A Poem About Some Sweet Pants

I have pants
These pants are blue
These pants are of no importance to you
For they are my pants

Every morning I pull on my pants
Because I can wear them without a belt
They are my favorite pair of pants
And I have never washed them

My mom bought me these pants
I said, “ I want those pants.”
She said, “Are you sure?”
I said “Yes.”
I got the pants

Teachers look at me and say
Young man, you might go far someday
(I think it’s the pants!)
I like these pants

I wear my pants in my van
I wear these pants despite the heat
I can stick it to the man
In these pants

If you saw a picture
of these pants of mine so dear
You would scoff, wrinkle your face
And say, “ Those are but pants.”
But I like these pants

I can dance in these pants
Which would be great
If I could dance
Some things cannot be helped
Even when wearing these pants

I walk the town in these pants
I spy on people, too
Around the corner, I see France
Maybe soon, I’ll see you

You will say
“I like those pants”
And I will think you cute


And we will dance
In our pants
For I can dance, with you.





_DZ

Everyone should be able to check this box at least once in their lifetime!

I was finishing up my taxes the other day, and I came to this screen.


Knowing that little things like this exist on tax forms makes me happy.


_DZ

Texting and Twittering Increase Connectivity but Detract From Meaningful Experiences

As cell phone use, instant messaging, and participation in online social technologies such as Twitter become more widespread, our society, or at the very least my generation and the ones after it, are becoming increasingly more spontaneous. People are more connected, more in touch, and just in general more in the know about what the happenings are in the world around them. Parties are organized, e-invites are sent out, and guest lists are compiled all from a cell phone at the grocery store in front of shelves stocked with dishwasher soap. We should rejoice, right? After all people are communicating with one another! Efficiently!

But I think that there is a dark side to this revolution as well. And there’s no denying it - it IS a revolution. It is a revolution in which the present is preeminent, a revolution that could turn the organized human being into an impulsive, mechanized, social drone. Where there once was clear communication and coordination there will now be compulsive multitasking and extraneous busyness. The hours of the day will be ever-shifting, non-linear, and dangerously pliant.

When you are only a text message away, the inhibition exhibited by some in contacting you is slowly abolished. People text you, wanting to know what you are up to, and then you must interrupt what you are up to in order to tell them that, yes, you are up to something. And then they ask you how it is, and you say, “gr8”. Then they ask if you want to hang out at the movies in an hour.

And now you have a choice.

You can continue to do an activity you enjoy with someone you enjoy being with, or you can leave that activity to hang out with another person whom you enjoy being around and doing things with. And worse, you alone are the deciding factor in making the decision. Your friend can’t look at you disapprovingly while you answer a private text the way they can when you are audibly waffling over the phone over whether or not to alter your evening plans. This choice would not have existed had you simply turned your phone off and directed your full attention to the activity at hand. Not only have you now spent time answering a text, but you have taken time out of a joint activity to do something private. You might as well have pulled out a GameBoy for five minutes.

BRB, person I’m hanging out with!

The choices you make regarding your time should cost you something. Opportunity costs should abound over the course of how you decide to spend your day. These costs are oppressive enough, but when you add in the ability to change what you are doing into every waking second of the day, things can become hectic. Moreover, planning an activity, at least in my experience, results in heightened anticipation for the event to transpire. This past Christmas, my mom gave me a ticket for the "A Prairie Home Companion" show last Saturday. I had to wait two months for the show, and every minute of the hundred-and-twenty that I sat in the Fitzgerald Theater was worth the wait.

When you make plans on the fly, however, there are no anticipations and, therefore, your enjoyment of the new activity that you spontaneously decided on is, more often than not, a merely average experience. It was something you did because you didn’t have anything else to do. Or maybe you did, and you thought the new activity was going to be better, in which case you now have to compare two activities that you were perfectly happy doing in order to make sure that you made the right choice. You have unknowingly heightened the chance of you regretting your own decision.

A few weeks ago I was making plans on Facebook with a friend, whom I hadn’t seen in months, to hang out. It was in the afternoon, and I asked, “How does tomorrow morning sound?”

To which I received the reply, “I don’t know, I might have plans. I don’t have anything at the moment, but something might come up.”

!!

