Exit stage left, kicking himself

A Sunday exercise in Sherlockian investigation.

Suddenly Malcolm's aged and usually-reliable iBook began playing up.

For no accountable reason it was registering an endless random input, mainly commas interspersed with "r".

So, check out if the keyboard is jammed.

Since this is the original keyboard, now five years old, that would not surprise. Keyboard out, try an external keyboard. Actually, try two in succession. Same fault.

Oh dear, what used to an I/O problem.

So, let's rebuild the whole disk. Run a disk utility check; all well. Do a disk erase and reload from the Leopard master (G4s don't take MacOs 10.6 Snow Leopard). All well until the set-up screen. As soon as the first key was entered, same fault: ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

Umm. This looks critical.

Well, let's go through the process again, just in case.

Meanwhile, crank up the 15in G4 Powerbook (dodgy DVD and lousy battery charging: Apple say an excessively-expensive motherboard problem) inherited from the Pert Young Piece when she went MacBook.

Hell's teeth! What's this? Yes: ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

Again, rip out the extended mouse and keyboard, which, self-evidently, must be the cause. Try again: ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

No: this is impossible.

Ah! what's this?

The Lady in Malcolm's life had discarded her inoperative Bluetooth keyboard (an incident involving a coffee cup), and lodged it under Malcolm's desk. It must have taken a kick or whatever, and turned itself on.

Extract the batteries therefrom, kill the Bluetooth connection, ... and Robert is most definitely brother to one's parent.

Incredible.

Sphere: Related Content

Gulp. Swallow. Choke.

CUPERTINO, California—January 25, 2010—Apple® today announced financial results for its fiscal 2010 first quarter ended December 26, 2009. The Company posted revenue of $15.68 billion and a net quarterly profit of $3.38 billion, or $3.67 per diluted share. These results compare to revenue of $11.88 billion and net quarterly profit of $2.26 billion, or $2.50 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter. Gross margin was 40.9 percent, up from 37.9 percent in the year-ago quarter. International sales accounted for 58 percent of the quarter’s revenue.

Gross margin: near 41%. Sphere: Related Content

Cyber-reflections (nothing original here)

In a sentence, a late-evening quickie, here's a true, first-person story:

Malcolm's American son-in-law, over for the Christmas vacation, expressed interest in Number 3 daughter's iPhone. [New readers start here: she otherwise is the Pert Young Piece.]

This, to say the least, involved a leap of the imagination:

• Redfellow Hovel is an all-Mac household.
• The Noo Joisey affiliation is not ... or rather, was not, until Number 1 daughter suddenly acquired a 17-inch MacPro. Obviously, things were happening.
• The American son-in-law was, until lately, a dyed-in-the-wool corporation man: standard combat-issue Dell lap-top and Blackberry.

So why the change of view? Well, there's this:


That's two definite front-runners, a couple of also-rans, and the MS empire nowhere.

Meanwhile, over at macobserver.com, Malcolm finds Bryan Chaffin rubbing salt into the gaping wound:

In a few short years, the company has gone from being a scary-ass giant that seemed certain to drown the tech world in a sea of mediocrity to an embarrassing old uncle with lots of money and dreams of faded glory shambling along in a pantomime of his past accomplishments.

Big Redmond -- and that analogy to IBM and its age of dominance no longer seems as apt as it once did -- is still dominant in PC operating systems, but who cares? The world, including Microsoft, follows what Apple is doing, leaving the company in the driver's seat in the PC world, even with its tiny, but growing, market share.

Microsoft is a bit player in the world of online music downloads and digital media devices, and is increasingly becoming a has-been in smartphones, despite (or maybe because of) having been an early player in that space. The Xbox platform is doing well, though, so rock on there. I think the company may even be close to making back all the money it has spent on that project.

Bing may turn out OK, though I strongly doubt it will unseat Google as the search king. Indeed, I'll be surprised if Bing can become even a strong second to Google in that arena.

