controlled and monitored the world’s population. Maybe not as intrusively, but just as effectively as Big Brother as envisioned by George Orwell in his “1984″.

Monitoring Site #7243

Two hours into their shift, Stan asked his wife to keep an eye on his screen while he went to the bathroom. When he returned he noticed an additional blip had entered into his grid. He brought up the profile of this new blip and was surprised to see that it was a natural gas tanker and that its auto-plotted course showed its destination as New York Harbor.

“This is strange,” he commented to his wife.

“What’s strange?” Emily asked.

“I’ve got a natural gas tanker headed right into NY harbor.”

“New York doesn’t have any facilities for tankers, Stan.”

“I know. That’s what makes it strange.”

“Maybe you better call a supervisor, Stan.”

“No. I don’t think so. Our job is to track and monitor these ships and only report when a ship deviates from its stated automated course. The stated automated course for this lost puppy is New York Harbor, I’m just going to watch it and see what it does when it gets there.”

Over the next several hours other anomalies began popping up on screens at Monitoring Sites all over the world. Third floor monitors were seeing hundreds, if not thousands of ocean going vessels being diverted to ports that were not equipped to handle the type of cargo that the vessel carried. Passenger cruise ships were arriving at freight unloading docks, while cargo laden ships were running aground in the shallow waters of beach resorts. Some unmanned vessels were just shutting down in the middle of the oceans and automatically flooding their own holds until they sank. But in every instance, the auto-plotted courses of these vessels, when checked, revealed that the ships were following the exact instructions entered into their self-navigational computers.

Things were looking even worse on the fourth floors of the Monitoring Sites where the monitoring of air traffic took place. Passenger airlines were landing at wrong airports all over the globe. Unmanned cargo carrying airplanes were staying aloft, cruising in circles until they ran out of fuel and then falling out of the skies crashing into oceans, deserts, and other uninhabited regions. Again, when their auto-plotted courses were checked it showed that the aircraft were doing exactly what they were programmed to do.

Like disasters were also occurring on the ground with the railroads and commercial truck traffic.

As word of these strange occurrences spread throughout the Monitoring Sites, it was learned that only the fifth floor monitoring of off planet vessels had gone unaffected. Satellites and spacecraft seemed to be operating normally.

Although thought to be impossible, it was beginning to look like a major attempt at sabotage was underway against the transportation industries of B.G. Enterprise. Not having a standard protocol or procedure to follow for such an occurrence, word of the ongoing disaster was slow to reach the hierarchy of B.G. Enterprise.

When Bill Gates was finally briefed on the situation later that evening, he phoned up Steve Jobs and ordered him to pull the plugs and shut down all navigational and communications satellites that controlled every moving vehicle on the planet. Jobs informed his boss that doing this would cause every aircraft that was presently in the air to fall out of the sky and crash. Gates told him, “Just do it!”

“No way,” Jobs told his boss. “Give me an hour and I can at least bring all the passenger planes down safely before shutting everything else down.”

“How is that possible, Jobs? Those planes are preprogrammed before they take off. You can’t access those onboard chips.”

“Just give me one hour,” Jobs said.

“What are you keeping from me, Jobs?”

“One hour. Bye!”

Steve knew he had just given his boss reason to suspect that he was the one behind this catastrophe by inferring that he could access and reprogram the onboard chips in the navigational systems–something that was not supposed to be possible. All navigational systems aboard every moving vehicle that used the embedded chip technology that Steve Jobs developed for B.G. Enterprise was supposed to be tamper-proof. And they were tamper-proof. That is, by anyone other than Jobs himself.

When designing the new chips, Jobs wanted them to have complete override capability, allowing changes to be made to the preprogrammed instructions on the chips. But Gates was against the idea, saying it would open the door to saboteurs and computer hackers, so he forbade Jobs to add that enhancement to his design. Steve Jobs knew that the real reason his boss wanted a closed, inaccessible monitoring chip was so he could have total control over the chips functionality, something Jobs wasn’t about to give to one man. So Jobs went ahead and secretly added the interactive capability to the chips anyway. He accomplished this by coating each chip with a silicon and copper-based paste he called silicop. He told everyone the paste was a sealant to protect the chips from dust and moisture, which in fact it did. But the silicop paste also contained microscopic filaments which were highly conductive. These filaments, when electronically excited in a certain way, could be aligned to carry overriding instructions that would bypass the chips original programming and receive and initiate new data via a satellite link. Jobs was the only person who knew how to do this and he used this knowledge as his ace in the hole, to be used against Bill Gates and his empire at the time of his choosing. That time was now.

Steve Jobs finished his instructions that would safely land all passenger carrying airliners. When the last plane was on the ground he commenced shutting down monitoring systems around the globe. Not just the communications and navigational chips that operated the transportation industry as Gates had ordered, but every monitoring chip in every B.G. Enterprise computer system around the world.

“Let’s see you explain this to the world, Billy boy,” Jobs said, as he gathered up all the data and codes needed to undo what he had just done and left his office for the last time. He would go underground and watch the unravelling of Bill Gates and company from afar.

Pete Miner
pete@mymac.com

Websites mentioned:

http://www.wolfenet.com/~pminer

The year 2000 computer bug. Commonly referred to as Y2K, the year 2000 problem, the millennium bug or just plain ol’ Oops! We all have a pretty good idea what it is and what kind potential it has for wreaking havoc upon humanity. But aren’t you getting tired of listening to all the hype associated with this little bugger? It wouldn’t be so bad if everyone agreed on just what exactly will happen at midnight on Dec. 31st, 1999, but nobody does. Ask ten different computer experts what’s going to happen and you’ll get ten different answers ranging from, “Not much,” to, “It’s hard to say” to “The total breakdown of civilization as we know it.”

With such wide ranging possibilities lurking over the horizon, I’ve concluded that no one really knows what the hell’s gonna happen in January, at least not when talking about our banking institutions, power plant companies, sewage treatment plants, transportation and distribution industries, satellite and communications, nuclear missile launch sites, etc., so I’ve decided to leave the discussion of those dry, unimportant topics to the experts and focus my energies on things that really matter to all of us.

I’ve done extensive research on the compliancy issues of Y2K on a number of items that I feel the ‘experts’ have overlooked and I’m happy to share my findings with you, my dear reader. I think it’s safe to say that nowhere else on earth will you find the following information:

I told you last month I was going to tinker with my iMac’s Speech Recognition and try getting more out of it than Apple intended for me to have. So tinker with it I did. And although I got mixed results from my initial tinkering, I am convinced this Speech Recognition software can do a lot more than Apple would have us believe.

Using ResEdit 2.1.3, I plunged deep into the bowels of the Speech Recognition and Speakable Items resources to get a general overview of how Apple programmed this software to react to spoken commands. It was a tad more complicated than I had expected, but with a little perseverance I was able to track down the specific string of code that prevents Apple’s Speech Recognition and Speakable Items from operating outside the Macintosh environment. I found the code string I was looking for inside the Speech Recognition extension. The computer reads the code string and interprets it as:

Even a novice computer geek like me could see that this code interpretation is what prevents the Speakable Items commands from working anywhere other than inside the host computer. Once I figured that out, it was a simple matter of tweaking the code string in order to get the software to do my bidding, not Apple’s.

After long tedious hours of recoding I came up with the following interpretation:

A close observer should be able to read the changes I made in the code. Hint: The ‘X’ characters have been replaced with my new instructions.

Being the careful re-programmer that I am, I made my changes on a copy of the extension, not the original. I set the original aside in case my new extension didn’t work. I saved my changes, put the new extension in the Extensions folder, and restarted the iMac.

I have my Speech Recognition preferences set to launch at startup using the Victoria, high quality voice and to only respond to my voice commands when I preface them with Hey, Guinevere. (Don’t ask!)

I had a normal restart. Nothing froze or crashed. I decided to begin slowly, giving my new souped up gofer a few simple commands.

“Hey, Guinevere, open SimpleText.”

Zap! SimpleText opened.

“Hey, Guinevere, quit this application.”

Bingo, SimpleText quit.

I did the same with a few other applications and the Speech Recognition software dutifully carried out my commands. Then I moved on to more substantial commands.

“Hey, Guinevere, find King Arthur.”

I expected nothing to happen when I gave this command, as it was not in the Speakable Items list. Boy, was I surprised when my Remote Access panel opened up and my modem began dialing my ISP. A minute later I had a list of 122 websites containing the name King Arthur. Guinevere knew exactly where to find her husband! Although impressive, I was looking for more than a turbocharged Sherlock.

While contemplating my next unorthodox command, I noticed the trash can at the bottom right corner of my screen was full and without thinking I said, “Hey, Guinevere, empty the trash.”

Nothing happened. At least nothing happened on my screen. But I did hear a loud noise coming from downstairs–in the kitchen I guessed–and then I heard my wife screaming. I ran down the stairs, through the hall, around the corner and practically knocked my wife over as she was racing out of the kitchen. “What’s wrong?” I gasped.

“In there! In the kitchen,” she yelled, pointing behind her.

I ran into the kitchen expecting to find some crazed psychopathic killer wielding a butcher knife or something. What I found was a kitchen floor strewn with garbage and the trash bin turned upside down and standing on its lid right in the middle of all the trash. No crazed psychopathic killer wielding a butcher knife in sight. That was somewhat of a relief!

I began picking up the garbage and called my wife back into the kitchen to explain to me what happened. She told me she was putting away the last of the dinner dishes when the trash bin just floated into the air, turned upside down and spilled all its contents on the floor. “Honest to God honey, that’s what happened! I know it sounds impossible but that’s exactly what happened! You’ve got to believe me!”

“Oh I believe you all right, hon. In fact, you’ll probably want to kill me when I tell you I’m responsible for this happening. Actually it was Guinevere who did it, but I told her, too.”

“WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?” My wife screamed at me.

I explained to her the little project I was working on and pointed out there were still a few bugs I needed to iron out. “Not a big deal, hon, I just have to be a little more careful about what I tell Guinevere to do.”

I went back upstairs not fully convinced my wife believed me. She decided to go visit one of our daughters for a couple of hours. “Don’t burn the house down while I’m gone,” she told me as she was walking out the door. Home alone, I continued working with Guinevere.

“Hey, Guinevere, empty YOUR trash, please.” The trash can on the desktop emptied and the kitchen downstairs remained quiet. So, she wants me to be specific. I can do that.