My attempt to make a plan was being subverted for fear that something, no doubt something more fun, might spontaneously demand my friend’s full attention! Here was a guaranteed activity - hanging out with me in the morning for a hour or so - that was left hanging because other plans might need to be made in the next twelve hours. (We did actually hang out the following morning.) And to think that I used to plan accountability lunches, with two or three other people, weeks in advance! What was I thinking!?

Now all this flexibility, like I said before, is not all bad. We can multitask, stay in communication, and stay active with people. However, I left one part of my story out. I don’t text or Twitter. And when a large part of organizing social life goes on in that realm, and it will increasingly do, those who don’t participate in the technology, like me, will be left out of the loop. It is akin to the last townsperson without a phone showing up at a town meeting that was moved to the evening before. The poster on the bulletin board still says tonight, but everyone else got a phone call about the change.

Now, that is progress - phones definitely make things a lot easier. But how easy do they need to be? This brings me back to the point about planning an event adding to its significance and expectation. I was perfectly able to organize my social life over Facebook and the telephone. I made plans, I showed up for appointments, and I even was flexible when if a friend phoned telling me that he was running late or couldn’t make it at all. But now I have to wonder, is that the truth, or did he just get texted a “better” offer?

_DZ

Why Living In An Adequately-Sized House Was/Is Awesome

On the front page of the ‘Home’ section of Monday’s Pioneer Press was an article reporting on the growing trend of potential homeowners settling for well-planned, cozy houses instead of following the previous more-rooms-in-the-house-the-better model. Smaller floor plans and multipurpose rooms are on the rise. The main reason for this is, of course, the tanking economy - people are second-guessing whether or not they really need a bigger house in trade for a higher mortgage.

This was surprising to me, because I had never thought that the bigger the house the better. I have been in plenty of big, nice, houses, but I never thought of them as something to put yourself into massive debt over. Big houses were what rich people bought. You know, people who could afford them.

You can chalk this up to ignorance on my part, but the point still stands that I think the first thing to consider in house-buying is how much space you can afford versus how much space you really need. If you want more space than you need or can afford, rethinking that mortgage should be in order. But what do I know - I’ve never bought or sold a house. My family has never even owned a house.

To date I have lived in ten different houses, two different apartments, and one college dorm room. That’s thirteen different permanent residences in twenty-one years. Up until age twelve I had to share a room with my brother, after which I either had my own room or shared a room with a non-relative roommate. The apartments being small goes without saying, but none of houses I’ve lived in would be considered “big” by American standards, yet they each had enough space for my family of four.

I cherish these houses because each one reinforced ideas about living quarters that helped me later on in life as I ventured out on my own. Small houses have taught me lessons that big houses may not have, and the result of this is that I am more aware of how I relate to my living quarters. Allow me to share some examples of what I have learned.

Small houses taught me to share spaces. Growing up, I had to share bathrooms, bedrooms, washrooms, and playrooms. Sharing rooms taught me to clean up after myself, to finish what I started, and to resolve conflicts. I couldn’t leave stuff strewn about because other people used that room, too. If I wanted to play with something, I had to do what I wanted to do in the time allotted, and then I had to pack up and move somewhere else. This, coincidentally, also taught me to keep track of my toys.

When I visit big houses, which is not often, I usually see a huge kids playroom with toys scattered about, abandoned after some play session that happened weeks ago. I never had that luxury. I always had to clean everything up, display my LEGO creations for mere days at a time before dismantling them to build something new, and keep my toy bins nice and orderly because I couldn’t afford the floor space to leave everything scattered about.

Small houses also taught me to buy and use functional furniture. I can’t remember a single item of furniture that my parents kept for display purposes only. No china cabinets, no cubbie shelves to hold knick-knacks, no small hallway tables that supported only a lamp, no overstuffed furniture that us kids weren’t allowed to sit on, nothing like that. Everything in our house had a purpose that it dutifully served. Part of that was because of the size of the houses, yes, but part of it was also due to the constant moving. When you move every two years (on average), you really start to question the reason behind keeping useless furniture, and then you start to dump it. I took that lessraon with me.

Speaking of dumping furniture, that was another thing I learned to do - not become too attached to it. My parents did keep a lot of furniture throughout the years, but they also gave a lot away and bought a lot of recycled stuff. My brother and I both had desks that were purchased from recycle shops. Throughout my childhood furniture was stuff that came and went as easily as the clothes I grew into and out of.