That's an extreme, even partial view; but there are germs of truth therein:

• Windows 7 had to succeed, at least in numerical sales, because Vista had been such a dog. Corporations face a stark choice: stick with MS Windows 7 or commit to a huge re-equipment investment. In the present economic state, for most that was a no-brainer (those smaller, more agile companies who thought twice probably went Linux or Open Source at some point).
• When a Microsoft executive, even one in the 51st State, mutters about Office 7 seeking to imitate MacOs 1.6, he is not mis-speaking. The MacOs desktop is the experience others want.
• MacOS Leopard and Snow Leopard are mature, reliable, stable platforms. MacOS has transferred painlessly (well, painlessly for the end-user) to the iPhone, and (let us see) to the hypothetical iSlate. As the graph above shows, not many would say the same of the portings of MS Windows to mobile devices. Nor should we mention those appalling Tablets that were discounted and dumped wholesale on schools.
  
• Apple has nailed the whole marketing operation to a degree that others must copy in the hope of emulation. The iTunes and iApps on-line phenomenon is quite staggering in its success, and the speed of its success. With it lies the opportunity to generate a whole on-demand provision of electronic content: news, films and entertainment, education, anything and everything that can be codified, pushed, transmitted, fed to a point of presence. The implications are staggering: at a single blow, the whole network of media come together in one potentiality. Only two corporations (Apple and Google) seem to have that sussed.
  

This is not the end of cyber-history:

All human things are subject to decay,
And when fate summons, monarchs must obey.

Thus John Dryden, putting the boot into a poetic rival around 1682-4. As IBM, and Microsoft, so, in due course, these present Colossi which bestride the world.

For the moment, though, Malcolm wishes he had sold all his earthly possessions and bought Apple stock at $13. Sphere: Related Content

Can one have too much of a good thing?

Why ask that of someone, as Malcolm was, born in the War years? Who remembers raiding his moneybox that day in February 1953 when sweets came off-the-rations?

In its own small way, the younger generation experience the rationing problem with their iPods.

No matter which model one has, all the way up the the 160GB Classic, there is a finite limit to storage. Which means making choices. The problem achieves cataclysmic crisis time with the Lady in Malcolm's life and her natty, minuscule Shuffle.

So, of Malcolm's several iPods (Weeuw ... there's posh!), the 32GB iPod touch, though not the biggest capacity, is the current favourite, not because of size, but simply through its general utility.

Currently it is carrying just over 5000 tracks and about 500 photographs. Since it, and the 80GB Classic are the back-ups for iPhoto when the Lady in his Life and Malcolm are on the move, that means it's pruning time. Another prompt comes when he found that, somehow when he uploaded 765MB and nine hours of Miles Davis's Complete Prestige Recordings, ripped @ 192 kbps, he must have over-written Sketches of Spain. That is, of course, unacceptable; and must be remedied instantly. There's only about 4GB spare, but Malcolm has this thing about excess: it's Brazilian time, ladies!

At first it's easy; how many variants of those Willie Nelson standards does a man need? Did Malcolm really upload all that ABBA pap? And that's not the worst (about which, least said the better).

Around this point the process of elimination slows down. Hey! here's Jackie Brenston and Rocket 88! We haven't cranked that one for a while ... and then we pause to stack it up against, say, Bernard Allison's and Nappy Brown's or the Alexis Korner versions.

YouTube offer a version, which (despite the "original" claim) seems later than, and different from the 1951 original:



The Bettie Page clips are a gratuitous addition. Moreover, to claim that this is "the first rock'n'roll song" invites a deluge of disagreement. A "fuzzy" tenor-sax does not a genre make.

At this point Malcolm realises he has a whole playlist of road-songs and car-songs. Malcolm scanned a score or more Cadillac titles, not including the Austin Lounge Lizards' The Car Hank Died In:

Poor sound quality: find the album, Creatures From The Black Saloon.