“Hey, Guinevere, turn off all the lights in the house.”

Bam! The house went dark. She even put the iMac’s computer screen to sleep. This is so cool! I thought.

“Hey, Guinevere, turn on all the lights in the house.”

Zing! Instant daylight.

“We’re cooking now,” I said to no one. I got up, went into the bedroom and pulled the covers and sheets off our bed and tossed them on the floor. I returned to the iMac and said, “Hey, Guinevere, make my bed.” I waited a few seconds and then peeked into the bedroom. Nothing was happening in there, but I did hear pots and pans rattling downstairs in the kitchen. Another glitch in Guinevere’s recognition capabilities? Maybe I spoke too quickly. I tried again. “Hey, Guinevere, MAKE MY BED.” Another glance into the bedroom… Nothing. The noise downstairs continued though, and I was afraid to go look, but figured I’d better.

When I entered the kitchen, the counter top was strewn with mixing bowls, cooking utensils and a heavy dusting of flour. I opened the oven door and saw three loaf pans of bread dough inside. Guinevere must have mistook my, “MAKE MY BED” command and recognized it as “BAKE SOME BREAD.” Oh boy!

As you can see I’m experiencing a little glitchiness in this tampered with, souped up Apple Speech Recognition software of mine, but I’m not yet discouraged. I still think I can get Lady Guinevere to do my bidding and have her performing all sorts of mundane household chores.

Once I accomplish this I plan to install the new software into a PowerBook and take it on the road with me. I can’t wait for the day when I drive my truck into the Fremont, California Toyota plant on a day when the temperature hovers around 100° and all my trucker buddies are sweating like pigs as they load their trucks. I can just whip out my PowerBook and simply say. “Hey, Guinevere, load my truck.” And as I sit inside my air conditioned cab playing Solitaire on the PowerBook, I’ll be the envy of the trucking industry while Guinevere loads and secures nine Toyota pickup trucks on my car hauler.

Hey! It could happen!

Pete Miner
pete@mymac.com

Help me! Help me! I’ve fallen behind and I can’t catch up! That’s how I feel now that I have this new iMac.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not the iMac itself that has me in the slow lane of the learning curve. Heck, your everyday tree stump could easily set up the machine and be surfin’ the Net in a matter of minutes, just like Apple advertises. Not sure why a tree stump would want to do this, but it certainly could if it so desired.

Neither did I have insurmountable problems connecting a new Epson printer and a new Epson scanner to the iMac. Connecting was a breeze. USB is a breeze. Tree stump simple, in fact. Learning how to configure and use the printer and scanner will, of course, take some time and self-education on my part, especially if I can’t find the time to read the manuals.

I did, however, let my ignorance show through when I purchased these two peripheral devices at the CompUSA store in Portland, Oregon. I told the salesman that I would also need to purchase a USB hub to connect these two devices to my iMac. The salesman asked me what else I had connected to the machine.

“Just the keyboard,” I told him.

“Then you don’t need a hub,” he informed me.

At this point I assumed my salesman had undoubtedly flunked his arithmetic classes because even I knew the iMac only came with two USB receptacles in the side of its belly. And if one was being used for the keyboard, that only left one available for the two devices I was purchasing. When I pointed this out to him, he just smiled and asked, “How many mice are you running?”

“Huh? Just the one,” I answered, perplexed.

“So use the empty USB port on the keyboard for one of the devices,” he told me.

Boy did I feel stupid! I didn’t know I could do that. I thought that extra port on the keyboard was only good for switching between left-handed and right-handed mouse users. I didn’t reveal my stupidity to the salesman, though. What I said to him was, “Oh yeah, I forgot about that one.”

I’ll still need a USB hub at some point in the future should I decide to go on another shopping spree for my iMac. But for now I have more than I can handle trying to educate myself and get up to speed with all the new gadgetry and software staring me in the face since this iMac showed up on my doorstep.

For example, this is the first extended keyboard I’ve ever had. It took me five years to get comfortable with my old keyboard, and now I think my fingers are getting worried wondering what all those F-keys are about stretched across the top of my number keys. I’m told that I can now take full advantage of my QuicKeys™ software because of those F-keys up there, but in order to do that I would have to think up things for those F-keys to do and then figure out how to get ‘em to do it. Too much to learn, so little time.

Also, jumping from 7.5.5 to 8.5.1 (which as of last week became 8.6) has got me playing catch up to you already familiar 8 point X’ers.

Sherlock this, Sherlock that, Sherlock Holmes! A cool thing this Sherlock, with all of its plug-ins and added Find capabilities. But I know if I don’t study up on it and learn all of these added Find capabilities I won’t be able to take full advantage of this investigator. And where am I gonna find the time to do that? I was hoping 8.6 would come with an ExtraTime folder that I could go to whenever I wanted to self-teach myself on the new inner workings of this system without spending any of my own actual real time. But no such luck. I couldn’t even find a FewSpareMinutes folder. And don’t think Apple’s QuickTime inventions will save you any time. No sir, you get caught up watching those QuickTime movies and before you know it, you’re out of time and haven’t learned a darn thing.

Desktop Patterns has become the Appearance Manager and has given us a multitude of ways we can personalize our Macs. My problem is that I spend way so much time creating my own Desktop pictures to display up on my screen that by the time I’m satisfied with the way my Desktop looks, I’ve run out of time to do the important stuff that I sat down at the computer to do in the first place, like recording all my business expenses for the month or writing an article for this magazine so I can get it in on time, or answering my email. Too much to learn, so little time.

Just when I started getting comfortable with the iMac and the newness began wearing off, I realized that now with 8.6 I could take advantage of Apple’s Speech Recognition because they finally upgraded the software to make it compatible with the iMac. How much time will I waste playing with this little novelty item? A bunch, I’m afraid, as the lure of sending vocal commands to an inanimate object and having it respond to my every whim is overwhelming. I’m already deep into it and am contemplating using ResEdit to tweak the program beyond novelty status. After all, how difficult could it be to change the Speakable Item, “Clean up Desktop” to let’s say, “Clean up kitchen,” or better yet, “Clean up garage.” Instead of “Change View to List,” why not “Change the oil in the car” or “Change the baby’s diaper.” “Open SimpleText” could become, “Open a can of tuna fish,” or maybe even “Open and bring me a beer.”

I see limitless possibilities where Apple fell short with this Speech Recognition of theirs. I figure by changing a few lines of code with ResEdit I can have this iMac cooking my meals, washing and waxing the car, doing the laundry, taking out the trash (my real trash, not just its own binary trash), washing the dishes, vacuuming the floors, making the beds, etc. My wife will love me! It’ll be like having her own maid, butler, and valet rolled into one handsome looking blueberry iMac. This, of course will allow her more time to drag me to the mall, to an opera, to a symphony, to… hey, wait a minute! Maybe I’d better rethink this. I could end up ResEditing myself right into a corner I don’t want to be in!

What else can I tell you about my new iMac? Oh yeah, removing the guts from my iMac in order to install more RAM was a bit more difficult than I remember it being on my old Performa 550. Especially for someone like me who is more comfortable working with large pipe wrenches, pry bars, and sledge hammers. But by carefully following the step-by-step instructions I was able to get it all apart, install a 128MB memory chip and put it all back together without having a single part left over. Steve Jobs, the father of the iMac, would be proud of me! [Note: I would not advise the average tree stump or fence post to attempt this procedure.]

I was a tad disappointed with the chintzy CD-ROM tray that comes with the iMac, mainly because it sometimes wouldn’t latch properly when closing. I’d heard others complain about this same thing and figured it was just an inherent bug in the design of the box. But as so often is the case I was wrong and found out there is a simple quick fix for this problem. A mere resetting of the tray locking mechanism is all that’s needed to insure that your CD-ROM tray door closes and latches each and every time you push it shut. The only tool required for this procedure is none other than the ever versatile, Apple certified and approved, paper clip.

Normally I don’t write anything on this page of mine that can be of any use to anyone, but I was so glad to get my iMac CD tray to close properly that I thought maybe some of you iMac owners having this same annoying problem might like to know how to fix it. So I took a picture of the bottom of my iMac’s CD-ROM tray door while the iMac was laying on its side. Now I’m gonna tell you how to fix it.

What you first need to do is get your iMac to roll over on its side. If verbal commands fail to get the iMac moving you may have to do it manually. Oh yeah, you might want to shut the computer off and maybe even pull the plug on the little bugger. This done, locate the little white plastic nipple, or Locking Mechanism, that I have so artistically pointed out for you on my photo above. Yeah, yeah, I know I misspelled Mechanism in the photo but you’ll just have to live with it cause I ain’t goin’ back to redo it.

If your CD-ROM tray door isn’t locking properly, then your nipple may be positioned more forward than the one shown here; that is, further to the right. (You see I already fixed my nipple and I wasn’t gonna unfix it just to show you how to fix yours.) Next, you simply take that paper clip of yours and position it like the one above. Carefully push the nipple (aka Locking Mechanism) with the paper clip towards the front of the CD-ROM tray door, applying no more than .025 foot pounds of lateral torque. Maintain this pressure until you hear the Locking Mechanism (aka little white nipple) click. If this is getting too technical for you then forget what I said about that torque pressure cause I just made that part up anyway. All you need to do is reset that lock mechanism back a notch and your CD-ROM tray door will close and stay closed each and every time from now on.

Okay, now. “Get up iMac. Come on, boy! Get up!” If this don’t work you may have to do it manually.

That’s about it for now. I’m still learning all the neat stuff this iMac can do and how much faster than my old whatchamacallit it can do it. (How quickly we forget our old friends, huh?) The main thing is that I’m having a blast learning about this new machine and putting it through its paces.

There is one major problem I’m having with the iMac. At least I think it’s a major problem, but maybe I’m just looking in the wrong place for it. I’m almost embarrassed to mention it, but I’ve taken this machine apart three times and can’t seem to find the floppy disk drive. I know it’s in here someplace and I’m sure I’ll kick myself when I find it, but you’d think Apple would put it in a more obvious spot. Now all you iMac users don’t bother emailing me to tell me where it is, that would just make me feel dumber than I already do. Give me another month and I’m sure I’ll find it. I know I will!