Finally, living in small houses taught me to think of the neighbors. Space is a luxury in most of Japan, and neighbors were never far away. My dad stressed the importance of having good relations with the neighbors, and being in a small house limited the noise levels as well as how much buffer space we had between houses. In the suburban American sprawl, I feel that this is often lost. When mowing your yard constitutes a good 40 minutes of exercise, who has time to pack a compass and knapsack and make the trek to meet the neighbors?

So that’s what I learned from living in lots of small houses. And that is why I will most likely choose to live in a flexibly-designed and cozy house filled with second-hand, functional furniture. At the very least I’m prepared to be ahead of the curve for the next economic recession!




_DZ

The Link Between Depression, MMORPGs, and Covetousness

After reading this short post on the LATimes blog about a study showing that almost 1/3 of Everquest II gamers (MMORPG players) are depressed, I can't help but say, "duh. It took this long to get a study going?"

The last time I played a MMO seriously was in mid-high school and, while I don't know if I was depressed or not, I was definitely not all bubbly-smiley-roses-and-rainbows happy. I played my MMO (Runescape) because it was more fun than real life and I don't think other people who play MMOs have any different motives.

What are the possible motives for playing an MMO? Fun? Distraction? Companionship? Team-building? An attempt to make money? There is one thing that these things have in common - doing them online is supposed to be a better alternative than doing them in the real world.

Nobody aspires to be less online than they are in the real world - there's no point in partaking if you don't. You might as well just stay in real life if you're having a more mediocre time online.

If we aspire to be more online, then what are the goals? What is the online gamer trying to achieve? How can they get prestige, status, and "win" in their online game?

Let's look at the cycle in most, if not all, online games,

1. Kill monsters / Fulfill quest requirements
   
2. Get rewarded for: killing monsters / beating quests
   
3. Loot monsters for items and money / receive quest rewards
   
4. Sell lots of crappy items to buy expensive, better items
   
5. Use better items to: kill more powerful monsters / to do harder quests
   
6. Go to Step 2

This is an endless cycle that players refer to rather ruefully as "the grind". There are some variations to the grind, like having to take a monster down with a group of people, or having a quest that takes a week to complete, but the basics are very much the same.

So how is the success and status measured in online games? It is measured by the amount of items or money you have. He who has the most toys, wins.

If succeeding in the online realm means having the most toys, and we aspire to be more online than we are in the real world, then I can only deduce that turning to online games represents a discontent with the material possessions or status that we have in the real world. Online games are seen as a shortcut to wealth, fame and fortune. And, unlike the real world, the items and money are all that matter. You can be the most generous person online, but people will still look at your avatar and say, "Man, that guy has crappy items. He must suck at this game." Character counts for nothing in the online gaming universe. It is a facet that is hidden by the brilliant shine of digital material wealth. (This also explains the disdain that gamers have for those who spend real-world money to buy in-game items and currency.)

Does this model hold true in the real world? Do the richest "win" at life? Does money, power, fame, and status bring happiness? I think anyone who reads even a basic supermarket tabloid
can tell you that some of the wealthiest people in the world are the most screwed-up and unhappy of the lot.

So what is the secret to happiness? According to the apostle Paul and psychologist Barry Schwartz, the secret is being content with what we have. The key is not self-centeredness and making sure that our all needs are met first and foremost, but rather that those around us are living comfortably. Every psychologist will tell you that the happiest people are those with meaningful, deep, personal friendships with others. Making these kind of friendships is hard work, as any married person can attest to. In short, character counts in real life.

If character counts in real life, and we want out online lives to be better than our real lives, then why isn't altruism rewarded in online games? As it stands now, selflessness is not a desirable attribute to work towards in any online game simply because it is not rewarded. Sure, you can give away items to lower-level characters or help them beat monsters, but does it really cost you anything? No, because you weigh the risks ahead of time and are always pretty confident that you can win before you engage in any risky combat activity. Helping others doesn't cost you anything in an online universe. In Real Life is costs you time, money, work, and/or investment, but it is one of the most rewarding things in life to do.