That would count as the nadir of bad taste — nothing wrong with that, says Malcolm — had Dave Allan Coe, complete with girlie chorus, not also been represented (a recommendation from our American Cousin, Colorado Zach):

Well, I was drunk the day my Mom got outta prison.
And I went to pick her up in the rain.
But, before I could get to the station in my pickup truck
She got runned over by a damned old train.

But to stick with the Caddy motif:



Then there are nearly as many GTOs and Chevys as there were Caddy songs: they include one worthwhile gem — Junior Brown putting a little overdue life into the Beach Boys' 409 (the B-side of the dismal Surfin' Safari of 1962):



That's before he hit on another favourite: Kathy Mattea's striding attack on Gillian Welch's 455 Rocket, "biggest block alive", which in a way brings him full circle:

Malcolm apologises for that version; the original is blocked in his region.

It goes without saying that anything by or from Gillian Welch is sacrosanct, and not for removing.

However, a stack of '70s and '80s stuff goes straight to the bin, no problem: Phil Collins, large swathes of other pretentious stuff.

With Sketches of Spain (is it jazz? who cares?) and a few other goodies onto the iPod Touch, and so to bed ...

Sphere: Related Content

The UK's coming iPhone mania

Today, officially, we had confirmed what had long been predestined, predicted and overdue. The O2 network's monopoly on the iPhone has been broken:

Orange's success in breaking into O2's exclusive deal to stock the iPhone is expected to lead to a Christmas price war with the cost of the Apple handset coming down for UK consumers. It is also likely to be available from at least one more mobile phone operator, with Vodafone also understood to be close to signing a deal with Apple, though it may not have the device in time for Christmas. Executives at Vodafone, which stocks the iPhone in just under a dozen countries, have long maintained that they would like to get their hands on it in the UK.

For the record, the current O2 pricing is:

The basic 8GB version of the handset currently costs £96.89 for a customer willing to pay £29.38 a month under an 18-month contract, but is free for anyone willing to spend £44.05 a month for the same period. The largest 32GB device is £274.23 at £29.38 a month over 18 months and free only for someone willing to pay £73.41 a month over two years. This makes the total cost of the phones between £625.73 and £792.90 for the basic phone over 18 months, and between £803.07 and £1,761.84 for the 32GB phone over 18 months.

Ouch! To help the odd transatlantic reader here, that means the top of the range 3GS costs a mere $2,800 over an eighteen month lock-in (which also denies a couple of iterations of up-grading).

More to the point, it seems that Orange and any other network buying in do so without Apple taking a share of the revenue.

What is happening, of course, is that the iPhone market has matured considerably. None of the competitors have managed to match the appeal and salescraft of Apple's prestige model. The constabularies of the UK would tell us that on thefts alone. As a result, the advertising for the iP{hone has changed: it no longer features the hardware, but it sells (very successfully) the associated applications.

So, chuck this into the admixture:

Apple's App Store is home to some 85,000 applications as of Monday, and the company claims that over two billion apps have been downloaded by iPhone and iPod touch users so far.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs commented "The rate of App Store downloads continues to accelerate with users downloading a staggering two billion apps in just over a year, including more than half a billion apps this quarter alone."

The App Store is Apple's online service where iPhone and iPod touch owners can find and download third party applications for their handheld. The store is home to games, productivity applications, social networking apps, business tools, and more.

Apple's App Store launched in July 2009 and had already seen 1.5 billion application downloads by its first anniversary only two months ago.

That's one entire story from macobserver.com, today.

If it were not for the Apple habit of over-pricing (to retain the prestige image), Steve Jobs could probably do a King C. Gillette (he's the one you didn't recognise at the head of the post), give away the iPhone and collect on the apps.

In passing, the iPhone is the one bit of Apple kit that Malcolm neither has nor covets. Sphere: Related Content

Totally screwed!

In a moment of abject self-pity, reviewing the dismal "statporn" (© Iain Dale) of Malcolm Redfellow's World Service , Malcolm made an even more depressing discovery.

His top "hits" of all-time involved:

• a piece on the BNP membership list;
• a reference, accessed by soon-disappointed dog-lovers from everywhere, describing John Humphrys, the BBC broadcaster, as the Splott Rottweiler;

and

• misinterpretations of words such as "tits" and "cock".