Pete Miner
pete@mymac.com

The iMacButton
Company: Joseph C. Lee Company
Price: $9.95
http://www.iMacButton.com

Normally, I don’t write reviews. I told the owner of this magazine that I’d rather not write reviews. I’m afraid to write reviews for fear that I might overlook an essential aspect of the product or write an embarrassing bogus report regarding said item, and I don’t want–nor need–that kind of pressure. Besides, there are far more talented and competent writers on this staff who already do a superb job at reviewing stuff. But apparently my editor thought I could handle this one because he had the item mailed to my house. I’m assuming it’s because I have an iMac and the item in question is applicable only to the iMac. So here goes.

Button, button, who’s got the button? The Joseph C. Lee Company of Fresno Ca., that’s who’s got it.

They call it the iMacButton, and instead of Think Different, they took the slogan Reset Different. What this simple invention does is take the place of your old paper clip or push pin that you can never find when your iMac decides to go into a hard freeze and must be reset.

Best of all, the button attaches itself over the reset hole and just sits there at the ready, waiting to be pushed whenever that inevitable hard freeze comes along. No more searching for paper clips and no more dragging out your troubleshooting manual because you forgot which hole to stick the paper clip into. (Just below the reset hole on the iMac is the programmer’s interrupt switch hole. You don’t want to be sticking no paper clip into the programmers interrupt switchhole by mistake because there’s no telling what kind of trouble that could get you into!) With the iMacButton installed you can’t make that mistake, assuming you install it in the proper hole to begin with, which is a no-brainer. Can everyone say, “Top Hole!” If that’s too difficult, let me draw you a picture.

This is what the iMacButton looks like just hanging around waiting to be installed on somebody’s iMac.

This is what the iMacButton looks like after you’ve installed it.

Doesn’t look like much, does it? Of course, the wheel didn’t look like much either till somebody found a use for it and put chrome spokes on it.

Although not quite as big a breakthrough as the wheel, the iMacButton does serve a very practical purpose. It’ll restart your computer at the push of a button–pun intended–when all your keyboard commands and power button-pushing leaves you high and dry with a frozen screen.

This is one of those gadgets you’ll never think about until your screen freezes and you go searching for the paper clip, magnifying glass, and flashlight so you can find that damn little reset hole in amongst all your modem, Ethernet, and USB cables plugged into the iMac motherboard. When that happens you’ll ask yourself, Why did Apple make this so damn difficult to reset?

Apparently the folks at the Joseph C. Lee Company thought the same thing, except, unlike you or me, they did something about it.

This little gizmo is so simplistic in its design and application that one wonders why Apple didn’t integrate a simular mechanism into the iMac from the get-go. My guess is that the engineers at Apple get a kick out of soothing peoples fears about being electrocuted after they tell them to stick a metal object into a socket on a hot computer.

The only drawback I can see with this add-on button is that should you ever decide to add more RAM or remove the motherboard for any reason, you must remove iMacButton because it willhang up on the iMac case when sliding the motherboard out. The Joseph C. Lee Company will be happy to provide free replacement adhesive pads upon request when a self-addressed stamped envelope is sent in. I would only make the suggestion that they send along a spare pad or two with the original order.

Aside from that, the iMacButton is a bright, innovative idea from the folks at the Joseph C. Lee Company. And their website promises more innovative ideas to come in the future.

If you run a lot of freezing, crashing, beta software on your iMac, or if you just find it repulsive to be sticking paper clips or other sharp pointed objects into the side of your new iMac, then this button will save you both time and aggravation, and is well worth the sawbuck the company is asking.

To get more detailed information about this product and for ordering, visit their webpage at: http://www.iMacButton.com

MacMice Rating: 4

Pete Miner
pete@mymac.com

Websites mentioned:
http://www.iMacButton.com

No, I’m not celebrating my fiftieth birthday, although that day is sneaking up on me so fast that I’m afraid to look over my shoulder for fear it will be closer than I expect it to be. Nope, “The Big Five-0″ is the 50th issue of My Mac Magazine.

So to celebrate and bookmark this milestone event in literary history, the powers-that-be around this cyber office have asked me–an overworked, underpaid, and literary-challenged poor excuse of a writer–along with the rest of the more knowledgeable staff of this magazine, to pen a few words about what it’s like to be a writer and why we chose to write about the Macintosh.

Speaking for myself, I haven’t a clue as to what it’s like to be a writer.

If you’ve read any of my stuff in the past several years, I’m sure you’ve noticed that I’m more a doodler of words than a writer of them. In school I considered a poke in the eye or a yardstick across my knuckles preferable to sitting in English class for an hour every day. Consequently I never learned the basic rules of usage, composition, structure and all those other language building skills that all of the Sister Marys at St. Bernard’s Grammar School in Fitchburg, Massachusetts attempted to cram into my little skull of mush. A good student, I was not. To call myself an average student might even be stretching the truth a bit.

Therefore I consider it rather bizarre that here I am, an undereducated, middle-aged blue collar worker writing a monthly column for a computer magazine that has become widely respected throughout the Macintosh community. “How the hell did that happen?” I ask myself at least once a month. And to that add the fact that only six months before I was invited to join the My Mac staff I was a total computer illiterate who couldn’t type his own name in under 39 seconds, and you might begin to understand my confusion and befuddlement.

Fortunately for me, Tim Robertson, the head guru and publisher of this magazine, doesn’t get too excited when I mix metaphors, dangle my participles, or string sentences together without proper punctuation. Now Russ and Jim, our eagle-eyed word-arranging editors, might get a little excited over what I submit, but they always end up fixing the mess I send in and making it look at least somewhat presentable, graciously never saying too much to me about my poor language skills.

What really amazes me is that Tim allows me to use my very limited knowledge of computers and to distort that knowledge with my imagination until I end up with a rambling, sometimes nonsensical fictitious story that is only loosely tied to the Macintosh experience. Every month I keep waiting for Tim or Russ to send back my submission with a polite note attached to it. Something along the lines of:

–”Are you out of your freaking mind, Pete? We can’t publish this! What does this have to do with the Macintosh? What are you smoking out there in Washington, anyway? Good God, Pete! Wait until you’re awake before you sit down at the keyboard!”–

But, against all odds, this has never yet happened! My submissions keep getting published. Go figure.

And unlike my far more talented and knowledgeable colleagues on this magazine, whom you can count on to learn new and interesting stuff about the Mac and its accompanying hardware and software every month, I can only promise the readers of Miner Thoughts one thing: You certainly won’t learn anything of value in my column! Nothing, nada, zip!

However, if you should stumble through one of my stories and at some point it causes you to chuckle, grin, smirk, cry, cuss, laugh out loud or scratch your head in perplexed bewilderment, then I’ve accomplished my goal.

I have no false hopes or illusions of becoming the next Stephen King, Dean Koontz, or even David Pogue. I’m just happy to be able to spin up the hard drive in my brain, connect it to whatever available biochemical RAM I might have working for me on any given day and see how much of what is residing on that hard drive can make it down to my fingers and onto the keyboard of my Mac.

Now as far as why I write about the Macintosh experience, that’s an easy one to answer. You see my Mac, (not the magazine but my ) Mac. Holy cow Russ! Let’s see you fix that line. It even confused me! Editor’s note: I’m now really concerned… I understood what Pete just wrote. Even worse, it made sense!!!

Let me start over. My computer is a Macintosh and it just so happens that I write stuff for a Macintosh relevant magazine, which is why I try to write stories having something to do with a Macintosh computer. I could, I suppose, try to write something glowing and positive about a PC Windows computer, but who the hell would want to read that in a Macintosh magazine? Not me! Besides, I don’t now anything about a PC Windows computer anyway. Not that I know a whole heck of a lot about the Macintosh, but I do own a Macintosh, and it’s a Macintosh that I use when I’m computin’, and I have fun while I’m computin’ on my Macintosh, so it only stands to reason that if I were going to write about a computer, it would have to be a Macintosh. An Apple Macintosh. Simple arithmetic dictates that.

Of course I do write about other stuff that has nothing whatsoever to do with computers but you’ll never see any of that stuff in this magazine. I mean who wants to read about a buried skeleton coming to life and digging its way out of a shallow grave in the forest to seek its revenge on the psychopathic killer that put it there two years previously, when all you’re looking for is an answer to why your scanned photographs always display upside down on your screen.

The reason I even bother doodling with words is a selfish one. I find that it calms my inner spirit and milks away my tensions. It allows me to escape the vicissitudes of the day-to-day rat race we humans call survival. And as long as word doodling allows me to forget that idiot in the four-wheeler that zoomed across three lanes of traffic, causing me to slam on my brakes and spill hot coffee in my lap just so she could take the exit ramp that she should have prepared for two miles ago, and as long as doodling with words helps me get over the insane dispatch I was given last week, I will keep on keeping on, and word doodle until my heart’s content or my internal hard drive crashes, or the powers that be around here decide I’m a detriment to the health and well-being of the magazine. Mixed metaphors and dangling participles be damned!

Oops! Sorry, Sister Mary Vincent.

True to my word once again. You didn’t learn anything of value by reading this, now did you?

Pete Miner
pete@mymac.com

It’s been six years now since I made my first computer purchase—a Performa 550 with a weeny 68030 processor inside. I keep telling myself, “Time to upgrade, Pete, time to get one of those new fancy schmancy machines.” But every time I get close to committing myself to a new purchase something always seems to get in the way.

By the time I learned there was a significant difference between a 68030 and a 68040 machine, (after the purchase, of course) I cursed myself for not going the extra couple hundred bucks and getting the ’040. But hey, what did I know? I was computer illiterate and a truck driver on top of that. I did, however, promise myself that I would save up the bucks and get into a speedier machine as soon as possible. So save I did, and before long I was ready to make the trip back to the candy store and purchase a ’040. The Mrs. didn’t quite understand why I needed a new computer so soon after laying out two grand and some change for the one I had, but she didn’t ask too many questions and was very supportive right up until the day before we were going to make the purchase.

What happened on that “day before” was a trip to the family dental practitioner by our youngest daughter, Lindsey. When Lindsey and her mom returned home I was informed that braces were in order if we wanted to keep her pearly-white smile in a straight line under her lips. Having just gone through this same thing with her older sister, I knew this would do in all my stash of cash—and then some. I tried reasoning with Lindsey by telling her that if she never smiled no one would ever notice her crooked teeth. She didn’t buy it, her Mom didn’t buy it, so consequently I didn’t buy it… the ’040 that is.

