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Techno-Geek Ramblingby George Ziemann -- February 1, 2009 Got a Mac laptop for Christmas, which I'm really just now starting to adapt to after shunning OS X for so long. It was about time. The Internet was slowly becoming unavailable to me as I hung on to Netscape 7 for as long as possible. First of all, I have to thank my 12-year-old for letting me have her laptop, which was refurbished when she got it. We upgraded her to a desktop model with a 17" screen, because she had killed at least two G3 Powerbooks already and the laptop (iBook G4) is actually a Frankenstein of the working parts from two of them that she killed -- one with a thick teriyaki sauce in the mother board; the other had a rip inside the LCD display, a black patch that was spreading. Yeah, we probably started her too young, but she's in 7th grade now and her grades are outstanding. Her name is Mackenzie, we call her Mac. The only reason I brought up getting a laptop was because I've been on a technology "hold" since 2001. I'm still happy with my beige G3. The old software still works (OS 9), I accomplish a lot, saved a ton of money on software. But the internet has slowly been disappearing over the years. Sites become inaccessible. Sometimes they reappear, usually they don't. I wish I had kept some sort of a diary about this as it was happening. In retrospect, it's kind of interesting because it goes a distance beyond simple consideration of what brand of computer I own, although that does come into play somewhat. Started using computers on the job in 1985 at a small-town newspaper, which was part of a larger chain. First we were using a Compugraphic typesetting machine. The "computer" needed a special refrigerated room. It had something like 5 or 10 MB of storage. Maintenance calls went to Boston, and they got to Bullhead City, AZ just two or three days later. One day they put Mac SEs on our desks, which had been chosen due to Adobe type handling advantages over Windows. But either way they had gone, the era of rolls of highly expensive photo-sensitive paper and $2000 service calls was over. From that day until 2001, I was always up to date with the current software. Went through three or four computer upgrades, which were required solely to keep up with growing requirements of the evolving software. When I started teaching software and working with clients, it was absolutely imperative to be familiar with the latest versions of software. It was also important to make sure I could deal with whatever file format they gave, no matter how inconveniently formatted it was. In 2001, I stepped away from the business sector to focus on music again. Suddenly, no one was bringing me incompatible files that required me to upgrade software, There was this DRM thing going on anyway, my version of iTunes (2.0.4) only played plain ol' mp3 files, and I still wasn't sold on their viability yet. Being a Mac user has always been, in and of itself, a barrier to big chunks of the Internet. Like when Napster came out and none of us could use it. And iMesh. And Kazaa, Grokster, Aimster, Napster 2.0 and Rhapsody. In the last 7 years, I've been rather comfortable as a Luddite in this respect. I'm using Flash 6, which was as far as Netscape 7 could handle and usually just a tad more than it could handle. But that trailed off. I've been seeing "Upgrade Your Flash Player" for so long that I forgot content shows up there, not just ads. There's a certain joy in finding all the old stuff again. The Onion's AV Club was one of the first to go. Just loaded blank pages. The Onion disappeared soon after. For a while, it was a slow change. Every few months, another site I used to go to became unusable. Some sites seem pretty rock solid. I never had a problem with them, except their Flash content was unviewable. The Washington Post, New York Times, BBC, CNN, Salon, Slate and Fox News all were still running fine before my upgrade. There was a second batch that worked, then didn't, then did again. YouTube for instance. It always dragged, then it started to be usable. I actually created an account once, but I was never able to log back in. Then the videos wouldn't play at all for a while. Just before I switched over, the videos would play again, but there was an odd, extended delay that I now see are commercials. MySpace and Facebook went through similar issues. I created accounts, then I couldn't click on any of the buttons to access them again. Batch three were the "killer" sites, which would crash my browser if I tried to read one of their stories. Mostly blogs. It was kind of sad when slashdot became a killer about a year ago. The Huffington Post has been off limits, too, but most of the others I don't remember because I never could visit them. The last group is comprised of web sites with one of several oddities, the most perplexing being the ones that draw the complete page, then it disappears. Netscape could read the page, did so, and then the site hid it again. This seems like bad programming, as within one site some pages display, some don't, some display and erase. A subculture of these will draw the entire page, except for the part you want to see. Oddity number two includes sites which redraw their pages every three seconds or so, making them actually painful to look at. I haven't completely switched over to OS X yet. My old computer is still awesome for handling my web site and recording music. It has always kept up with my typing. So far, I'm switching my web browsing and mail over to the laptop, but I haven't even experimented with any of the applications yet. My old computer is 366 MHz. The laptop is 1.25 GHz. But the iBook has several things I dislike, which is why I've never owned one.
Okay, that's only three things, which may or may not count as several, but it's at least a few. That's not bad for a Frankenstein laptop. Everything works. I used to debate Mac vs PC. I gave up on it a long time ago, except sometimes when someone will proclaim the Mac owners are elitists who pay extra just because it's a Mac and PCs are always a better deal. I've spent $1900 on hardware in the last 10 years, if you count the purchase price of both of the refurbished laptops I used to make Frankenstein. And less than $1000 for software, primarily since everyone stopped making software for the G3 years ago. Surprisingly, a computer seems to become extremely stable if you stop adding new stuff to "improve" the operating system every two weeks. The downside is that it eventually becomes too outmoded to access information formatted into newer protocols it cannot understand. |