Personal Observations about OSX
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Below are several screen shots of things I observed recently while using my 2 GHz PowerPC G5 iMac, which upgraded a G4 eMac and the original model Titanium PowerBook. I think they may be related with the change to the G5 and the latest OSX update, v10.4.5
Maybe I could begin with REstart, so I click it from the apple menu -- this popup appears --
HUH? You mean that I didn't click a genie in the bottle and now I have to wait to make my three wishes? Am I sure? Fut the wuck [hey, I didn't want to offend anyone by typing in WHAT THE FUCK] do you think I, being of sound mind and all that crap, wanted to do when I clicked the option? Order a side of fries?
Thursday, 9 March 2006 --
This appeared when I tried to REstart because everything was slowing to a crawl [REbooting usually gets the processing speed back to normal] -- I got this popup on three different occasions before it dawned on me to take the screen shot -- since I did not have a clue why I needed new settings, I clicked the right option, after which I got the following popup --
Thursday, 9 March 2006 --
clicking CANCEL caused the exact same popup to appear again and again -- I did manage to manually force quit, then REbooted, waiting the 120 seconds for it to happen automatically and continued working
Saturday, 11 March 2006 -- When using the InterNUT I almost always use the AOL browser, which works fine for most things -- I switch to the Netscape browser [v. 7.2] to add things to my eBay, Yahoo and YardSaleNet.net item listings because it is a lot more stable than the AOL browser had been in the past for these activities.
I also set up an AIM screen name, MyMastodon, while using Netscape, basically for use on the YahooList posting boards, including the one dedicated to AppleBytes, and for my Yahoo auctions -- therefore, when I log onto Netscape, the user MyMastodon is activated and appears in my Buddy List while I am logged onto that user name in AOL -- at first it surprised me and I wondered why the hell I popped up in my own Buddy List -- then it occurred on me that it is my AIM handle, which I also happen to be logged onto. This did NOT occur on my older computers.
Isn't the computer toy and / or Netscape / AOL smart enough to realize that the two apparently identical MyMastodons are from two somewhat different sources? I clicked the red button in the upper left the three times I got this popup and continued working but did not like the intrusion
Saturday, 11 March 2006 -- for some reason, when I REstart, almost invariably my digital clock does NOT appear in the toolbar -- this did NOT happen with my former computers. Innumerable times I have had to go to the System Preferences to click the clock option, and to RElock the security lock -- at reboot, there is a 75% chance that the clock will not be present and I will find the lock UNlocked -- I find that extremely annoying and sucky --
Saturday, 11 March 2006 -- this popup I have gotten only once -- what the hell are my "trusted wireless networks"?? The wireless keyboard and mouse that I stopped using weeks ago because I found them erratic which caused many more spelling and other errors than when using the normal wired input devices?? I now use the USB keyboard and mouse from the eMac -- as mentioned before somewhere, the classical Mac USB IR mouse has really flimsy, shitty wires, and konks out on me frequently, at which I have to giggle the wires to get the IR to appear again -- I have gone through three apple PRO keyboards in the last 2 years because the letters get worn off and I do NOT touch type, so I have to look at the letters on the freekin keys to type anything [although, after all these years of practice, I DO type rather quickly with two fingers] --
I am also now on my third mouse, and will replace that with something else when I find one that looks simple enough -- I don't need scroll wheels and all that crapola to do the simple things I always do [gamers love that kinda thing] -- I have two really old track balls which I loved using because they are the ultimate in ergonomics, but they tended to collect hair and crud deep inside, and are a bitch to disassemble and totally clean out, so they have been retired.
OK, so fut the wuck [you weren't offended, were you?] is "the open wireless network named "motorola 819""?? I clicked the left button because I was clueless -- I really hate being clueless with these techy gizmos! These toy gadgets are, as someone said in a popular movie a couple years ago, "like a box of chocolates; one never knows what will pop up", or something to that effect -- but at least it isn't as bad as they say PCs are in this respect --
Saturday, 11 March 2006 -- OK, I saved the bestest until last -- I very vaguely recall finding this type folder in the trash many, MANY years ago on gawd knows what Mac I was using --
although this G5 iMac is snappy as hell, at times EACH and every day it seems to really slow down to a crawl, no matter what I might be doing with it. By experience, even using the eMac and TiBook, when this happened I would simply FORCE QUIT and / or REstart and things would be back to normal again. With this G5 iMac, after REbooting I usually have a folder of Recovered Files sitting in the trash, something, as said before, I had not seen in many years when working on an Apple Computer. Should I mention that I use MANY really vintage apps to make my innumerable web pages, process photos / scans, make and print address and other labels / business cards, and just about everything else I do on a daily basis.
