So yeah, I've been getting up to speed on my uh... rescued and unrepossed Mac G4 Powerbook and it's taken a little learning curve after all that time on the PC. I haven't used a Mac since I worked at Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute in 1990, which is when Selene was born. She started high school this week. As the Grateful Dead said in Uncle John's Band: where / does / the / time go?
I have had to find replacements for the trusty software tools I've gotten so used to on my busteddown Dell laptop, the last machine still standing (well, except for the Sony Vaio slimtop) after the Plagues of Job beset me late in 2002 just to show me that God was not amused and that any attempted recovery would meet with immediate and devastating retribution. Maybe later I'll tell you about the locusts and the rain of frogs.
Good tools I have found, too. Though it did take some looking. Killer graphics apps like the latest version of Graphics Converter. Like the latest version of Art Director's Toolkit, not to mention (yes, what the hell, why don't I) Color Consultant Pro, which is absofuckingloutely fantastic. And one more that replaces Snagit, or at least close: SnapZ Pro X. And from the same outfit, a cool little applet called iSeek, which gives Mac users a Google bar and much much more. No, I'm not getting paid for this.
Long ago, when I first bought the Powerbook, first thing I did was to download and register BBedit, by Bare Bones Software -- thus the BB. It's the best editor for the Mac there ever was, though it could drive you batshit with everything it can do. Consider me batshit (if you don't already) because I'm writing to you tonight from way down in the guts of the thing. I also like the product's Original Net Gonzo tagline...
I go there and discover there's a major new version just out. Seems that 8.0 was released like yesterday, or maybe last week. Oh yeah, I need to check this out. And since I'm pirating some truly excellent high-speed bandwidth from some neighbor with an open WiFi port, it's nothing to download the 11 meg fully featured demo. The package is on my desktop before I can even flip over and check the download manager screen. Wow. I guess this is why I'm the only person left on the planet using an Apple Airport connected through a dialup phone line. But hey, it works. And it's cheap. And as long as I can rob fat bandwidth when I need some real muscle, well hey.
But. Big butt. I open the BBedit demo download... or try to open it. But the but is: I get a message saying sorry pardner, this software in incompatible with your system. What! OK, now I'm pissed. I go back to the BBedit site and see that the new rev will run only on MAC OS X.3, which, now that I'm fast turning into a MacHead, I know means I gotta have Panther to run the editor. Fuck.
I go to the Apple site to check out Panther. It's supposed to be really hot, man. And it's "only" 129 bucks. Yeah sure, I got that. But it's my total net worth at this point, as I keep trying to remind you...
So anyway, since I have all this monster bandwidth all of a sudden I can -- yee hah! -- watch hi-rez full motion videos. Not only do I not get out much, I don't even get on much. And I don't get much, either. But those are whores of a different color. The reason I keep saying "anyway" so much is that I keep going off on these fucking irrelevant tangents. It's that Bad Attitude ADD again. I got it BAADD.
Yeah well anyway, I find this video kinda tour thing, which I click on, and gee, even at this borrowed speed I grabbed, the thing takes like an hour to download. Well, maybe 10 minutes. I go do something else. Download the fucking spam. Check google images for stuff to illustrate my meme fatale series (see below), ta dum, ta dum, doing lots of little things. Then I notice it's all here, I mean of course the video clip. So I hit the start button. And the first thing I see is Omar Wasow saying "Hi, I'm Omar!" Fucking too fucking weird. I know the guy and here he is enthusing like a regular motherfucker about Panther. I bet he got nice little chunk of change for that one. But he's so real about it. He's all excited. He's seen the future and it is Panther, yo. Damn. I wish I could get that excited about making some fucking money somehow. And he's talking to these artist types who are saying like that Panther "kicks ass" and other edgy expressions not usually found in mainstream, that is to say TV, advertising. And holy shit, he sells me on it. Omar, you bastard, you owe me 129 bucks. You can drop it on the button right above the cat . You fucker!
But once again, this wasn't supposed to be about all that. I have another app on this little box that is quite needful for the way I blog. It's an FTP client called Transmit, which does the job pretty well. I can get to the right local and remote directories (panix.com in NY) with the click of a button, But then I have to watch the entire filelist scroll down. And there is one fuckload of images on the EGR site. Look, all I want to do is plop that pic up there in the right place on that sever in NYC. There has to be a simpler way. A way to get around all this goddam sticky GUI friendliness!
Then I remember. There is! There's full-bore Unix under the hood of this little pup. And I learned a pretty good lot of Unix when I was bored silly working in that Ricoh research lab in the heart of sunny (heh) downtown Tokyo. Berkeley Unix 4.2 on a dumb terminal hooked into a VAX cluster somewhere I never got to go. Maybe because, when I was learning? I wiped out three months worth of coding by my Japanese colleagues. They were not amused. But I pressed on! Never say die, I said -- thus contravening my own injunction in the very act of giving voice to it. Burroughs was right. Language is a virus. So I opend up a termnial window and did this to transfer the grafik of THE-ONE.JPG (see meme fatale #4, below).
[/egr/blog/images] rageboy% ls the-one.jpg
the-one.jpg
[/egr/blog/images] rageboy% ftp
ftp> open panix.com
Trying 166.84.1.1...
Connected to panix.com.
220-
220 panix1.panix.com FTP server
(NetBSD-ftpd 20010329) ready.
Name (panix.com:rageboy): clocke
331 Password required for clocke.
Password:
230-
NetBSD 1.5.4_ALPHA (PANIX-USER) #0:
Thu Feb 26 14:11:15 EST 2004
230 User clocke logged in.
Remote system type is UNIX.
Using binary mode to transfer files.
ftp> put the-one.jpg
local: the-one.jpg remote: the-one.jpg
229 Entering Extended Passive Mode (|||61566|)
150 Opening BINARY mode data connection
for 'the-one.jpg'.
100% |********************************|
40105 80.44 KB/s 00:00 ETA
226 Transfer complete.
40105 bytes sent in 00:01 (37.70 KB/s)
ftp> close
221-
Data traffic for this session was
40105 bytes in 1 file.
Total traffic for this session was
40826 bytes in 1 transfer.
221 Thank you for using the FTP service on
panix1.panix.com.
ftp>
See? Simple as pie. That is, if you don't blanche at the sight of a command line.
Well, folks, now it's after 8am and I wanna tell you I am some kinda wasted over here at EGR HQ. I know that this needs a better ending, something you can you know, like use. But I'm tapped out.
I heard that den of coyotes out in the back forty howling at the full moon last night. Can you use that?