A lexical malfunction

All those hundreds of thousands of well-honed words, dozens of thoughtful postings, the wry comments on the Not so Great and Not so Good: all wasted. The cyber-world wants only an easy laugh and a cheap thrill.

So Malcolm felt a frisson of recognition when he discovered that the iPhone dictionary is equally open to mockery:

The spirit of Thomas Bowdler lives on at Apple. The increasingly bizarre nature of the approval process for the iTunes App Store has reached new levels of eccentricity with the revelation that a dictionary app was blocked because it contained “objectionable content”.

The story is that a developer, Matchstick, submitted an application, Ninjawords, to the iTunes App Store. It was rejected because of "objectionable content".

Yeah, yeah. All the old favourites were there:

Consequently Ninjawords was forced to bowdlerise the dictionary in order to get it onto the Apple devices. The list of omitted words includes ass, snatch, pussy, cock and screw, but Apple still displays a 17+ age rating and the accompanying warning that the app may contain objectionable material.

Well, says Malcolm, I object!

It's all those niggling frustrations that the blue-noses build in.

He remembers first encountering it at Wells, from the Norfolk County Library Service. There comes a moment in a young man's life when he moves on from Biggles, crosses the aisle, and investigates the adult fiction shelves. There he found T.H.White's The Once and Future King. When Malcolm presented this to the issuing desk, he was quizzed as to its suitability, and whether his parents would approve.

The experience was, at the time, unpleasant. In retrospect, it's hard to see any objection to the book (except for White's politics). Yet it had a lasting product -- a continuing fascination for fiction in all forms. That is why, when he hears someone decrying the young modern male's distaste for reading, Malcolm suggests the quickest remedy is to ban the whole corpus of literature for a decade. Then they'll all want some.

Pursuit of the missing couplet

There was the moment, around the age of fifteen, Malcolm was preparing for GCE Eng Lit Those, of course, were the days when, as Michael Gove maintains, exams were truly testing. More to the point, the books studied were real literature: none of yer modern rubbish. From the General Prologue to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales this turned up:

For if a preest be foul, on whom we truste,
No wonder is a lewed man to ruste;
......................................................
......................................................
Wel oghte a preest ensample for to yive,
By his clennesse, how that his sheep sholde lyve.

Today, of course, a quick flick to that hotlinked source will give the missing couplet. In those, pre-electronic days, it involved a hike to a main library or, as Malcolm did it, hoicking after school to Dawson Street, and Hodges Figgis (now a Waterstone's, by any other name, and opposite its original site), to check it out. Forbidden fruit!

And so it goes on.

Today, school networks have to be protected by all kinds of firewalls and safeguards. Since the kids are infinitely more cyber-savvy than the staff and technicians, this rarely works for long.

Such nannying has consequences. For example, it is virtually impossible, in most schools, to access Shakespeare texts. Early on in the download, the built-in Bowdler cuts in and the text cuts out. Did David Blukett know just how filthy and corrupting Romeo and Juliet is, when he approved it for Key Stage 3?

So, how can one teach technology if "screw" is verboten? Sphere: Related Content

Sunday evening with Fred

Astaire, that is.

To accompany a good read, Malcolm dons his Sony noise-canceling [sic] headphones; and cranks up the G4 iPod. That avoids the distraction of the iPodTouch screen waking up with each change of track.

For the occasion he had installed a new Playlist; and settled back to nearly two-and-a-half hours of Top Hat, White Tie and Tails.

Although improved from the original shellacs, sound quality is -- naturally -- hardly hi-fi. But, who cares?

And so time passes.

Pages are turned. Cabernet is sipped. A good evening is had.

Occasionally the surreality of the audio-only of tap-dancing Fred strikes through: as peculiar and irrational as, say, the ventriloquist "turns" that used to "appear" on the BBC Light Programme.

Occasionally, too, the sheer delight of those clever lyrics, in particular those of Irving Berlin, breaks through.

