Bill, you old prankster you! That was a pretty hilarious thing you did to me the other morning. Almost as funny as your Soupy Sales pie-in-the-face stunt you pulled off in Brussels. Although I would have thought that a man of your stature might have more important things to do than waste your time playing such an elaborate, hi-tech prank on the likes of me, I reckon even the richest man in the world can have a sense of humor. You really had me going there for awhile.
If you don’t mind Bill, (or even if you do!) I’m gonna tell my readers how you hacked your way into my computer and tried to force your browser software on me.
Of course, I can’t prove that it was Bill Gates who did this but I can put two and two together and come up with the only plausible explanation for what happened… and it all points to Billy and/or Microsoft.
If you read my column last month, I defined Billy’s “Internet Explorer” as a ‘computer virus.’ I also insulted his Word 6.0 by calling it the ‘slowest moving object known to man.’ I suspect that Bill read this and took umbrage with my definitions and decided to play a little prank on me.
This is what happened:
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This month catches me without a story to tell. Of course I could have composed a fictitious yarn replete with intrigue and adventure about some non-human life form that decided to take up residence inside my Performa and slowly but methodically took over my mind. But alas, that sort of prevarication is not what the half-dozen or so regular readers of Miner Thoughts have come to expect from me. No, you read my column because what you learn here gives you that extra edge when dealing with today’s computerized society. You rely on me to give you those little tidbits of information that will always keep you one step ahead of that ever present, self-proclaimed computer guru in your workplace. And hey, I’m happy to oblige.
Today you will learn the definitions of 50 of those sometimes pesky and hard to understand computer terms that we all too often trip over. So sit back, relax, and scroll your way through an education you couldn’t get anywhere else.
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Unless you’ve been living in a cave or under a rock for the past several years you have probably heard of the meteorological phenomenon known as El Niño. If you live in the Pacific Northwest like myself and enjoy seeing your rhododendron bushes blooming in the middle of the winter and the accompanying warm weather that makes this possible, you are hoping El Niño will stick around for years to come. But if you live in California you wish it would just go away before you start growing webs between your toes or your house gets swept away in the mud. Thanks to El Niño, Floridians can’t even walk down a sidewalk without having to dodge a tornado or two. In Mexico you wonder why it’s snowing and in the rain forest of Brazil you’re praying for rain. One thing is certain, El Niño has turned our normal weather patterns upside down.
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Normally I don’t make a big deal out of nor do I beg readers for feedback on what I write in my little corner of My Mac Magazine. I figure that if my unintelligent and meaningless stories make it past the editors and publisher of this fine magazine, I have tricked enough people into thinking that I, Pete Miner, actually have something to say. This is not to suggest that I don’t enjoy receiving email from my readers (all 6 or 7 of you!) because I do. I just don’t actively solicit your opinions. Just as I didn’t solicit the opinion of the person who sent me this email from South Africa:
Buried five stories underground in what has become known as Area 51 in the state of Nevada is a nondescript room manned and operated by a special R&D team from Apple Computer Inc. Although Apple Computer has its headquarters in Cupertino, California, and maintains a research and development department there, it is at its Area 51 facility where the company performs its, shall we say, not-so-traditional research and development. Rumor has it that Area 51 is the place where the U.S. government is hiding alien spacecraft and, some even say, alien beings. I cannot speak directly to this issue of alien beings or UFOs because of an oath of secrecy I was required to take before signing on as a writer of My Mac magazine. At the time I took the oath and for the following two years, I didn’t have the slightest idea what a high-security government installation had to do with writing about the Macintosh computer.
I had all but forgotten about the silly oath I had taken until a few weeks ago when I was contacted by the publisher of this rag (I mean mag) and asked if I was willing to do a piece on what the real Apple was up to. I told Tim that I thought most of the other writers, he included, were doing a bang-up job of keeping the readers informed of what was coming out of Cupertino, and that I didn’t think I could add anything more to what was already being written.
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Gosh! Another year has come and gone. What the heck’s up with that? The millennium is fast approaching and I’m convinced that as it gets closer, time is also speeding up. Scientists may not be able to detect this increase in the speed of time, (or maybe they can but just ain’t telling us) but I myself am convinced that it’s happening. I don’t possess any hard evidence or data to substantiate this claim other than the fact that three days after we celebrate the coming of a new year, I have to mourn the fact that I just got one year older. I realize that this is a pessimistic way of looking at one’s birthday, but according to my calculations, if time continues speeding up at the present rate it seems to be going now, I figure by the time my 70th birthday rolls around, it’ll only take 18 days before I hit my 71st. How optimistic can one be knowing that?
Unable to do anything about the speed of time, I guess I’ll just have to learn to live faster and hope my calculations are wrong. But that’s not why I called you all here today.
