10/16/06
Hate it or love it, OS X is here to stay. What better way to become enmeshed in its coils than by getting a new computer? After all, if the machine itself is a different breed of cat, the kitty litter needn't remain the same old brand either.

And in that spirit, here I be bumping away on the tinny tiny chiclet keyboard of a brand-old 500 mhz iBook, the pride of 2001 and my latest attempt at remaining at least a competitive distance behind the ever-cresting tsunami of digital progress.

Not much of an attempt, sad to report: for a little more I might have picked up a laptop with a respectable 100 MHz bus instead of the puny 66 this slab sports, if that's the word. No sound input except a cheap microphone hidden in its bowels, barely useful for recording notes at a meeting but no AKG 414. RAM limited to 640 megs or so, Gates to the thousandfold admittedly but still a little cramped if I wanna edit big graphics or audio files or whatever. Ten gig hard drive, less than a self-respecting iPod anymore. USB 1.1 (aka snailbus). Worst of all for a software packrat like myself, limited and snarky backwards compatibility with System 9, that tragic magic binary realm of yesteryear where all my legacy apps reside. I may have to borry some fellow machead's fully fully functional install disc to get ReBirth or Superpaint up and tottering on this square little fellow.

And then of course there's that chiclet keyboard previously noted.

On the plus side, it does have native firewire and the all-important Airport card, all-important because without it I have no excuse to warm my crotch with the little cutie in the first place. The sole reason I could come up with for getting a portable that my crabby inner Scrooge (you have an inner child, you say? Lucky you!) would hold still for was to check email at internet cafes whilst bouncing merrily down the road on tour. That a travelpooter could also double as a recording studio, backup band, personal journal, organizer, photo album or phone book was the quintessence of irrelevance to the Ebenezer Of My Soul. Most of those functions are either frivolous or easily covered by bound pieces of paper. Bah. Humbug. Etc. I tell you, it's tough sharing your mind with a miser.

Quite apart from all that, though, it runs mighty and majestic Panther OS X 10!3!9! at one of those respectable speeds you read about in the fan mags whilst wondering if it isn't all just a bunch of hypetext. I was surprised and vaguely enthused to discover this peculiarity of the new OS when I held a torch to the feet of my quaint old 9600 frankenmac and convinced it to boot into the brave new world. Even in that teetering house of virtual cards configuration, X actually scooted its shiny aqua ass along quite fetchingly.

And okay, I'll admit it's quite a shiny ass indeed. The graphic detail and overall design of System X are right up to the standards Apple has always strived to set as the Porsche of the personal computer world. One thing for sure, when you're running X, you know you're in the 21st century, dog. It's The Operating System Of The Future Today is what it is. And that's the problem.

I'm not new at this personal computer crap, lemme tell ya howdy johnson. I could go into a pretty credible geezer rap about mainframes I have known and loved, not that I particularly loved any of them. And I could go and have gone and will undoubtedly again go into my rake's progress through the endless expanses of early to upper-middle Macintosh, The Real Life Movie, relating the attempts of Apple to chuck me out of the kool kids klub with deadly upgrades and absurdist disenfranchisements, and my own foolhearty stabs at crashing the snooty party once more.

This time, though, I'm faced with what amounts to a new computer, one that resembles the old one I'm comfy with the way Seabiscuit recalls Eohippus. I can find my way around OS X -- heck, I can find my way around gawdawful Windoze, and I don't even own a PC -- but there's a definite fog of indistinct understanding that clogs my every cyber-move, frustrating my mac-fu like never before if you don't count my first maybe 15 minutes in System 7 (What, no Multifinder? Where's the Font Mover?). It's not that nothing gets done, it's that a lot of the time I don't know what I'm doing.

And what's worse, I don't know how to find out what I'm doing. Help is reasonably useful at getting stuff done a la Cooking Class mode: "All right girls, today we're going to make brownies. Everyone have their aprons on?" But the minute you ask why, a wall of obscurity slams shut and nips your nose good and hard.

I suppose I shouldn't be upset. Mac's are supposed to be easy to use by normal average human beings without six heads and ten degrees in computer science. But I've been a luser and I've been a (very slight) haxxor, and for control, creativity and the ability to circumvent the Man's dumbass regulations and make shit happen, I'll take the latter over the former grand slam in spades.

Which, I'm sure, is exactly why Apple went to so much trouble to circumscribe folks just like me. We're the troublemakers, the ones who persist in repurposing their cyber-dishwashers to wring out the neighbor's dog or steal fruit from the local A&P. But in so doing, we're also the guys and gals who make The Operating System Of The Future Today happen, either by inspiring the company stooges with some looney application or other or (more likely) forcing them to rewrite their muddy playbook before homegrown klugers sidestep them right out of business.

S'okay, fellas -- happy to play my part.