Okay, back to square one. Start saving again.

As things turned out I was glad I didn’t make the “mistake” of purchasing a 68040 machine because shortly thereafter Apple introduced their new PowerPC line. “Now this is what I’ve been waiting for!” I told myself. “I really need one of these!” myself answered back. ” And have one you shall!” said some unknown third entity in my head.

I would visit my new PowerPC machine several times a month at the local computer candy store. I even went so far as visiting it at COMDEX 95 in Las Vegas, Nevada. Not that it was actually mine at the time but it would be, oh yes indeed, it surely would be! No more daughters needing braces this time. I was home free.

Trucking that year was very good to me. I was able to stash away quite a large sum in a short time. Enough to buy a top of the line PowerMac and still have enough left over to get the Mrs. a nice Christmas present. I had planned to get both the computer and my baby doll’s present on the same day, December 20th. But on Dec. 15th I was headed home from Phoenix, Arizona, my last trip before taking the rest of the year off. I stopped in the small town of Hawthorne, Nevada to have a cup of coffee and call home to let my wife know I was on schedule and would see her in a day and a half.

“It’s me,” I said when she answered the phone.

“Something’s wrong with the car, Peter.” was her reply.

“What’s wrong with it?” I asked.

“How should I know? It just won’t go.”

“Does it start?”

“Yes it starts. But I put it in gear and it won’t go!”

“Did you release the emergency brake?”

“PETER! I’m not stupid. It just won’t go!”

“Okay, okay. Call the garage and have them come out and look at it. I’ll call you tomorrow and see how it’s going.”

When I called the next day I was informed that the transmission in her car could now be used as a paperweight or a door stop, but not much else.

When I got home I immediately went out and bought the Mrs. her Christmas present. A new (used) car. I didn’t have anything left over for a PowerMac.

Okay, back to square one. Start saving again.

Well into my third attempt at saving up for a new computer I realized I really didn’t need a new one. After all, the one I had was doing everything I asked it to do and was doing it flawlessly, although not as fast as I might have wanted. I wanted a new one, sure, but need one? Not really. Then Apple threw me a curve ball by introducing their new OS that would only run on a PowerPC. I was to be left behind in Apple’s dust running 7.5.5 if I didn’t upgrade. I reevaluated my philosophy on upgrading and began thinking along the lines of dual use and mobility. A PowerBook is what I needed. That way I could continue my computing experience on the road as well as at home.

Alas, about the time I saw a PowerBook in my not-to-distant future, my second daughter approached me insisting she had gone as far as she could in college without a laptop computer, and could her mother and I maybe help her out. I had to decide what was more important, my daughter’s future or my ability to surf the net at a faster clip. Tough call, but I capitulated to my daughter’s future.

Now that my daughter has a PowerBook (a used 5300 that she insists I can have as soon as she graduates in June), I have pretty much given up on the idea of upgrading. No more saving for me. At least not for a new computer. I’ll just save for the next family financial crisis and spare myself the agony of disappointment.

This is where I originally intended to end this crybaby, don’t-you-feel-sorry-for-Pete article.

BUT WAIT! There’s some LATE BREAKING NEWS to be added here! Yes, indeed there is!

Picture if you will: it’s Good Friday, April 2nd, 1999. I’ve got half this article written and still have eight days till deadline. I’m sitting in my easy chair imitating a potato. A knock comes at the door. I look around and realize I’m the only one in the room. I get up and open the door. It’s the UPS man. Oh great! More Tupperware, QVC junk, or some other useless crap, I think. But wait! What’s that huge box behind this Buster Brown man? That’s an iMac box! “What the hell!” I exclaim.

“Got yourself a new computer, huh?” Says Buster Brown.

“I wish. But no, you must have the wrong address,” I tell him.

Buster looks down at the electronic thingamajig in his hand and asks. “Does Pete Miner live here?”

My heart stopped and I quit breathing. For a second I thought he said my name.

“Are you Pete Miner?” Buster asks again.

I must not have answered him the first time and all I could do the second time was nod my head.

“Sign here, please.”

I scribbled something loosely resembling my name on his electronic thingamajig and the UPS man thanked me, turned and left.

There on my doorstep sat a colorful box that, if I could believe the markings on the box, contained a $1200 iMac computer. I picked it up, carried it inside and set it down right in the middle of the living room floor. And began circling the box.

My wife walked in and saw the box on the floor.

“You didn’t!?” she said eyeing me suspiciously.

“No, I didn’t” I replied. “I thought maybe you did?”

“Not hardly, my dear!”

“Well if you didn’t, and I didn’t, then who did?”

“Read the shipping label.” Carol said.

“Yeah right, okay.”

I read the shipping label and part of the mystery was solved. The label identified Small Dog Electronics as the shipper, and underneath that were the words: To Pete Miner, Compliments of My Mac Magazine.

“Well I’ll be a son of a…”

“PETER!” My wife cautioned.

“Sorry. But can you believe this, Carol? They sent me an iMac! A real honest-to-god, brand-new still-in-the-box, G3 screaming, blueberry-flavored iMac!”

“No, I can’t believe it. Why would they do that?”

“I’m not sure. But I’m gonna find out. I’ll call Tim.”

“Aren’t you gonna open it first?”

“Not till I talk to Tim. Who knows, maybe it’s a mistake and I’ll have to send it back.”

I called Tim Robertson, the owner and publisher of My Mac, but he wasn’t home, so I left a message. Five minutes later Tim hadn’t called back and I couldn’t take the suspense any longer. I opened the iMac box. I was as excited as a seven year-old on Christmas Day.

Later that evening Tim returned my call. By then the iMac was up and running and I had decided he wasn’t getting it back even if it was sent to me by mistake.

Tim assured me it was no mistake and proceeded to tell me what the magazine was doing in regards to this iMac giveaway. He told me that I was not the only member of the staff who would be paid a visit by Buster Brown’s UPS truck in the months to come and wished me well with my new computer.

So how cool is that? “Way too cool!” my 17 year-old daughter says and I have to agree with her. Way too bondi-blue cool!

This story was supposed to be about an upgrade that never took place. About my Performa 550 that I so badly wanted to upgrade but in the end really didn’t NEED to upgrade. I was going to compare what I can still accomplish with my old ’030 machine to what I couldn’t accomplish had I bought a ’386 PC machine 5 years ago. And how lucky I was that I went with the Macintosh. And I was going to tell you how much I still love that old 550 of mine.

But now…, now that I have this screaming iMac, who cares about that old bag of bones relic of a Performa! Not I. No sir, that thing can sit in a corner and collect dust for all I care! I’m in “speed heaven” and ain’t never looking back!

Not that the old girl will actually end up in a corner collecting dust. Nope. She’s still got some life left in her and will be moving to a new home to be shared between two of my daughters who live in separate apartments across the hall from one another. They’ll get lots of use out of her, I’m sure.

Pete Miner
pete@mymac.com

Websites mentioned:
http://www.filemaker.com

Our second daughter, who is away at college, bought a used PowerBook 5300 a couple of months ago. It was one of those deals that sounded too good to be true, but she went ahead and made the purchase anyway. When she called home to tell us about it I was somewhat skeptical, being a firm believer in the old adage: if a deal sounds too good to be true, it usually is. But Dawn insisted she got the better end of this bargain and assured me the PowerBook worked fine. And it did—a couple of months ago. Now, as Paul Harvey would say, I’m getting “the rest of the story” about this very strange PowerBook.

It all started with Dawn standing in front of the campus bulletin board in the central plaza of Santa Clara University. She was reading the numerous 3×5 cards pinned haphazardly on the board in the hopes of finding a bargain on a used PowerBook. She noticed several cards advertising PC laptops for sale but only one for a PowerBook, and this guy wanted way more money for it than she could afford. Dawn dreaded the thought of having to settle for a PC laptop but time was growing thin. Her senior thesis was due at the end of the school year and it was fast becoming a real pain in the butt having to walk from the house she rents off campus to the computer lab or the library just to work on it. If she didn’t find an affordable PowerBook pretty soon she just might have to settle for one of those cheap Windoze machines.

As she turned to walk away from the bulletin board she almost ran right into a small elderly gentleman who was standing directly behind her. Startled, an involuntary screech of surprise escaped her but she recovered quickly, saying, “Excuse me, sir,” and began walking around and away from the old gent. As she walked she heard him softly say, “Might the young lass be interested in purchasing this fine portable computer?”

“Excuse me?” Dawn said again, turning towards the man. “Did you say something?”

“Indeed I did, lassie. I said, might ye be in the market for a fine portable computer like the one I hold here?”

Dawn looked closer as the old man raised what he was carrying and she saw the unmistakable Apple logo on the closed lid of what was obviously an Apple PowerBook.

“Umm, what kind is it? I mean what model? I can see it’s an Apple.”

The elderly man smiled at Dawn and said, “Of that I’m not sure lassie. Not sure at all. You see, it belonged to me late dear wife and I never paid no mind to such things. I’ve trouble enough operating me confounded electric can opener, I do!”

Dawn smiled at that and moved a little closer. “May I look at it?”

“Surely you may, lassie, surely you may indeed. Let us sit down on this bench so you can inspect the goods thoroughly,” the man said.

Dawn scanned her surroundings in the campus plaza and saw numerous students and faculty members coming and going in all directions. She decided it was safe enough to share a bench with this strange elderly gentleman. If he turned out to be some kind of weirdo, he wouldn’t likely try anything in this public place.

They sat down and the old man handed Dawn the PowerBook. Dawn opened the lid of the machine and immediately recognized it as being a 5300.

“Do you mind if I turn it on, mister?”

“Of course you may, lassie, of course. You turn it on, you shut it off, you take it apart if you feel the need to. Take your time. Do whatever you think is necessary to verify its worth. Oh dear, yes! As I’ve stated, I know nothing of such things, so you take a real close look-see and tell me what you think that contraption is worth. Lord knows I have no use for it. None indeed! Not unless ye can show me how to open cans with it!”

Dawn and the old man both laughed at this. The old man extended his right hand and said, “Me name is McDuff, Harry McDuff.” Dawn took his offered hand. “Dawn Miner, I’m pleased to meet you, Mr. McDuff.”

Dawn turned on the PowerBook and watched as it powered up surprisingly quickly. She opened the ‘About this Macintosh’ in the Apple menu and scanned the information there. Following the words ‘System Software’ where she expected to see the version number of the OS, there was nothing.