No, this month I want to share with you my perception of what the next generation of Virtual Reality machines might be capable of doing in the not too distant future.
Picture, if you will, this average American family living in the suburbs of Seattle, Washington. Mom and Dad Average are sitting at the kitchen table sipping on their last cup of coffee before heading off to their respective jobs, when little Johnny Average walks into the room saying, “I think I’ll stay home today and go to school from here.”
“Good idea,” replies Mom Average. “It looks like it might rain today anyway. No use getting all wet.”
“If it’s gonna be a wet day, I think I’ll go to work from here also,” says Dad Average.
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The meeting broke up and everyone left the room except Duke and Mrs. Claus. Mrs. C walked over to Duke, put her arm around his shoulder and said, “Don’t pay Santa no mind, Duke. He gets rude and obnoxious at times and can’t deal with anyone who’s smarter than he is. He knows you’re smarter than him and that’s why he treats you like he does. He likes dealing with Susie because she won’t question him; she’ll do as he asks just as long as she gets something out of the deal, and Santa enjoys giving stuff away, so that makes her easy to deal with. If you’re worried about your name not being on The List, you can stop worrying right now because I’ll fix that. It’s obvious to me that I made a mistake, because after talking to you I can see you are definitely a cool-kid.”
“That’s not it, Mrs. Claus,” insisted Duke. “I don’t care if I’m on The List or not. I just don’t feel that any kids should be left off the list unless they are extremely bad kids. Being cool or not being cool shouldn’t have anything to do with it. 99% of the kids on Earth are basically good kids and they deserve to be recipients of Santa’s generosity, not just a selected few. Can’t you see that?”
“Yes, I can Duke, however, Santa only has a limited amount of time to circle the globe and he couldn’t accomplish that if he had to go to every child’s home. It just isn’t possible.”
“Oh, yes it is, Mrs. C. If Santa would have listened to me, I could have built and installed a highly sophisticated navigational computer in his sleigh that would have enabled him and his reindeer to circle the planet in record time, stopping at every kid’s home along the way, all within the allotted 24 hours!”
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For an untold number of years now, one Mr. Santa Claus of the North Pole, Planet Earth, has organized and partaken in an annual 24 hour around-the-world philanthropic expedition. This ongoing expedition has consisted of making a list of all the boys and girls in the world, checking the list a couple of times, finding out who’s cool and who’s not-so-cool and then flying to the cool kids’ houses in his outrageously red reindeer-powered flying sleigh and giving those cool kids neat stuff, batteries not included. Time permitting, he’ll show up at the not-so-cool kids’ houses and leave them a piece of coal with a note attached elucidating the benefits of being cool.
Doing this year in and year out takes an exorbitant amount of organizational and logistical planning, which Mr. and Mrs. Claus (and a few of the smarter elves) have, until now, been taking care of manually with pencil, paper and a real old compass that one of the elves dug out of the bottom of a Cracker Jacks box thirty-eight years ago. But, with the planetary population now exceeding 5 billion souls, this type of record keeping and navigation has produced more and more missed deliveries of stuff and has gotten Santa in hot water with the International Aviation Agency more times than he cares to think about. So, faced with the reality that he may have to cancel his yearly worldwide romp, Santa called an emergency crisis meeting to explore what alternatives, if any, he might have to keep his operation going.
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PUBLISHERS NOTE:
[The following is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to
actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.]
Who woulda’ thunk that writing a small monthly column for the electronic pro-Macintosh magazine My Mac would gain me the recognition of some famous (and some not so famous) people around the globe? Certainly not I. But that’s exactly what’s happening.
Ever since I began writing for this highly regarded magazine I have become somewhat of a celebrity’s celebrity and find my knowledge and expertise in high demand amongst some pretty well known people. Unlike most of my readers, these pretty well known people must not know that I am devoid of any knowledge or expertise about anything.
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For those of you who don’t know, I do all of my computin’ on a Performa 550 that was manufactured in October of 1994. I bought it on New Years Day 1995, and its been a regular member of the Miner clan ever since. And although this inanimate member of the family was never formally given a name, it has informally come to be known as “the computer.”
Recently I’ve been thinking I might have been better off buying a Wintel PC instead of this lowly 68030 Mac I have sitting in front of me. Not because I’m unhappy with this machine, mind you; on the contrary, “the computer” does everything I need it to do and does it well. But had I purchased, let’s say, a 386 PC on that cold and wintry first day of 1995 instead of this Macintosh, I most likely would have been forced to upgrade to the much faster Pentium or even a Pentium II machine by now, keeping me on the cutting edge of this ever changing computer technology.
Why…?