So no wonder online roleplayers are depressed - they spend all day thinking "If only I had suchandsuch an item, then I could be really cool and people would look up to me." When success is always one item or another hundred gold pieces out of their reach, constantly failing their expectations of what will make them happy, depression is the only direction to go.





_DZ

My Love For the PowerMac G4

While I’ve mentioned my possession of PowerMac G4s in several previous posts throughout the months, I think it’s time I went into the history of them in a little bit more detail. These are machines that I have bought mainly for nostalgic purposes; machines that I idolized when they were released and wanted so badly but could never afford. After high school, however, I decided that I was a big boy and could buy them if I so chose. So I did.

My first G4, a 450MHz single core AGP machine with a DVD drive, 512MB RAM and a 40GB HD running OS 10.4 Tiger, was purchased when I was at Messiah College in February of 2007. I won it on eBay for $75+$20 shipping, which was not a bad deal by any means. It had been a design machine at a studio in New York, and had been retired and put up for sale. The auction mentioned that shipping would be slow, and indeed it was - nearly a month after I won the auction the machine showed up at my campus post office. Included was the tower, an ethernet cable and a Dell keyboard and mouse, which was more than I was expecting. My friend Isaac gave me a 15 inch Dell monitor that had been sitting in his attic, and I soon had my very own G4 up and running in my dorm room. Now, what was I going to do with it?

It wasn’t nearly as powerful as my MacBook, and it didn’t come with any software other than Microsoft Office X. I didn’t have Office at the time, so I transferred that over to my Macbook. I had bought the machine for nostalgia purposes, but now I had a machine that ran the same OS as my Macbook (10.4.9 Tiger), only slower, and had less programs. Crap. The DVD drive was very nice, since I had Japanese region DVDs that required my MacBook to switch the DVD region of its drive. Since the number of switches was limited to five, the G4's first role was as a Japanese DVD-watching machine.

But I didn’t watch Japanese DVDs that often, so I had to find another way to justify this machine that hung out under my desk. Games, I thought, I can run games on it.

So I did!



For the remainder of the college semester, my G4 ran a copy of MacMAME. MacMAME allowed me to play shmups (my first video game love), and I poured hours into playing classic games such as Progear no Arashi, DodonPachi, DonPachi, E.S.P. Rade, Guwange, Battle Garrega and Armed Police Batrider. A regular keyboard was no good for these games and I didn’t have a gamepad, so I bought a USB<=>PS2 cable and borrowed a friend’s idle DualShock to rock MacMAME. It was glorious, I assure you.

I stored the machine over the summer, as I was in Japan making money, and by the time I returned in September I was itching to actually use the G4 for classic, nostalgic purposes. A quick search on eBay and a few strategic bids netted me a copy of Mac OS 9.2 and a copy of Unreal Tournament (I see Unreal Tournament 2004 as pretty much the zenith of computer gaming, but classic UT is almost as good). Not only was I granted access to hours of fragging goodness, but being able to boot into OS 9 allowed me to download and play abandonware games for the Mac as well. These are classic games that have been abandoned by their publishers and are available for free download. The most notable of these games, of course, was SimCity 2000, Original Oregon Trail, and Civilization 2, all of which had incredibly high nostalgic value for me. I was now swimming in nostalgia goodness!

But, believe it or not, that got old. I never imagined it getting old, but it did. And soon I decided that the computer wasn’t worth the space it took up, so I decided to sell it. I bundled it with OS 9, a pair of Roland speakers, the monitor, keyboard and mouse, and the copy of Unreal Tournament and put it up on CraigsList for $150. It wasn’t exactly a flip because all of the stuff DID cost me more than that, but I certainly didn’t lose a lot of money. A guy who lived in Philadelphia came and picked it up, only to call me two days later to complain that “[he] plugged it in and it started smoking.” I expected to be out a full $150, but for some reason he never called me again. I sometimes wonder what ever happened to the machine.

Well, one G4 had come and gone, but how long would it be before I wanted another, better one?

-------


That was in the spring of 2008, after which I went for half a year without another G4. Upon moving to Minnesota, however, I decided that it would be nice to have one again, so to Craigslist I faithfully turned once again.