“That’s weird!” Dawn said.

“Something wrong, young lady?”

“Yes. It doesn’t say what operating system is installed.”

“Oh me gosh! Is that a bad thing? Might it be broken?”

“No, no I don’t think so. It seems to work fine. It’s, well… just weird.”

Further down in the window next to ‘Total Memory:’ and ‘Largest Unused Block:’ were two more blank spaces.

“Wow! This is even weirder. How much memory is in this machine, Mr. McDuff? Do you know?”

“Oh lass, as I’ve stated before, old Harry McDuff knows nothing of such things, no sir, nothing. Me wife used it all the time. Indeed she did, right up til her last day, she did.”

Dawn continued to search around the computer. She opened the Apple Menu again and was amazed to see the extensive variety of software listed there. Photoshop, Word 98, Illustrator, PageMaker, QuarkExpress, Excel, Quicken, FreeHand, KPT Bryce, Painter, Live Picture, CodeWarrior and lots more, some of which she had never heard of. There were thousands of dollars worth of software installed on the machine!

She double-clicked the Hard Disk icon on the desktop to find out how much disk space was being used, but again that information was blank. Blank MB in disk and Blank MB available. She opened the Memory control panel only to find more blank space where the pertinent information should have been. Stymied by this, Dawn began opening applications one by one to see how many apps she could open before the machine ran out of memory.

She chose the memory intensive programs first. Each one opened in less than 3 seconds. She gave up after counting twenty-seven open applications, the last one opening just as quickly as the first.

What Dawn didn’t notice as she was opening applications on the PowerBook was the student sitting on the grass some twenty feet away. The student was putting the finishing touches on a Biology report that was due in less than an hour. She didn’t notice the screen on the students laptop as it faded to black. She also didn’t notice or even hear as the student raced his fingers over the keyboard, saying , “No, no, no! Don’t do this to me!” Neither did Dawn notice when the student slammed the lid of his laptop closed and walked away quickly, heading for the computer lab on the other side of the plaza, mumbling something that sounded like, “I’m dead meat! I’m sooo much dead meat!”

The student wouldn’t find any help for his problem in the lab because when he walked in he saw that they were having problems of their own. Two of the desktop PCs that were being used by other students had gone down the same road as his own laptop. And the two on-duty lab techs were occupied trying to figure out what happened.

Dawn was unaware of any of this. She was too busy being impressed by the old man’s PowerBook.

“This is some computer you have here, Mr. McDuff. Other than a small glitch that won’t allow certain information to display, it seems to work perfectly. Better in fact than the brand new G3 computers in our computer lab. Unfortunately, it’s worth a whole lot more than I can afford to pay.”

“Is that a fact now? How excellent! Yes yes, how excellent that ye can get some use out of a contraption that I have no use for. We must strike a deal. I insist we must come to agreement.”

“As I said, Mr. McDuff, I couldn’t afford…”

“Nonsense, my dear!” Harry McDuff interrupted, “a deal is waiting to be struck here, I kin feel it in me bones. And Harry will see to it. Yes he will indeed!

And Harry McDuff did see to it that an agreement was reached, in the most bizarre illogical use of mathematics Dawn had ever witnessed.

The old man had Dawn write down on a piece of paper what she thought the PowerBook was worth, while he jotted down a number that he would be willing to sell it for.

Taking into account all the high dollar software inside the machine and knowing she couldn’t afford even half this amount, she scribbled $2000 and handed the paper to Mr. McDuff.

“Oh me gosh, lookee here!”

He showed Dawn the number he had written down. It was $20.

“Looks like ye have too many zeros and I not enough. We must fix that, yes we must!”

The old man crossed out one of the zeros on Dawn’s paper and added a zero to his.

“There ye be, lassie. Our numbers are now the same. ‘Tis more than me wanted, ‘Tis less than it’s worth. A bargain for the both of us, wouldn’t ye agree?”

“Mr. McDuff, as tempting as your offer sounds I must tell you that this computer is worth substantially more than two hundred dollars.”

“Are ye trying to back out of our deal, young lady?”

“Well, no sir. It’s just that…”

“Kin the young lass pay the two-hundred dollars we just agreed upon?”

“Sure, but…”

“Then pay me the money and the contraption is yours. We both walk away feeling satisfied that we made a good deal.”

Not believing her good fortune, Dawn reached into her purse and pulled out her checkbook and ATM card.

“If you’re absolutely sure about this, Mr. McDuff, it will only take me a minute to walk across the plaza and get your money out of the bank machine over there.”

“No need to do that, lassie. No need indeed. Ye kin write old Harry McDuff a check. Yes, yes, a check will suffice.”

So Dawn wrote out a check for $200 payable to Harry McDuff. She thanked him kindly, and stood up with the PowerBook. As they shook hands Harry said one last thing.

“I ‘spose ye should know what me dear wife Helen told me ’bout that contraption just ‘fore she died. She told me it was a magic machine, she did. Said it did things other computers couldn’t do. Told me to find a good home for it after she was gone. Made me promise it would get used and not just sit in me closet.

“I am afraid me Helen’s mind was failing ‘er towards the end. I ‘spose it were all her pain medication made ‘er talk crazy like that. Magic computer indeed! Not magical enough to keep me Helen alive though. No indeed! Not that magical.”

Dawn felt bad for the old man rambling on about his deceased wife and would have spent more time with him but she had a Communication class in twenty minutes. She explained this to Harry and took her leave.

Walking away, an idea struck Dawn. She whirled around to ask Mr. McDuff if he would care to have dinner with her that evening. But Harry McDuff was already gone.

From where Dawn stood the view in the plaza was unobstructed for twenty yards in every direction. A sprinter couldn’t have fled from view in the few seconds Dawn had her back turned. Yet, he was gone. As though he’d never been there at all.

“The spookiest thing I’ve ever witnessed!” my daughter told me in a phone conversation.

“You know what else, Dad?” He never cashed the check! It’s been over two months and that $200 check still hasn’t cleared my bank! I don’t think it ever will.

“I tried to track him down in the phone book with no luck. I inquired at the school administration, thinking he or his wife may have been on the faculty. I even called the local hospitals and researched the obituaries for the last two months. Nothing!

“You got any ideas, Dad?”

“Yes I do.” I told my daughter. “First thing you do is contact the university’s security. Explain it all to them and ask if they can run a check on the PowerBooks serial number through the local police department to see if it shows up as stolen property. If it does, I suggest you turn the PowerBook over to them, stop payment on the check, and start looking for another computer. If it isn’t stolen, then maybe the police can provide you or your school’s security with information on the registered owner of that particular serial number. I’m sure Apple has that information on file. It’s just a question of whether they’ll release it to you.”

“Okay Dad, thanks. I’ll try that and let you know what I come up with. Luv ya!”

Three days later Dawn called me again.

“This is turning into Twilight Zone material, Dad!”

“What are you talking about, honey?”

“The PowerBook! It’s bizarre!”

“Oh yea, what did you find out?”

“You’re not going to believe this Dad, but I almost got arrested for making false statements to the police!”

“WHAT!” What are you saying? Is that thing stolen? Is that it?”

“Not hardly, Dad. In fact this PowerBook and all the expensive software inside it is legally registered and on file as being purchased by one Dawn Miner of Santa Clara, Ca., the address on file is my current address. The date of purchase on the PowerBook was September 1st, 1995. Guess what? I wasn’t living here on September 1st, 1995!”

“The old man must have transferred your name to the registration, honey. No big deal.”

“Nope. Not according to Apple. They show me as the original buyer.

“The police asked me if this was some sort of joke and said I could get in trouble for making a false claim or false statement or some such thing. I apologized and said I must have made a mistake and got the heck out of there.

“Well, Dad, what do you think? What’s going on here?”

“I don’t know, kiddo, but I’m sure there’s an explanation for it. Whether or not it’s a reasonable one is a question.

“How’s the PowerBook working for you otherwise, Dawn?

“Well… okay, I guess. It does some strange things, or at least gets accused of doing some strange things.”

“Like what?” I asked.

“Like making other computers around it crash when I turn it on.”

“That’s ridiculous!”

“I thought so too, and attempted to make light of it by telling my friends they should have bought a Mac instead of a PC. But Shauna, Penelope, and Jessie have all lost big chunks of their theses because their computers have been crashing a lot lately, and I feel pretty badly about that.”

“That’s not your fault.”

“They say it only happens when I’m in the house and only when I’m using my PowerBook. And whenever I take the PowerBook to the library to do some work, there’s always one or two of their machines that goes bonkers while I’m there.”

“Has your PowerBook ever crashed or frozen up?”

“Never. It runs so smoothly and so fast that I sometimes think it knows what I want to do next before I even know it. Like the other night in my room, I was racking my brain searching for the right words to string together to explain the importance of journalistic ethics while on the trail of a particularly dicey political story. Finally getting my thoughts together, I looked up at the PowerBook screen and there it was, three full paragraphs of eloquently stated information that I didn’t even know I had typed. I must have typed it while I was thinking about it and being as tired as I was—it was 3:00 AM—I just didn’t realize it.”

“What were you doing up at 3 AM?”

“I try not to use the PowerBook while the other girls are using their PCs.”

“That’s dumb!”

“Just trying to keep the peace, Pops!”

“Still, it’s ridiculous.”

“You might not think so after I tell you this next little tidbit.”

“What’s that?”

“The battery in the PowerBook. I never have to charge it.”

“So? You wouldn’t need to if you always ran it off the AC adaptor.”

“I don’t have an AC adaptor, Dad. I’ve used this PowerBook every day since I bought it from Harry McDuff and not once have I charged the battery. Heck, I don’t even have a battery charger! You know what I think, Dad? I think that whenever I turn it on, it gets its power from the nearest available computer. I also think it borrows whatever memory it needs from available computers in the area. Strike that! Make that available PCs, as it doesn’t seem to effect any of the Macintosh machines.”

“Dawn?”

“Yes Dad.”

“You’re not taking drugs or anything like that, are you?”

“DAAAAD! Of course I’m not! You know that!”

“I know, kiddo. It’s just that what you’re saying is so… so… unbelievable!”

“Tell me about it! Hey, I gotta run Pops. I’ll be graduating in a few weeks and then you can take this PowerBook and turn it inside out and figure out what the deal is with it. Till then I need it to finish my thesis. I’ll just be a little more careful where I turn it on. Luv ya, and tell Mom the same. Bye!”