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So what’s it gonna be: AppleSoft, MicroApple, SoftApple, MacinSoft, AppleMicro, MicroMaco, SoftMac, SoftIntosh, RottenApple, or KissMyApple? Hard to say but one thing is certain: we, the common folk, will be the last to know. That’s why they call us end users.
Sure, it may be a bit premature to be thinking that a name change for either Steve Jobs’ Apple (I think it’s safe to assume that Steve is calling the shots at Apple no matter what his title), or Billy’s Microsoft is in the making, but is that any more unbelievable than what was just announced in Boston?
By the time you read this, you’ll probably be sick of listening to everyone in the industry tell you what this whole semi-merger of Apple and Microsoft means so I won’t bore you with my analysis of the situation. (Even if I had one!) Instead, I’d like to discuss the two major characters of this soon-to-be highly rated sitcom/soap-opera.
Let me refresh your memory with a few quotes from these two computer giants and how they felt about each other as recently as 1996.
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Don’t you just hate it, when all that’s on TV are summer reruns? You’ve already seen them once, and now they want you to suffer through them again. What’s a person to do?
Well, if you’ve come to Miner Thoughts for something fresh and new, you’ve just added to the number of blunders you’ve already made today because all you’re going to find here is, you guessed it, a summer rerun!
The following little ditty appeared in the April, 1996 issue of My Mac.
The reason I’m submitting an old, used piece is not what you may think. I’m not on vacation, soaking up the sun on some swanky beach. In fact, I haven’t taken a vacation in 10 or 12 years.
This isn’t a piece that I think is great and deserves to be read a second time. In fact, as poetry goes, it really stinks. I didn’t get lazy or forget to write something for this issue. In fact, I always have 2 or 3 columns in the works at any given time.
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Two months ago, I told you about Coldar’s cordanna juice (cyanide gas) overdose and subsequent illness which nearly killed her. She blamed her illness more on the Macintosh SE I had sent her and less on her own inattention to the duties she was supposed to be carrying out while observing us here on earth. I quickly pointed out to her that it wasn’t the Macintosh SE that was the cause of her near death, but her ignorance and stupidity that resulted in her body being drenched in the deadly cordanna juice. After all, she’s a highly trained space explorer and should be aware of what’s going on around her at all times. I told her not to be blaming me or the Macintosh for her ineptitude.
As you can tell, I don’t let that little space bug push me around, even though she claims to have the ability to destroy Planet Earth.
Coldar has since calmed down from all that ruckus and only interacts with the Mac after her daily observations and reports are completed.
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I had a conversation with my Macintosh the other day and although I had long suspected its independent nature and hard drive rebelliousness, I still felt that I, a human being, was its master. Boy, was I ever wrong!
It all started while I was attempting the simple task of uploading three small files to my Web site using the program Fetch. Nothing difficult here, right? That’s what I thought until Fetch kept crashing and unexpectedly quitting when it reached the part of actually uploading the files.
Exasperated, I went through all the fixes I could think of. I rebuilt the desktop, I shut off all but the necessary extensions, I zapped the whatchamacallit, I slapped the side of the monitor, I slammed the external hard drive with my fist a couple of times and even reinstalled Fetch. All to no avail.
After a few choice cuss words, I opened up a blank SimpleText page and boldly typed:
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These Macintosh machines are pretty durable little suckers, ain’t they? I say this from experience as you’re about to find out.
The other day I wanted to clean up my desktop (I’m talking my actual hardwood desktop). So in order to do a complete job of it, I moved my Performa 550 so I could get at all the dust bunnies, cigarette ashes, old ham and cheese sandwiches, spilled milk, spilled coffee and some green slimy pulsating substance that I haven’t identified yet which was growing under the machine. You know, the same ol’ stuff that collects underneath everybody’s computer.
I set the 550 on the floor behind me, (which just happened to be at the top of the stairway) and with dust cloth, vacuum cleaner, shovel and scraper, I commenced cleaning my work area.
Finished, I stepped back to admire what I had accomplished and my heel knocked over the 550, sending it bouncing and crashing down the 14 carpeted steps to the floor below. Jeeze, I hate it when it does that. But that wasn’t the first time my computer has taken a nose dive. I guess you could call me a klutz. I drop stuff, knock things over and otherwise have the grace of a bull in a china shop, or so my wife says. That’s why I’m so impressed with the durability of my Macintosh.
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This is where I bring you up-to-date concerning my ongoing correspondence with my now good friend and co-conspirator, Coldar. If you don’t know who Coldar is you need to read Miner Thoughts in the April edition of My Mac, cause I ain’t gonna rehash that whole story here.
Following several days of no e-mail from Coldar, I was getting a little worried. She had never missed a day of writing since she first contacted me.