I sold the first G4 because I didn’t need it, so "what made me decide I needed another one?", you may ask. This time I did actually have a goal in mind. This time I wanted to use it to set up an FTP (File Transfer Protocol) server. An FTP server, for those who don’t know, is a machine that hosts files online that can be accessed from anywhere that has an Internet connection. I saw my future G4 as a machine that would sit in the corner, run 24/7, serve up media files at my request and also backup any data I might want backed up.

My media is actually pretty limited - just 207 episodes of the anime BLEACH (though at 175MB an episode, that’s a lot of data) and a few seasons of House M.D. These I figured would go on a slave hard drive, while the OS and backed-up files would be stored on the primary drive.

But wait, I haven’t actually found a machine yet.


Though I decided I wanted to step up and buy a faster, better machine than the last G4 I owned, price was still a factor, and I set myself a price range of $120-$180. After a few days of browsing I happened upon a listing for a Quicksilver G4 with a 867MHz processor, 384MB RAM, 40GB HD, Zip drive(!), and running an unknown version of OS X. Apparently the lister (the same guy who had no idea how to use Pro Tools) had forgotten the admin logon password and hadn’t used the machine in ages. The machine, priced at $150, came with an Apple Pro keyboard and mouse, and the cute round Apple speakers. I looked at the listing and grinned. I could haggle that down. I called the guy up at 9:45 on a Friday night, asking if the machine was still available. It was, and he wanted it gone that night, so I hopped in my van and drove over to his house. We had a quick meeting at his apartment, he showed me the machine, and I successfully haggled the price down to $120, citing that the machine effectively had no operating system - that alone was worth the $30. The keyboard was extremely dusty, but everything looked good overall, and I drove back home eager to set up my new machine.

I got home and realized that not only did I not have a monitor, but no one in my house even had a monitor that I could borrow. After a bit of thinking, I remembered that the basement had a projector which accepted VGA input, so I hauled my new purchase down the stairs and set it up in the basement at 11 o’clock at night.

First on the agenda was obviously to get an OS loaded onto the machine. It didn’t have a DVD drive (grr!), which meant that not only could I not (illegally) load my copy of Leopard onto it, but also that I couldn’t load my copy of OS 10.4 Tiger on it either. Luckily, a Grape iMac that I had purchased a month before had come with a copy of OS 10.3 Panther, so I grabbed the discs for that and went to work.

It is worth noting that I wanted to keep things legal here. My 333MHz iMac was at the time dual-booting OS 9.2.2 and Panther, so to keep things square I deleted Panther from the iMac before installing it on the G4. The iMac ran it slowly anyway.

So now that the OS was loaded on, I needed to install a plethora of networking utilities. I set up Panther to for file-sharing and FTP hosting, (following this website) configured a DNS account using DynDNS, downloaded and installed Eavesdrop, and loaded up a VNC client. At this point I only had the one 40GB hard drive, so loading my media would have to wait.

Time to connect from my MacBook! I loaded up Cyberduck, typed in the G4’s DynDNS address, and BAM, I was FTP-ing. It was sweet. I could, like, transfer files back and forth between the G4 in the basement and my laptop in my room.

Now it was time to upgrade my system to make it a worthwhile FTP system and deal with all the technical difficulties and disappointments that went along with that!

---


So my Quicksilver G4 was humming in my basement, FTPing inside my house to my MacBook. But I couldn’t leave it set up that way - I needed to move everything into my room. That meant that before I started upgrading anything else, I needed a monitor. I thought about trying Craigslist since it is, after all, the answer to any material need, but before I could hop on there I ran across a nice 15-incher at my local Axman Surplus. The monitor, a CRT of course, was attractively priced at $1.97. They couldn’t guarantee that it worked, buy for that kind of price, I was willing to risk it.

It turned out that the monitor worked beautifully and fulfilled all of my viewing needs quite well. I then turned my attention to the RAM and hard drive upgrades. First the RAM.

The G4, as stated before, had a paltry 384MB of RAM - one slot with a 128MB stick and another with 256MB. Despite rampant claims that 16k should be enough for anybody, I ignored the advice of yesteryear and sought to procure more RAM. My first stop, oddly enough, was eBay.