There are 97 friggen items in the folder shown below, but I have had 100+ on occasion, and only a couple at other times -- this screen shot was taken less than 10 hours after the last reboot, and I didn't really do anything super special during that interval --
Since theoretically, those Recovered Files are the result of some temporary files of various things, used once and then discarded, virtually useless after the fact, why the hell can't the dumb computer realize this and simply make them go away instead of making us flush them down the virtual tubes after REboot? It already has them in the trash, so it must know that is where they belong. Then, as a corollary, since it seems to be able to stash files that it terms "Recovered", fhy the wuck [same apologetics as above] isn't it able to recover the text of something I was typing in an email or message board post when AOL suddenly crashes and disappears, which has happened to me several times?
Wednesday, 11 July 2007 -- gosh darn, the sorry saga continues -- Apple came out with a QuickTime update, so I MUST have that -- after all it is an Apple invention and widely used on the WWW for videos and such. What could possibly go wrong, it's not one of their shitty OSX updates this time.
Kewlio, the download is complete, so now I went to see what difference I might find when clicking on a uTube video. JHC, all I got was a vertical black bar where the video should be, and html code or whatever crap began appearing at the top of the bar.
OK, maybe it is just a problem with that
particular video, so off to several others I went -- SAME RESULTS,
and / or this, a faded / failed QT load icon -->
-- fut the wuck is happening here? I posted about
this on the AOL AAPL message board, and everyone replied that
they had NO problems, that it may be the AOL browser which
many of them never use, and that I am a retard for continuing
to use it -- problem is, I also tried Netscape and Safari, obtaining the same stupid results. I then did a search
for QUICKTIME UPDATE PROBLEMS
and found several links saying that many peeps had the same glitch
I did -- so I followed the instructions they provided for fixing
the mf'in glitch and was once again viewing the videos as before.
Apple must have known that this would happen -- why didn't they
provide information about correcting it along with the download,
OR include it in the updated programming? Maybe it could be chalked
up to programmer's HUTA
disease?
I sort of suspish that all of the above are results of the Operating System changes connected with the latest incarnations of OSX, the G5 and the switch to Intel chips, both single and dualie chip-on-chips -- Mac users always raved about their legendary ease of use compared with Microsoft PC users, but ever since OSX first appeared, this hallucinatory ease of use seems to have vanished along the way and was even commented on by none other than Steve Wozniak, one of the inventors of the Mac way of doing things. Do PC users always have some / all of the above to contend with? If so, then their potential switch to the Mac platform will be a piece of cake, while the long time Mac faithful will have to start learning the PC ways of doing things.
Let me attempt to explore this stuff a bit more -- when computers first came out, each had a single user -- the only so-called networking they did was probably to log onto the ancient Arpanet boards via aome "ASP", possibly the Defense Department, their university or corporation inhouse system. Along came WorldNet and America Online -- Messaging was simplistic, the number of peepers in a chat room were few, and everybody knew everyone else. A few years later, millions more got online, things started getting flakey and extremely impersonal -- you could never keep track of which thread was being commented on or who the new screen name was.
Then came the big interest in networking, first in large corporations and their clients, later among family members living in the same house. Everybody seemed hell bent on being directly connected with everybody else, somehow -- database / photo / live cam exchanges, P2P music and movie downloads, eBay, Yahoo, MySpace, Google got in on the action -- pay your bills / buy stuff via credit cards or PayPal / Bidpay / transfer money from one account to another / take a quicky poll about politics / news items / comment on a product purchased, print Postal Service mailing labels and postage, store all of your important personal data on some third party server over which you have NO control, all this and loads more while online. The news was no longer as factual as it should be, nor as impartial -- user data was constantly being lost through hackers or by simply misplacing backup tapes / having computers stolen -- Nigerian and other scams began becomming commonplace, bogus international money orders were used to pay for high ticket items such as automobiles and plasma TVs, the masses had NO clue what to believe, Bill Gates must have given away zillions to all those who replied to his hallucinatory email and the urban legends multiplied, prospered and seemed almost believable.
Add to all of the above the weird interest in wireless this and that -- WiFi cell phones and video cams that take pics up women's dresses and as they used rest rooms -- traffic cams that record license plates of those running red lights -- HotSpots set up in many public libraries / cities / countries to provide instant InterNUT access to anyone within the transmission towers / points -- how much more radiation can a living organism withstand before the effects become dangerous and deadly?