Truth be known, all her writing was getting to be a little too much. After all, I don’t need or even care to know every little thing she does throughout her waking hours but she insists on telling me everything, right down to how her body processes and, shall we say, evacuates its own waste. I don’t want to know that kind of stuff, but she tells me anyway! Heck, her dietary intake is enough to make me sick! Her favorite meal consist of Cadmium pellets rolled in a boron solution which she washes down with a tube of anhydrous ammonia. Good Grief!
But now, after not hearing from her, I realize how much I looked forward to receiving her e-mail and was becoming a little antsy wondering if something was wrong.
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What a wild and crazy place this information highway has become, huh?
Can you name me any other place that has a more useless, mindless, un-informed, misinformed, money grabbing, dishonest, vanity crazed group of people crawling around it than the Internet?
Aw’right, aw’right, I hear some of you screaming, WASHINGTON D.C.! WASHINGTON D.C.! Well, I can’t argue with that, except to say I think there are more of these scuzzy, slimy people on the Internet due to the fact that there are a lot more people that use the Net than there are people in our nation’s capitol.
This virtual highway, or community if you wish, has become very crowded, tiresome and oft times claustrophobic for me. There’s nothing I hate more than pasting a new URL in my browser and having to sit and wait, sometimes up to 90 seconds for my browser to either elbow its way into the new site or just give up and turn on me with a diabolical, “You can’t get there from here, try again later” message! It makes me want to scream. And sometimes I do! After all, I just drove the information highway halfway around the world to look at something and now some stupid computer has the audacity to tell me to come back later! What kind of bull is that? My ISP says I have unlimited access to the Internet and, by golly, that’s what I want! So after giving this problem some Miner Thought, I have devised a way to gain immediate access to any Web or FTP site on the Net at anytime, day or night. Armed with only my Hackin’ Mac and a little imagination, I proceeded to do things my way!
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What you’re about to read could get me in a heap of trouble with the U.S. Government if they were to find out what I did. So I must ask you, my dear Constant Reader, to keep what you read here under your hat. That said, this is my admission of guilt and explanation.
A friend of mine works for NASA at the Cape Canaveral launch facility in Florida. He was one of the lead scientists on the Galileo space project, which was launched from the Cape on October 18, 1989 aboard the space shuttle Atlantis. Its main mission: To cruise around the planet Jupiter and its many moons, gathering data and sending that data via the Deep Space Network (DSN) back to us here on earth.
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All this sniveling about who manufactures the better computer has finally driven me to prove, once and for all, who builds the most reliable, innovative and user friendliest computer on the market today.
To accomplish this, I conducted my own scientifically controlled Benchmark tests on several of the leading personal computers being sold today.
I used my own funds to carry out these Benchmark test so I could maintain the highest level of credibility – even though thousands, and in one case, tens-of-thousands of dollars were offered to me if I would slant my findings favorably towards one computer manufacturer or another. In fact, as soon as one company heard that my findings would be printed in the highly regarded and esteemed My Mac Magazine, that manufacturer increased his bribe to $75,000. I, of course, refused these sorry attempts at bribery so that I could give you, Dear Constant Reader of mine, the true, scientific, unbiased, untainted and totally honest results that you deserve and have come to rely upon when reading Miner Thoughts. Besides, my honesty and credibility cannot be bought for a penny under $100,000.
I could have conducted these Benchmark tests at a lab just like the big boys do at Macworld, MacUser, and PC Magazine but I opted to go out in the real world to do my testing. Some of you may question my sanity for choosing the Gorilla exhibit at the Seattle Zoo to conduct these tests, but if you’ll please bear with me and trust me, I will, as always, prove to you that there is a method to my madness.
Ready? Let’s go Benchmarking!
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This was the winter that broke the camel’s back, so-to-speak. At least for me it was. Driving my 80,000 pounds of tractor, trailer, and cargo up and down the mountain passes of the western United States in the dead of winter has never been much more than a slight inconvenience for me. In fact, at times it was a welcome challenge. But as I got older it became more of a pain in the ass than anything else. No longer did I consider it a challenge to get out of a toasty warm cab in the middle of a raging blizzard to hang tire chains that weigh 40 pounds each onto eight tires only to have to get out of that same warm cab ten miles later to take the damn things off because I was over the mountain and on dry pavement again. No, I thought, there’s got to be a better way to make a living. But trucking is all I know! I’ve been doing it my whole life, I told myself. Maybe I just need to figure out a way to make it easier and more enjoyable. Yeah, that’s the ticket!
So I set out to do what long-haul truck drivers all over the world have been unable to accomplish. That is, being out on the road making a living and at the same time being home with their families. How is that possible you inquire? Well, I wasn’t sure it was possible but what the hell, I gave it a try. And ya know what? It wasn’t all that hard to do! After all, I do own a Macintosh computer!
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