I had $22 idly sitting in my PayPal account that I wanted to use, so I looked around eBay for some good RAM for about that amount. I found a listing for 1GB (2x512) of high-density RAM for $19, so I took it. It arrived, only to not work in my machine, because, unbeknownst to me, my machine needs low-density RAM (which is considerably more expensive). I flipped the useless high-density stuff on Craigslist and this time stayed there to try and find some more. I eventually, after a couple weeks, found a guy who was selling two 256MB sticks for $20, so I went for that. A quick install and my G4 was purring with 768MBs of RAM goodness, its three slots holding 256MB each.

The second hard drive posed a much bigger headache. I’ve already admitted to being kind of a sad n00bcakes when it comes to computer parts, and my choice of hard drive will demonstrate that once again. I hopped on Craigslist once more, hoping to find something around 120GB-160GB that I could partition into two parts - allowing me to keep my OS and other files on the master and organize all of the media to host on the second drive. I found a nice 160GB SATA drive for about $20, and I met the guy in a McDonalds marking lot and made the swap. I took it home only to find that my machine needs an IDE drive - a completely different type of interface. Still full of vigor, I hopped on Amazon to find a converter bridge, something that would allow a IDE machine to take a SATA drive. That part turned out to be about $15, so, ever the stickler for FREE SuperSaver Shipping, I tacked on a internal four port USB card to the order. A computer can never have too many USB ports!

Both items arrived in a timely fashion and I installed them in an afternoon. The USB card worked flawlessly. The bridge did not. I tried every combination of master/slave drive set up that I could think of, but nothing worked. I took the IDE drive out of my external back-up drive and plugged the bridge into that, and that worked, so I knew that the bridge wasn’t bad. I just couldn’t get my machine to recognize that stupid second drive!

I abandoned that SATA drive (the drive and bridge are still stuffed in a drawer, four months later) and trudged back to CL to find another drive. I found one and arranged to meet the guy at the Oakdale Best Buy parking lot on Black Friday. In hindsight, this was a terrible idea. Don’t ever do this. I ended up walking around the parking lot for an hour, only to never find the guy and return home. He emailed me later, apologizing for not showing up and claiming that it, “just wasn’t a good day.” Whatever, guy. I gave you my cell number - you could’ve called me.

I soon found another listing, and arranged to meet this guy at a local record store called the Electric Fetus, a popular offbeat Minneapolis joint. Again, I was left browsing rows and rows of CDs waiting for a guy who never showed up. I got home only to find an email from him, claiming that he never saw me. I had told him earlier to look for a guy in shades and a leather biker jacket, and I reminded him that that was what I was wearing.

“Oh,” he replied, “that tall guy? I didn’t know. I asked the guy at the counter if anyone was waiting for me, and he said ‘no’.”

Oh, of course. I’m totally going to walk up to a clerk and be all like, “Hey, if a some guy comes in asking if someone is waiting for him, send him over to me.” What am I, nuts? So that swap didn’t work out either.

Turns out the third one was the charm. I found a guy selling a 160GB IDE drive for $20, so I agreed to meet him at a gas station about 4 miles or so away from my house. It was cold, but I decided that I was tough and that I could bike there. I did, only to soon receive a call saying that he was running late. The gas station was in a part of town that, while not “bad”, was not exactly full of moms-driving-minivans (I’m sure you are all familiar with the M-D-M parts of town in your areas). So, because of this, the gas station wouldn’t let me wait inside, and I had to try and keep warm at 9:30AM in ten-degree weather and wait for twenty minutes until this guy showed up with my hard drive.

My hands froze on the ride home (I WAS wearing ski gloves, but I guess that doesn’t help against cold wind and bare metal handlebars), and I had to stop in at my work to warm them up before I could continue. Standing there holding my hands inside of a metal hotcase was one of the most painful experiences of my life, second only perhaps to having my nipple pierced when I was 15.

I eventually made it home, threw the drive into the G4, and booted it up.

Success! Not only did it work, but this guy had left 20GB of MP3 files on it. I didn’t want any of them, and I had to partition the drive anyway, so they all got deleted. The partition went smoothly, and soon I was loading all sorts of media onto the machine, fulfilling my dream that I had set out to achieve for it.

But is that it? Is that what the machine is doing now? Shockingly, no!


------

Now that my Quicksilver G4 is fully upgraded, I should be able to put it to use as an FTP server, right? Well, things weren’t that simple. It turns out that I don’t know how to assign a static IP address to the Quicksilver machine, which is kind of important if you want to FTP. My options are actually to A) open all the ports on the router to allow FTP, or B) assign a static (unchanging, as opposed to dynamic, or variable) IP address to the machine. I know how to do neither of these things. (If you know how, by all means let me know!)