So, now you all know as much as I do about my daughter’s mysterious PowerBook 5300. Is it possessed? Is it magical? Who was this likable little Scot, Harry McDuff? What happened to him? What happened to the uncashed $200 check? These are questions I ponder every day. But until I see this machine for myself I will withhold any judgement as to my daughter’s sanity.

Pete Miner
pete@mymac.com

I think we can all agree that the speed at which computer technology is advancing is nothing less than phenomenal. You can buy a state-of-the-art computer today that will be old news and outdated tomorrow, or maybe a week from tomorrow. Remember when “the next generation” computer had a life span measured in years? Today they are measured in months. Three years from now they very likely will be measured in weeks. And unless you’re an avid computer geek, it’s darn near impossible to keep up with the daily parade of enhancements, upgrades, and innovations that blanket both the hardware and software industry.

Back in the 40′s, 50′s, and 60′s, scientists and large corporations were the only people with access to anything that even remotely resembled what we would call a computer today. And those so-called computers were the size of small houses costing millions of dollars and requiring massive amounts of electricity to run. And what were these scientist and large corporations able to accomplish with these titanic machines? Really not much more than can be accomplished now on a pocket-sized calculator you can purchase for $3.99 that runs off a built-in 1-inch solar panel.

In 1969 the United States was able to put two men on the moon because of computers. But did you know that the computing power and capabilities of your own present day desktop Mac is equal to or even surpasses the combined computing capabilities available to the entire Apollo program of the late sixties and early seventies? Just think, if you had a big Saturn V rocket laying around in your backyard and a few other pieces of add on hardware, you too could send somebody to the moon, right from your desktop Mac! Your neighbors might not like the noise but hey, that’s their problem.

Whenever I try to put these giant leaps of technological advancements into perspective I always think back to something I read a couple of years ago. It said a computer analyst once calculated that, had the automotive industry progressed with the same efficiency as the computer industry, it would have yielded a Rolls Royce that cost $1.00 to build and got 1 million miles to the gallon. Not something that’s likely to happen, but an interesting comparison nonetheless.

Assuming this comparison is true, one might ask, “What enabled the computer industry to advance with such rapid efficiency while other non-technical industries such as basket weaving, ink pen manufacturing, and carpet laying were left behind?”

Some say it was the development of the silicon chip that gave computer builders the turbo charge they needed to fast forward to where we are today. Others say it was the transistor that opened the door to miniaturization and thus allowed the industry to put computers on everyones desktop or in their laps.

I say, “Hogwash!” I also say it’s time to give credit where credit is due.

This all-of-a-sudden fast-rolling super train of computer technology that seems to be gaining speed every day has been made possible, not through the diligent, hard work of a handful of brainy technology nerds as some would have us believe, but through the generosity of a nomadic race of alien beings who call themselves Zar-rons and who just happened to stumble into our solar system around the year 1945.

The Zar-rons–who found the evolution of intelligent life throughout the cosmos to be so rare that it only occurs in only one out of every 7.2 million galaxies–were elated when they discovered us semi-intelligent beings living and evolving on this third planet out from a seemingly unremarkable dwarf star situated so far away from the center of an equally unremarkable galaxy.

Up until they found us, the Zar-rons believed that intelligent life forms only evolved from star systems that were close to the center of galaxies. After all, that’s where the stable wormholes are. And it is the wormholes that make intergalactic travel possible; necessary really. For if a life form fails to evolve rapidly enough to recognize the need to escape its planet of birth so near the center of its galaxy, or fails to develop a means to escape its birth planet using the wormholes, it is only a matter of time before said planet of birth along with its entire solar system gets sucked into the bottomless recycling bin of the black holes located at the center of all galaxies. An event simular to being flushed down a toilet.

The Zar-rons believed that a rapid evolution into intelligent, thinking beings could only take place when the physical forces and certainty of the big galactic flush were present.

That is, until they discovered us earthlings way out here, some 30,000 light years from the sucking effect of the black hole at the center of this otherwise insignificant spiral galaxy we call the Milky Way.

Needless to say, the Zar-rons walked in on us during one of our not-so-flattering moments in history. In fact, it is my understanding that the Zar-rons were preparing to leave our solar system after observing the detonation of the two atomic bombs the United States used to end World War II, in the belief that we earthlings were already on the short path to self-annihilation. However (and lucky for us), the Zar-rons stuck around long enough to witness the cessation of hostilities and the proclamations of our world leaders never to use these weapons of mass destruction against one another again.

Although not thoroughly convinced, the Zar-rons did recognize this gesture of reconciliation as one of the necessary ingredients for the rapid evolution of a species. Even though being so far away from the maelstrom of the galactic center’s rapid evolution was not a prerequisite for the continued survival of this planets inhabitants, I think this fascinated the Zar-rons enough to hang around a while longer and perhaps give us oddball, lost-in-space earthlings a little nudge towards becoming a member of the universal community.

I think the Zar-rons’ first–and as far as I can tell–only act of intervention to date has been to show us how to store, collect, process and transfer information and knowledge using a more rapid and compact method than was available to us in the late 40′s. They accomplished this by launching a Zar-ron probe that crash landed in the high desert near Roswell, New Mexico in the United States on July 8th, 1947. The contents inside the probe showed the use of miniature circuit boards, memory chips, data transfer modules, storage disks, and other unknown electronic devices. Unfortunately, the probe was whisked off and hidden away by the U.S. military under the pretense that the probe and all its contents posed a threat to national security. Shortly thereafter the U.S. Government maintained its denial that the probe ever existed, which delayed the introduction of these neat little gadgets into the mainstream industrialized sector for many years.

It wasn’t until the late 70′s and early 80′s when a new generation of bright, young scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs hit the scene and took it upon themselves to use what little information had leaked out of the military over the years about the gadgets in the probe, and through trial and error began using that information to duplicate some of the gadgets. Not exact duplications mind you, but close enough to get our computer industry off and running at a substantially faster pace than it had been progressing.

Had the U.S. Government released these computer-like gadgets to the civilian scientific community back in 1947, the duplication of these Zar-ronian gadgets would have been more precise and the Y2K thing, computer viruses, and other imperfections found in today’s computers and software would not even exist–because the Zar-ron computers had no imperfections. The industry would also be 50 years ahead of where it is today.

But the government didn’t release the gadgets in 1947, nor have they given any indication they ever will. Maybe they have good reasons for this, maybe not.

Regardless of the reasons, I’m not writing this as an attack on the decision making of the United States intelligence community, but only to point out the existence of what I think is a friendly alien race who cared enough to extend a helping hand to what they believed was a burgeoning evolving life form that might one day have something to offer the Universal Family Of Intelligent Life forms.

Some of you may be wondering what all this has to do with the Macintosh computer. So, to end this not-so-widely-known story about how the Earth’s computer industry really got started, I’ll make that link right now.

While researching the material for this column, I came across an interesting bit of information in the files of the Central Intelligence Agency. It was in the form of an “Eyes Only” memo dated Aug. 22, 1982 from then CIA director William J. Casey to President Ronald Reagan. The memo detailed Casey’s concerns that someone may have gained access to, or detailed information about, the Top Secret gadgets recovered from the alien spacecraft that crash landed in 1947. His concerns were based on information he was receiving about two young men from California named Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs. The memo stated that these two men were rapidly developing a computer platform that was so simular to the recovered artifacts in the alien probe that it went beyond the possibility of coincidence.

Casey was convinced that an exact duplication of the Zar-ron computer (called a Zil) would bring economic chaos to the industrialized world. He envisioned the decline and eventual eradication of such mainstay manufacturing as the paper industry, pen and pencil manufacturers, typewriter builders, and the Xerox conglomerate. This in turn would all but eliminate the United States Postal Service and have a devastating effect on telecommunications carriers such as Ma Bell and the CPA (Carrier Pigeon Association).

To ward off the possibility of a major breakdown in the way the business world conducted its business, Casey proposed to President Reagan a plan to de-rail the efforts of Wozniak and Jobs. His plan called for the government’s discreet bankrolling of another individual who would directly compete with the Zar-ron like software advancements that Wozniak and Jobs were developing.

This flawed competitor later became known as Microsoft. And the individual the government bankrolled was, of course, Bill Gates.

The government operated on the premise that if Bill Gates could develop a system that was substantially inferior to that of Wozniak and Jobs–but be mass marketed to the majority of businesses around the world–then the consequences to all these other industries would be negligible.

Looking back, I would say that the government’s plan worked. Not only did Microsoft attain its goal of major market share throughout the world, but the goal of Wozniak and Jobs to produce a perfect Zar-ronian like computer had to be dumbed down just to compete with the inferior capabilities of Microsoft.

Word on the street now is that Bill Gates has acquired the blueprints for the original gadgets and plans to go into production of the gadgets shortly after the new millennium renders his present system useless. (He never did get a grip on this Y2K thing!) So, instead of supporting Microsoft as it had in the past, the government is attempting to dismantle the Microsoft empire in Federal Court with the sole purpose of preventing the introduction of the alien Zar-ronian gadgets into the world.

Could it be the Zar-ronian gadgets are nothing more than Trojan horses waiting to unleash untold horror over our planet if someone succeeds in duplicating them? Is that why the government is doing everything in its power to suppress these gadgets?

At the present time I don’t have the answer to this question. But if Bill Gates succeeds in producing perfect replicas of the Zar-ronian gadgets and our world comes to an end because of these gadgets, I guess that will be our answer.

Oh well! No use worrying about things we have no control over. We’ll just have to wait and see what happens.

Pete Miner
pete@mymac.com

It used to rile my feathers when my email box got inundated with unsolicited electronic junk mail. I thought, “How dare these people have the audacity to fill my private electronic mail box with unwanted and unasked for advertisements.” But I’m cool with it now; my feathers are no longer riled. In fact I invite every Billy, Bob, and Wilma who has something to sell to send me their electronic solicitations. Whether or not I read them is a whole other matter, but by golly I’ll download each and every one of them to my hard drive.

No longer do I waste my time trying to block incoming junk mail or get myself “removed” from the numerous mass mailing lists I must be on. After all, nothing in my ISP contract says I have to read this stuff. I can be rid of it with a click of that neat little button that says ‘delete’ on it, if I so choose. But I do not so choose. I’ve discovered ways of putting my electronic junk mail to work for me, so I keep every piece I get.