Omaha, Nebraska, twinned with Naas, County Kildare: birthplace of not just Frederick Austerlitz, but also Nick Nolte, Marlon Brando (whose mother first put Henry Fonda on her stage at the Omaha Community Playhouse) ... and Malcolm X/Little. Sphere: Related Content

iLife, iLove

Another day, another toy. Or in this case, a compendium of several.

The Apple Store at Brent Cross supplied the family-sized version of iLife. Malcolm feels beatific and ennobled to have acquired it legitimately: not, of course, that he could or would stoop to other means, o no.

Then for the surprises. So far two:

iPhoto comes with extra whistles and bells, in particular a facial recognition sytem which is ... interesting, but needs refinement, perhaps.

iWeb is worth a play, if only to see if the appearance of this outpourings can be improved.

So: watch this space? Sphere: Related Content

In the beginning was Word 3.0

The Beeb has woken up to realise that the Macintosh is twenty-five years old.


Malcolm learned most of his tricks from either the Amstrad 8256 or the Mac 128. He rarely got close to the household BBC Micro, which spent most evenings playing Snapper (Acorn's rip-off and improvement on Pac-man).



The real pity of that was Malcolm wanted to become an Elite. Or, at the very least, to master Hopper.



And the Beeb had to have someone to review that quarter-century-old piece of e-archaeology. They chose someone totally, totally impartial of course. Jane Douglas from -- read this very carefully -- MSN. That stood for MicroSoft Network, the last time Malcolm looked.

So, no bias there.

But Malcolm can assure one and all of one thing. Mark this:

Those teaching-notes and worksheets he produced on a Mac128 and an Epson dot-matrix printer were once the very zeitgeist of the educational cutting edge.

Twenty years on, he still found the odd echo and pale-imitation in new and unknown staff-rooms, where his neglected, scribbled-on, past labours still had an afterlife as they

Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn

or simply provided work for supply teachers and cover classes.
Sphere: Related Content

Aaargh!

Iain Dale (that's a Home Service gripe), in a passing Twitter, informs the world he is digitalising his vinyl. Bless him.

On Wednesday evening, a major disaster hit Redfellow hovel. A misplaced foot. A stumble. A drop, the Big Bastard, the terabyte drive, went down, literally, metaphorically, technically, and terminally.

So Malcolm is back where Desperate Housewife Dale is: rebuilding a digital musical library.

γνῶθι σεαυτόν

Oh, how Malcolm loves these excursions. That means "Know Yourself". According to Pausanias, it was the inscription above the temple of Apollo at Delphi.

You see, all that has survived, out of Malcolm's half-terabyte of digitalised music, is on his three iPods, perhaps 30 or 50 gigs. In other words, this is the portable stuff, the VS001 LHR-EWR seven hours of dozing, the 45 minutes of survive-the-Northern-Line, the can't-sleep-lullabies, the music-to-blog-by.

Out of that comes a process of self-diagnosis. And Old Malc finds it instructive.

For example, except for Live Licks and early stuff, much of the Stones archive has gone. Along with the lesser stuff by the Boss. So have the Ellington and Basie collections. All the Beatles and the 60s crooners (so no great loss there). A stack of R&B. Mozart and Bach. Swathes of dixie and traditional Jazz. Almost all of Charlie Parker. Great chunks of swing. Bel canto. Folk.

No sweat. With time and effort, that can be reconstructed, if necessary. It just means pulling out boxes, extracting CDs and re-loading ... or whatever. Time is the great healer.

That's not the point here. What has survived? What was in daily use?

And that's where the psychology of Luke 4:23, "Physician, heal thyself", hits home.

Malcolm is forced to confront what has been his recent day-to-day diet of aural stimulus and satisfaction. It is quite frightening, and quite revealing.