So because I can’t FTP, the machine just sits there as a media storage unit. But, thankfully, I can put it to use in other ways as well.

In late November I bought a grape G3 iMac off of Craigslist for $25 that had OS 9 as well as Photoshop 5.5 and Illustrator 9. Since the G4 can run programs in the Classic environment, I copied the whole system folder and both Adobe programs over to it. It now servers as my graphics machine, and I use it to make these comics. Actually just about any image editing that I do is done on that machine. (I have since reinstalled OS 8.6 on the iMac and given it away).

I also tried using the G4 as a music jukebox, because my laptop is portable and my speakers are not. I like to listen to music as I drift off to sleep, but the G4 generated too much fan noise to be of any use while I am trying to sleep. It’s just too loud and disconcerting. Bleh!

The keyboard that came with the G4 was super dusty, so one week I decided to clean it. While all of the keys were strewn about my desk, I got the wild idea that I wanted to learn the Dvorak keyboard layout. So I re-assembled the keyboard in that layout, and now I am teaching myself Dvorak. One annoying part of this is that every time I restart the computer, the logon window still operates in QWERTY, so I have to try and picture the QWERTY setup in my head in order to input my password correctly. Consequently, I don’t restart very often.

So, dear reader, our journey has come to an end. You have followed me from basement monitor setup to Dvorak layout, and suffered with me through parts upgrades, missed appointments, incompatible hardware, and other frustrations. But now you know the whole story behind my Quicksilver G4, and why I love it so much. It’s become a permanent fixture in my room, humming away a bit too loudly, and providing my with good classic software that lets me get done what I want to do.

Hooray!



_DZ

Ubuntu 8.0 on a Macbook to replace Leopard? Not quite yet!

Last weekend I entertained the idea of switching my Macbook OS to Linux, or more specifically, to Ubuntu 8.0. Right now if course I run OS Leopard 10.5.6, which I love. So why would I want to switch? Well, there are a couple of reasons.

First, I was just curious. The last time I tried Ubuntu was back when it was version 7.0 and wouldn’t recognize my Mac’s wireless card. No wireless was kind of a deal breaker, and I wasn’t about to go rooting around to find code or drivers to make it work, so I immediately retreated to the safety of Leopard. But now version 8.0 was out, and I thought I would try it out to see what features it had to offer, and to see if the wireless issue was fixed.

Secondly, I was attracted to Ubuntu because it was free, open source software (the two are not synonymous). More importantly, it was a free, open source operating system. I use free software on my Mac whenever possible, but a free operating system would be a first. Open sourcing is an issue I care about because I feel that closed, proprietary formats and software seriously inhibit the progression of global, grassroots software technology. In order for software to be available to everyone, it needs to be as cheap as possible, and nothing is cheaper than free. In the past free software couldn’t compete with commercial products, but that has changed thanks to (a) more programmers and (b) their willingness and ability to collaborate with one another over the Internet. Free software really is the future, and as such I feel that I should adopt it as soon as possible.

So I was all ready to install Ubuntu, but then I had second thoughts. What would I lose by abandoning Leopard? Have my computing habits become so ingrained in the Mac user experience that I would find it difficult or even painful to switch? In the nine years or so that I have been using Macs, I have become somewhat of a Mac power user (also a Power Mac user!) It was time that I examined the features that I totally take for granted on my Macbook.

For starters, I would lose the total hardware/software integration. These are the little things that make the Mac user experience so enjoyable. Things like the brightness and volume adjust keys, the Safari/Dashboard integration, and Exposé. The two finger scroll, the numerous keyboard shortcuts that I have memorized, and the native iSight and iPod support. These things “just work” on a Mac.

This goes for language support as well. I have a MacBook with a Japanese keyboard, which allows me to switch from English to Japanese with the press of a single key. I also get to type @ ¥ ^ - [ ] : ; / _ without hitting the Shift key!

On the tangent of iPod support, I would also have to face losing three years worth of music statistics kept track of by my iTunes. Stats like song ratings, play counts, playlists, not to mention other perks like album art and downloaded lyrics. I would literally have to start from scratch.