Let’s say I’m looking to get out of cleaning the garage or washing the car or going shopping with the Mrs. In these instances I use the excuse, “I can’t do it now honey, I’ve got all this email to answer,” at which time I show the Mrs. a long list of unopened junk mail I keep in my Inbox mail window just for this purpose. When she leaves the immediate area I can then go back to the important stuff I was doing, like playing a game of BlackJack, Solitaire, or downloading David Letterman’s Top Ten List from the night before.

Electronic junk mail has also given me a feeling of self-importance and has raised my self-esteem. You see I don’t normally get lots of personal email. Truth is I can go days or even weeks without hearing from relatives, friends, business associates, or disgruntled readers of this column. So all this junk email has saved me from facing long dry spells of “No New Messages” when I go on-line and check my mail (and we all know how debilitating that can be to one’s psyche).

Just like clockwork, I can now count on receiving several E-junk mails a day from people who care enough about me to give me, “A CHANCE TO EARN MILLIONS”, or tell me how I can, “TURN MY WEB SITE INTO A CASH COW.” Someone even likes me enough to want to sell me (for $7.00) their plans on “HOW TO ASSEMBLE A CABLE DESCRAMBLER.” This last one sounded so blatantly illegal I had to read the entire text. (Apparently this person skirts the law by professing his plans are only to be used for educational purposes. Yeah, right!)

I get E-junk advertising, ROCK BOTTOM, CAN’T BE BEAT, LOWEST AIRFARES EVER! I don’t know why I get these because I haven’t flown in the last 10 years or so, but they keep coming. Then there’s the “INVESTMENT OF A LIFETIME” solicitations telling me I can’t go wrong if I put all my life savings into their hands. Yeah, I’ll bet!

I get lots of email telling me that, I too, can jump on the mass mailing bandwagon. The most recent of these tells me that, for a paltry $125.00, they’ll send my email to 10,000 targeted customers who may be interested in my product or service. They also promise that this will PUT MONEY INTO YOUR POCKET!! I only wish I had a product or service that 10,000 targeted customers would be interested in but I don’t, so I guess my pockets will stay empty.

The strangest piece of E-junk I ever received came to me in November with a subject line of: TIRED OF THE 9 TO 5? This did not interest me until I opened it and something in the header caught my eye. The date stamp didn’t look right. So I read the letter.

Subject: TIRED OF THE 9 TO 5?
Sent: 11/24/45 7:44 AM
Received: 11/7/98 4:13 AM
From: offshore366@yahoo.com
To: offshore366@yahoo.com

Ladies and Gentlemen

Please pardon the email intrusion. We are NOT on the Internet to burden you with unsolicited advertising solicitations and if we have offended you in any way we do sincerely apologize. To be removed from our list please email us back with “remove” in the subject heading and YOU will be deleted immediately.

I am very serious when I say “Do you have the desire to make $2000 to $5000 Plus per week, beginning almost immediately?” How does $10,000 to $25,000 plus per month, and a realistic STRONG SIX FIGURES per Year sound? And how about generating all of this by just sharing information? If you can bring desire and an honest effort to the table, we can show you how to NEVER WORRY ABOUT MONEY AGAIN! Opportunity is truly knocking!

To open the door call Toll Free 1-800-636-6773 ext. 3886

God bless

After reading the above email I came to the only conclusion I could. This is an electronic junk mail from the future, sent in the year 2045. I naturally ruled out 1945 because email wasn’t happening back then. This letter from the future tells us that the Internet and Yahoo are still going strong in the year 2045, that the almighty dollar still seems to be the driving force for most people, and that both Toll Free numbers and God are still a part of 2045 society. That’s comforting to know, isn’t it?

There is another more entrepreneurial reason why I like receiving E-junk. Some people collect baseball cards, beanie babies, antique furniture, Barbie Dolls, aluminum foil, balls of string, et cetera. I collect electronic junk mail. “How stupid is that,” you say? Well, you can eat those words when one day in the not too distant future you start hearing about massive shortages of white electronic background.

What? You think there’s an unlimited supply of electronic paper out there? You think the white background behind the words on this page just came out of nowhere? It has to be made from something, doesn’t it? Bits and bytes of zeros and ones, you say? Sure, maybe, but where do those come from?

Nothing lasts forever my friends, and when the rest of the world runs out of white electronic background to write on I expect people will be beating a path to my door when they hear I’ve been saving all my E-junk with perfectly good reusable white background.

Maybe you should start doing the same.

Pete Miner
pete@mymac.com

Continued from last month

Stan ended his visit with the Individualist promising to get in touch with them if he noticed or heard of any problems with B.G. Enterprise’s monitoring system. Anita had confided in him that someone named Steve Jobs was about to do something. Something big. Something that would change the lives of everyone living under the suffocating blanket of the New World Government. Stan didn’t think that one man could make much of a difference in his life, let alone the lives of everyone else. But then again, Bill Gates was just one man.

Riding his electric motor bike back to Garnersville, the name Steve Jobs swirled in and out of Stan’s memory. He felt as though he should know the name. Was sure he had heard it before, but just couldn’t place it. He made a mental note to check it out at the main info console when he returned to work.

Arriving home that evening, Stan’s wife Emily was obviously upset. “Where have you been , Stanley?” (She called him Stanley only when she was upset.) “The Controllers have been sending messages here for the past six hours asking for you. They said you hadn’t logged in since the number 7 recharge station on the west Hudson bike trail. I told them you probably left the trail and lost track of time.”

(Emily had not been worried that something untoward had happened to her husband because that sort of thing just didn’t happen anymore. Everyone carried with them their own personnel locator transmitter, so if Stan had gotten hurt or was incapacitated the transmitter would have sensed this and activated itself, transmitting a signal to the closest Controllers’ station, sending a rescue team out immediately.)

“Their last message said they were sending out a search team to look for you. What were you doing, Stanley?”

Before answering his wife, Stan walked over to the central com center and quickly entered his social security number and allowed the retina scanner to positively identify him. He typed a short message into the machine.

Stan Walker, 012-52-5197. Reason for tardy login: I Left the bike trail and to my embarrassment got temporarily lost in the forest on the west slopes of the Hudson River. I apologize for any inconvenience I may have caused the Controllers.

Stan hit send and waited for an answer. The Controllers replied within seconds.

Stan Walker, 012-52-5197. Message received. Explanation temporarily accepted pending mandatory investigation of unaccounted whereabouts of user. Penalty to user for failure to activate Locator: 200 Purchasing Units.

“Damn you people!” Stan yelled at the screen.

“Stanley! What’s wrong with you? What’s going on?

“Nothing. It just burns me that the Controllers have to know where we are every minute of every day. They keep tabs on us like we were prisoners. It isn’t right.”

“It’s the way the system works, Stan. It’s how they keep everyone safe. You know that.”

“It’s “1984″ come true, is what it is Em. Just a little late.”

“Stanley, what’s gotten into you? Why are you so angry?”

Stan told his wife about having spent the whole day with a clan of Individualists. He told her how happy and content they had seemed. How none of the news reports they had been hearing about the inevitable demise of the Individualist were true. How maybe, just maybe they had made a big mistake choosing this life over what he had seen today.

“Oh my God, Stanley! You can’t be serious! You’re not thinking about giving up what we have here to go live in the woods with a bunch of nomadic crazy people, are you? Is that what your saying?”

“They’re not crazy, Emily! Stan yelled. “They’re normal people just like us. Except they chose to be free, to live their own lives, make their own choices. They refuse to be led around on a leash, dependant on the government for every aspect of their lives, like we are. If you ask me Em, we’re the crazy ones.”

Crying now, Emily Walker attempts to reason with her husband. “Stanley, we’re too old to go traipsing off into the wo…woods. We wouldn’t last a wu…week out there. Things aren’t so bad here, are they Stanley?” Emily’s crying turns into heart wrenching sobs. She covers her face with her hands, unable to continue.

Transfixed by what he was seeing, Stan walks over to his wife and puts his arms around her, hugging her closely. “Emily, my dear Emily, look at you. Crying like a baby. I never said we were leaving, and we’re not.” He moved her hands away from her face and lifted her chin so he could look into her eyes. The sobbing had stopped but tears were still flowing from her ducts. He slowly kissed each of her cheeks, savoring the salty taste of her tears.

“We’re not going anywhere dear,” he told her again. “But tell me, when was the last time you cried, actually cried, like you did just now?”
“I don’t know. Why? Why would you ask such a thing, Stanley?”
“It’s been a long, long time, hasn’t it, Em?”
“I suppose. But so what? Do you get pleasure seeing your wife break down in tears?”
“No. Not pleasure Em. More like relief.”
“What are you talking about? You’re not making any sense, Stanley.”

“Yes I am, honey. Think about it. You can’t remember the last time you cried. Hell, I can’t remember the last time I cried about anything either. Even more disturbing is that I can’t remember the last time you or I laughed, actually had a rip-roaring laugh about anything. And it’s not just us, Em. Do we ever hear laughter at work? No, we don’t. How about when we walk past the park when it’s full of children. Do we ever hear laughter coming from the children, or even crying for that matter? No again.”
“So what are you saying, Stan?” asked Emily.
“I’m saying that our feelings and emotions are dulled. We’re turning into automatons, emotionless robots of this New World society.”
“You’re scaring me again, Stanley!” Emily shuddered.
“Sorry. But maybe we should be scared. Maybe if more people were afraid and incensed over their lives being manipulated and controlled by the NWG they would try to do something about it.”
“Do what, Stan?” Emily asked. “Start a revolution? Start a war?”
“No, Em, I don’t think it has to get bloody.

“Look, we were all grateful when Bill Gates convinced the world to disarm, and by doing so eliminated the threat of planet-wide destruction by a handful of hotheaded, egotistical political leaders. Hell, if it hadn’t been for Bill Gates stepping up to the plate with his zero tolerance verifiable disarmament technology the highest form of life inhabiting this planet today might be some mutant species of cockroach. For that he deserves his rightful place in history as the man who single-handedly saved the Earth from nuclear holocaust.