The entire history of Willie Nelson. Carpenters and ABBA, for heaven's sake. Miles Davis. Neil Young and most other manifestations of CSNY. Asleep at the Wheel. Pretty well the whole oeuvre of the Kingston Trio and the Limeliters. Manhattan Transfer and the Swingles. The best bits of Artie Shaw and Goodman. Beach Boys (cue visual recollection of Andy Lippincott's elegiac death in Doonesbury).

A replacement drive is on order. The cycle will repeat itself.

And the moral of this story is:
Back up your back-up.
Sphere: Related Content

The joys of Airport Extreme

Reconsidering that previous post caused Malcolm to review his own activities and practices:

• He was sat, with iBook, in dining-room (front of the house).
• Daughter three, with MacBook, was in kitchen (back of the house).
• Daughter two, with MacBook, was in Yorkshire (two hundred miles away).
• Daughter one, with MacBook Pro 17 inch (for which all others despise her, out of envy), was in from New Jersey, on couch in sitting room (back of house) and adjacent to:
• Wife, with MacBook, at desk in sitting room.

All were communicating by broadband and wi-fi, using mac.com and me.com addresses.

So, rather than a shout from room to room (or even sitting in the same space), e-mails were winging from North London to Cupertino (or wherever) and back again.

Bizarre.

And they said it would be television that killed the art of conversation. Sphere: Related Content

The (dubious) joys of an iPod Touch

Malcolm has (count them!) three iPods:

• a second generation 20Gb metal block, still going strong (and currently devoted to the life and works of Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings);
• a fourth generation (60 Gigs!) which, on Shuffle mode, bridges the half-alive world -- thanks to noise-deadening 'phones -- of Virgin Atlantic's LHR-EWR route; and
• a newish iPodTouch, on which are installed Bob Dylan's Theme Time Radio Hours. Of which, doubtless, more anon.

Now, the problem.

The iPodTouch (can that be the approved capitalisation?) insists on downloading and preserving all those e-mails that Malcolm instinctively deleted from his main machine. Which means he regularly finds he has several hundred to delete, for a second time.

Some of these can be quite odd. No: he is not speaking here of Nigerian multi-millionaires with a banking proposition. Nor all those invitations to extend his penis or to add Viagra to his daily diet.

Far, far more bewildering.

Consider Harley-Davidson of Los Angeles' offering of a seasonal special: gift-wrapping.

How does one gift-wrap an Ultra Classic Electra Glide in black? (As if. But, oh, pu-leeze!)

Which neatly links to the greetings card Malcolm saw in his local book-shop:

The saddest thing in the world
is to wake up on Christmas morning,
and not be a child.

Sphere: Related Content

FUBAR

A dog, a bummer, a crock, a wart.

Yes, Malcolm's talking Vista here.

He was confirmed in his prejudice when he leafed through dabs4work.com's Business Buyer's Guide. There he found an Acer Notebook being sold: the list of features concluded:

Microsoft Windows Vista Business/XP Pro downgrade.

When was the last time anything was sold on the basis of a "downgrade"?

It is as it ever was, and as celebrated in the epic conned from the New Hacker's Dictionary:

SNAFU principle /sna'foo prin'si-pl/ /n./

[from a WWII Army acronym for `Situation Normal, All Fucked Up'] "True communication is possible only between equals, because inferiors are more consistently rewarded for telling their superiors pleasant lies than for telling the truth." -- a central tenet of Discordianism, often invoked by hackers to explain why authoritarian hierarchies screw up so reliably and systematically. The effect of the SNAFU principle is a progressive disconnection of decision-makers from reality. This lightly adapted version of a fable dating back to the early 1960s illustrates the phenomenon perfectly:

In the beginning was the plan,
and then the specification;
And the plan was without form,
and the specification was void.

And darkness
was on the faces of the implementors thereof;
And they spake unto their leader,
saying:
"It is a crock of shit,
and smells as of a sewer."

And the leader took pity on them,
and spoke to the project leader:
"It is a crock of excrement,
and none may abide the odor thereof."

And the project leader
spake unto his section head, saying:
"It is a container of excrement,
and it is very strong, such that none may abide it."