Another thing I would miss is the intuitive, subtle features present in Leopard itself. While I could do without gimmicks like Stacks, other features such as Spaces, Quick Look, Spotlight, and the Dock have become mainstays of my computing experience. Would these have Linux counterparts? Linux has such counterparts for programs like Quicksilver (a third party application launcher that has revolutionized how I interact with my Mac) and Time Machine, which I feel that I could get used to quite quickly.

Of course, there are other apps that I run on my Macbook that I would likely miss as well - programs like Amadeus Pro, Garageband, Handbrake, Ghost Recon, iMovie, and GarageSale. These might have Linux alternatives, but it would take me time to learn all of them, and, frankly, right now I don’t see the point in learning a lot of new software that does the same stuff that I can already do.

And what about the migration of all my preferences? All my saved passwords, system settings, website autologins, and bookmarked links? I would have to reset all of those!

So I didn’t install Ubuntu. I figured, “Hey, I paid the money for Leopard, I might as well get all the use out of it that I can.” And this is what I plan to do. Right now I am not yet ready to make the migration to the Linux world, but I plan to eventually. And by the time I am ready, my Macbook will no doubt be falling apart and Ubuntu will have gotten even better. But know this, I will install Linux on the next computer I buy. And the next one. And the next one.


_DZ

Desktop Colors, Productivity, and Useful Information

I found this article in Wednesday’s Minneapolis Sun-Herald.

“A new study by the American Computer Learning Society, the nations leading body on researching how to optimally use the personal computer in everyday life, reports that displaying a solid color on a computer’s desktop results in increased productivity for the user. While the current trend is to post a personal photo or “wallpaper” as a background image, researcher Laura Beechersmith says that this is a less-than-ideal situation for both private users and employers alike.

Says Beechersmith, “Since nearly the inception of the computer desktop, people have liked to put a picture of their kid, pet, favorite vacation destination or whatever as the backdrop for their personal computing. What we’re finding is that not only do people who have these customized wallpapers spend less time being productive, they also spend more time on things that should matter way less than they do.”

Beechersmith notes that those who like having control over their desktops are more often to browse the Internet in search of fresh images to display, and are 20% more likely to engage in idle, non-work-related conversation with their co-workers than those who just have a single, solid color as their background. In a widespread study that concluded last month, blue was seen as the best color to set a desktop background to in order to increase productivity.

“Employers would be wise to take note that solid colors result in more productivity and to likewise develop their workplace computing guidelines accordingly,” notes Ezra Gould, one of Beechersmith’s colleagues. “This could be as easy as a bulletin on a public board or as intensive as visual checks of each workstation.”

Public reception has understandably been mixed. Says local resident and employee of Three-Angle Computing Solutions Ashley Carrey, “I think it’s a big deal that this research might have an impact on my employers decision about computing in the workplace. I mean, I have a picture of my two sons playing baseball on my desktop, reminding me each day that I work hard so that they can have a better life. If that image were gone, my motivation would go down.”

Others seem completely fine with the change. Businessman Karl Simons of Uptown commented, “This will be great for my work. I have a guy who sits next to me all day who talks non-stop about how the Saints are the greatest football team in America, and how he is such a huge fan by having twenty different Saints wallpapers running on a rotation. Forcing him to have a solid color would save me countless headaches and no doubt increase productivity in my office.”

Whether yellow or blue, the research does seem to indicate that a solid color could certainly help productivity by decreasing distractions and helping the hardworking American concentrate on business at hand. Only time will tell if employers will heed the advice and take action in their workplaces.”

Pretty convincing, no?





Now, if you had done any Googling whatsoever of anything in the article, you would know that it is not a real article. The newspaper name is fake, the quotes are fake, and the research is fake. I wrote that article in fifteen minutes. So why bother writing it?

Because I want to make a point that not everything on the Internet is believable just because it looks good. Web design has come a long way in a very short time span, and having a good website with lots of information does not necessarily mean that it’s good information. In an age where we expect everything to be linked or cited, we often take such things for granted and don’t investigate the credibility of articles we may come across. I wrote this article in fifteen minutes - imagine what it could look like if someone was really intent on fooling you and was willing to put a lot more time and effort into it!

Investigate what you read!


_DZ