“But it should have stopped there, Em. At that point, Bill Gates’ foolproof monitoring technology should have been made available to all the governments of the world, allowing them to individually monitor and suppress any further attempts at rearming. We never should have allowed B.G. Enterprise to become the Big Brother of the world. We had laws in place to prevent that sort of thing from happening and we didn’t use them. Willingly, we allowed, even assisted Bill Gates in rewriting the laws to conform to his agenda. Like a deer caught in the hypnotic glare of oncoming headlights, we froze, we did nothing to prevent him from running right over the top of us. And by the time we blinked, it was too late. We had handed over control of the world to this one man. A man who admits to being a technology addict and a man who, however unintentionally, may very well reduce the human entity of the Earth into an unthinking, inconsequential biological form whose only usefulness will be as an expendable and replaceable extension of a self-sustaining, self-governing societal machine that no longer requires, nor will accept the input of human thought.

“It may be a safer, less threatening world we live in Emily, but at what cost? At what point does the price of simply maintaining an existence become too high?”

Emily had never heard her husband speak like this before, with such fervor, such conviction. She was tempted to assume it was because of what he had seen and heard at the Individualists’ camp. But Stan was never one to be swayed easily by someone else’s political rhetoric. As far as she knew, Stan never really paid much attention to, nor cared about the political goings-on of the world.

“Maybe your right, Stan,” Emily said. “But what can we do about it? You just told me we weren’t leaving here to go live with the Individualists. You haven’t changed your mind, have you?”
“No, no.” Stan answered. “Fortunately, I don’t think we have to do anything about it. I think someone else has already done something that will change things, change the way we live. All we have to do is take advantage of the changes when they present themselves. I think!
“Who’s going to change things, Stan?” Emily asked.
“The Individualists call him Steve Jobs. I intend to find out more about him when we go to work tomorrow.”

Stan and Emily did not register with the medical module that night as was required by the system prior to partaking in sexual activity. Thwarting the system further they refused to make love in their bed which would have picked up their activity through sensors in the mattress and they would have been rudely interrupted by the clanging alarm of the medical module insisting they register before indulging. Instead, they spent the night on the living room floor, physically and emotionally enjoying one another more than they had in a long time.

Stan and Emily worked for B.G. Enterprise. In fact, everyone worked for B.G. Enterprise. It wasn’t the only game in town, it was the only game on the planet for those who chose to live under the New World Government.

Before 2009 Stan had been a pilot for Delta Airlines and Emily a real estate agent in Garnersville. However, now that property was assigned to people according to their needs and ownership was not allowed, demand for real estate agents no longer existed.

Stan’s career as an airline pilot had also been pulled out from under him. Ever since the transportation industry was taken over by B.G. Enterprise and all forms of commercial transportation around the world had been upgraded to operate off the perfected Embedded Chip technology of B.G. Enterprise pilots, ship captains, railroad engineers, and even truck drivers were no longer needed. Planes fly the skies, ocean vessels navigate the seven seas and trains and trucks zig-zag across the land delivering their cargo, all piloted by a removeable silicon chip no larger than a credit card which is inserted into a vehicles onboard navigator prior to departure. This advanced version of the self-programming auto-pilot not only propels and navigates a vehicle from point A to point B but is capable of foreseeing mechanical problems developing within the vehicle under its control and initiating repairs before the problems have a chance to become malfunctions. The chip will also reprogram the onboard navigator in the event that weather and/or other traffic along its route dictates a deviation from its original auto-plotted course. This is accomplished through the chips interpretation of the continuous flow of data it receives from the global positioning and weather satellites above it.

Originally, this system had been designed with manual override capability. Back then the designers held to the assumption that should it ever fail, the reasoning abilities and common sense of the human brain would still be needed to take over for the non-thinking, inherently stupid electronic pulses of a computer system.

However, in the two years following implementation of this self-navigating chip technology into the transportation industry, it was determined that the added redundancy of the human element had been the single underlying cause of every accident, missed delivery, delayed shipment, or overlooked maintenance requirement that had been investigated.

It was the fatal collision of two passenger-laden Boeing 797s over the dark, cloudy, rain filled skies of Seattle, Washington that had precipitated the elimination of all human interaction with the self-navigating capabilities of all commercial aircraft. This one tragic event, which killed 681 people aboard the two aircraft plus another 210 on the ground, was quickly determined to have been caused by human error. Specifically, pilot error.

The final report stated that the pilot of the incoming 797 had overridden the auto-land sequence of his aircraft when his radar scope indicated another heavy was about to cross in front of him on the same course and at the same altitude. In reviewing the black box’s data of both aircraft it was determined that the onboard radar of the incoming jumbo was indeed displaying faulty altitude numbers on the pilot’s scope, but was also in the process of repairing the numerical glitch and resetting itself when the pilot took control. Had the aircraft been flying in clear skies instead of the zero visibility of the soupy cloud cover, the incoming pilot would have seen that the other aircraft was actually a safe 1400 feet above him. But the pilot, ignoring the absence of any warning alarms in the cockpit (which, according to procedure, was the only condition that allowed for pilot override) took control of the aircraft and frantically added power and tried to climb. When the proximity alarms finally did fill the cockpit as the result of his climbing to within a thousand feet of the aircraft above him, the pilot wrongly assumed that he had anticipated and properly reacted to the near miss projected on his radar screen even before his onboard computers picked it up.

The only word captured on the incoming 797′s cockpit voice recorder was the unfinished wail of, “Nooooooooo…!” This having been heard and recorded seven-tenths of a second before its starboard wing cut into the bottom of the fuselage just forward of the tail section of the hopelessly maneuvering aircraft in its path. Both aircraft exploded and fell six thousand feet, one crashing into the waters of Puget Sound while the other scored a direct hit onto a 300 unit apartment complex killing an additional 210 of its sleeping, unsuspecting residents.

As a result of the investigation, all pilots were removed from the cockpits of all commercially flown aircraft and the override capability of the onboard auto-pilot was de-activated. Not long afterward that trains, ocean going vessels, and trucks followed suit. Since then, there has not been one recorded incident involving a crash or even a near miss in the transportation industry. Stan no longer flew.

To compensate for the millions of jobs that were being lost to the advancing technologies of B.G. Enterprise, the New World Government assured all its people that they would be found gainful employment and be taken care of under a generous employee package of B.G. Enterprise.

During the initial transition from the free and open society that was once the United States to the closely scrutinized and protective global society that is now the New World Government, Stan and Emily had been employed as Installers. They were trained and given the task of installing monitoring devices in hundreds of residential homes in Garnersville. Upon completion of this job they were assigned to one of the Monitoring buildings that were being erected all around the world. They were fortunate in that they didn’t have to relocate because Monitoring Site #7243 had been built only a short distance from their home.

Now, Stan and Emily work side by side in one of eighty monitoring cubicles located on the third floor of the five story Monitoring Site. The building itself sits discreetly amongst a stand of fir and pine trees overlooking the Hudson River. However, what should have been conducive to a pleasant and soothing work environment for the employees inside was lost due to the fact that the building was windowless, as were all of the Monitoring Sites. Monitoring had become the name of the game in 2019 society and that’s what took place in these buildings every second of every day.

Stan and Emily both work the 1200 to 1800 shift. And although six hours doesn’t sound like much of a work day, the monotonous, mindless, drudgery of their work often made those six hours seem like ten or twelve. Their job is to monitor ship movements in the Atlantic Ocean. Each has their own 200 square mile grid of ocean to keep track of on a 17 inch tracking screen. Emily’s grid encompasses the northeastern most area of the United States — or what use to be the United States, now just another part of the New World — from the southern tip of what use to be Nova Scotia to two hundred miles off the coast of Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Stan’s grid covers from Cape Cod on the north to the southern tip of New Jersey on the south. They consider themselves lucky in that their respective grids are in the commercial shipping lanes of the North Atlantic and not situated out in the middle of the ocean where you could stare at your tracking screen for weeks without seeing a single blip cross into your grid.

On August 11th, Stan and Emily intentionally arrived at site #7243 fifteen minutes early, allowing Stan to spend a little time at the main informational console located in the lobby. Here one could access information on anybody who was registered, or if not registered, at least known to the New World Government. This information was provided in a personal biography accessible to anyone who cared to look. The biographies were updated as notable events or changes took place in a person’s life, for example, a change in work assignment, medical problems, the birth of a child, marriage, divorce, etc. Privacy no longer existed in today’s world and secrets were hard to keep.

Stan searched the database for one Steve Jobs, limiting the search to the North American continent. He watched as a list of 27 people with that name popped up on the screen. Scrolling down the list, Stan was able to quickly eliminate thirteen of the names that were followed by the word ‘deceased.’ Reading the bio’s of the remaining fourteen, Stan found that eight were under the age of sixteen, two were over ninety years old, and one was presently confined to a long term quarantine facility. (This usually meant AIDS or some other infectious disease.) Stan deleted those eleven, leaving three “possibles”. Of those three, the one that caught Stan’s eye was a Steve Jobs living in Livermore, California. Stan read that this Steve Jobs had been a co-founder and two-time CEO for a company called Apple Computer, which had been credited with creating the enormous personal computer industry of the 1980s. Also to its credit (or detriment, Stan thought), Apple was cited as the last remaining hi-technology company to be swallowed up by the global conglomeration of B.G. Enterprise, surviving numerous hostile takeover attempts until succumbing to the inevitable in the year 2009. Apple had even outlasted NASA and the European Space Agency, which had both been privatized and taken over by B.G. Enterprise in 2008.

Stan also learned that Steve Jobs and Bill Gates had at one time worked together in their early careers. The bio went on to say that Steve Jobs had initially and vehemently argued and warned against Bill Gates’ proposal for a global government, but failing to convince more than a handful of humbled politicians and a terrified population, Jobs withdrew his objections and actually joined Bill Gates’ team as the head of B.G. Enterprises’ Embedded Chip production facility located on the campus of what once use to be the Lawrence Livermore Laboratories in Livermore, Ca.

Stan thought this had to be the same man the Individualist were hanging their hopes on. How this one man was going to accomplish any major changes in the way the world was being run, Stan hadn’t a clue. He exited the database and rode the elevator to the third floor where Emily was waiting for him in their assigned monitoring cubicle. He quietly told her what he had found out and then whispered, “I guess all we can do is wait and see what happens. The Individualists told me that whatever this guy Jobs has planned, it’s tied to the monitoring systems.”

Continued next month

Pete Miner
pete@mymac.com

Websites mentioned:
http://www.wolfenet.com/~pminer