We already had power / telephone lines all over the place, in-wall home electrical wiring, radios, microwave ovens, and televisions emitting measurable amounts of electromagnetic radiation. Even the Sun in its eleven year activity cycles is known to affect terrestrial life, climate, power lines, among other things, as its solar storms / flares / radiation reach and engulf the vicinity of our planet. But now we have cell phones, thinkpads, blackberries, desk / laptop / server computers, external hard drives, CD / DVD burners / players, routers, gizmos to provide wireless transmission throughout the home, monitors in the baby's room, satellite dishes sprouting up on walls and rooftops, yeah, and even ankle bracelets used by law enforcement. The satellites flying high overhead bombard us with yet more radiation.
Cell phone makers naturally tell us that using their products has NO ill effects; I have yet to see any computer or accessory maker even mention the possibility of life threatening effects due to their daily use -- business as usual in a free market society. Last week I read that one city or state (Utah?), or was it a university, legislated AGAINST installing a WiFi network because they have found NO scientific proof that long term effects are non-existent.
Only yesterday I was browsing -- MOOOOOOO -- an AOL link about creative uses for aluminum foil got my attention -- one of the uses was to place the foil between the top of your pizza box computer CPU and the separate monitor above it, so that the radiation produced by the former wouldn't affect the picture quality of the monitor! The same would hold true for an external disk drive, a printer, or two computers sitting next to each other as is found in InterNUT cafes and right here in front of me, with my eMac on the left, the iMac to its right, the external disk drive for backup above and the printer several inches on the right -- should I mention the several cables in the surge protector below the eMac and the multi power outlet with surge protection on the wall behind all of these dudads??!!
Am I being affected by these things? Of course I am, but I shall be stone cold dead and long forgotten before the truth eventually becomes public knowledge. Watch for interesting related phenomena as the new solar cycle progresses to its maximum, which has been recently suggested will be at least 50% stronger / more active than at any time in the past.
Then what? Back to hand written notes / address books / letter writing while at the same time improving your handwriting skills / spelling [spell check is that dictionary in the attic], going back to the movie theatres, buying CDs again, looking for the cheapest prices for something in newspaper supplements, using the olde fashioned telephone once more, listening to the radio on that old Philco that you couldn't sell on eBay instead of downloading RSS feeds via that futher muckin [yeah, get used to it] computer contraption that took up way too much space in every room of the house. Seriously, just what would you do? The ONLY workaround in this scenario would be to return to doing things as you did BEFORE you got your first computer. Actually, the MOST deviously humorous thing about this entire computer topic is that BEFORE I got my first Commodore 64 I SWORE that I would NEVER get one of these playthings! Not long thereafter I started working for the New Jersey Department of Transportation as a FORTRAN programmer trainee for six months, which I found quite logical and stimulating, but at the same time more than a tad boring.
The sequel of the story includes several active domains, the constant need for updating really older pages, trying to understand techy things, some of which I illustrated above, trying to sleep normal hours in bed instead of frequently dozing off in my computer chair after snacking and / or woofing down a dinner in front of the monitor instead of in the kitchen.
Gawd, how I wish I would never have become interested in all this crapola! I would be happily living in a normal home, with a comfy living room, the cats would be free to roam where ever they wanted to and get all the attention they crave -- necessary repair work, inside and out, would be done before things start falling apart, and the mfsoab'n place wouldn't look like an overstocked eBay warehouse with just enough space to walk through piles of boxes, past storage shelves and nooks and crannies where the dust seems to accumulate as thick as in an Egyptian tomb despite the two electronic air filters / ionizers which function 24/7! Where is all that proverbial "quality leisure time" that modern technology has repeatedly promised us if we run out and spend more money on the latest gadgets and gizmos, upgrading everything as soon as the more advanced / faster shit appears on the retailer's shelves? More importantly, are we becomming less human and more humanoid / robotic in the process, getting fatter, lazier, less concerned about our fellow inhabitants of this spaceship we call Earth, so accostomed to violence which is always depicted in the dumbass media that if someone was being mugged on a bus or train, we would think, oh, well, it happens all the time and NOT try to help the victim? Is this the start of the decline of our so-called omnipotent civil society, as has happened many times in the historical past with other dominant cultures / societies / regimes? The answer my friend is blowin' in the wind......
Some Computer Terms
Computer / eMail / Back Up Copy / Download / Mouse / Floppy Drive
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