The section head then hurried to his department manager,
and informed him thus:
"It is a vessel of fertilizer,
and none may abide its strength."

The department manager carried these words
to his general manager,
and spoke unto him
saying:
"It containeth that which aideth the growth of plants,
and it is very strong."

And so it was that the general manager rejoiced
and delivered the good news unto the Vice President.
"It promoteth growth,
and it is very powerful."

The Vice President rushed to the President's side,
and joyously exclaimed:
"This powerful new software product
will promote the growth of the company!"

And the President looked upon the product,
and saw that it was very good.

After the subsequent and inevitable disaster, the suits protect themselves by saying "I was misinformed!", and the implementors are demoted or fired.

This blog is created exclusively on an Apple laptops. No animals were harmed in the making of this entry.
Sphere: Related Content

A Santa Rosa, by any other name,
would smell as sweet?

As the great clear-out goes on, a curiosity dropped into Malcolm's ken, onto his foot, and with great force.

It was an AST "lap-top" computer from about 1992 or 1993. No wonder male impotence became a medical phenomenon about that time. The battery alone is the size of a fold-up umbrella, capable of being used as a small hand-weapon (but, amazingly, still capable of holding a charge).

AST, once a Fortune 500 corporation, has long since become one with the Norwegian Blue:

Bereft of life, 'e rests in peace! If you hadn't nailed 'im to the perch 'e'd be pushing up the daisies! 'Is metabolic processes are now 'istory! 'E's off the twig! 'E's kicked the bucket, 'e's shuffled off 'is mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisible!

To Malcolm's surprise, even astonishment, feeding the AST 240 volts provided life, albeit in glorious LCD monochrome on a five inch (to be generous) screen. The menu then turned up Word, Excel and Notes, even Windows 3.1, and all on a hard-drive of 80 MB. The wonder driving the box of tricks is a 386SX, running at 25 MHz. All this and an ethernet connection. What else could a road-warrior desire?

At that time Malcolm's weapon of choice was a Mac with a similar configuration: a IIvx, with a 68030 CPU running at 32MHz, another 80MB hard drive, but also .... a CD ROM. That is also still in working condition (though it needed a motherboard transplant a couple of years into its long life. That, along with a Power Mac, a 6100 from a year or so later, and a couple of pizza-box LC630s, are kept in the attic on the theory that one day, one day, they may be needed to run obsolete software, such as the Oxford English Dictionary ROM. In fact, since the OED is now on line (along with the DNB) -- thanks to the agreement with the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council -- that is just an excuse for clutter.

This train of thought was complicated by trying to comprehend a Computerworld article which was supposed to explain the naming of Intel chips, specifically that the "Nehalem" is now "Core i7". Hopeless.

And for his next trick, Malcolm explains the off-side rule. Sphere: Related Content

Of Apples, Lemons and Eagles

Malcolm has long been a cheer-leader for most things Apple.

This goes back, more than two decades, to a close and loving acquaintance with a Mac Plus, which had supplanted his "first" computer, a BBC Micro. The Mac Plus (with an early Epson MX-80 dot-matrix printer) smoked the only realistic alternative: the Amstrad PCW8512 (though Malcolm also operated a couple of those, quite effectively).

Like all relationships, there have been occasional moments of friction. The Performa 5200 0f 1995-6 was a particularly fraught period.

And now we have the whole MobileMe shambles.

It begins to seem -- touch vinyl -- as though the worst of the transition is over. Having been away from home, reliant on "borrowed" time and passing wi-fi links, Malcolm's problems may have been thus magnified. But, he has not been impressed. The acquisition of routine "@mac.com" mail has been quite erratic. His iPod touch no longer happily syncs (And there's no chance he'll attempt any software upgrade his current side of the Ocean).

So, in his chagrined state, to parody the famous Skibbereen Eagle editorial, on the Emperor of Russia (over the 1905 "Bloody Sunday" St Petersburg riots), Malcolm wants Steve Jobs and all at One, Infinite Loop, to know he has his eye upon them. (Note that Bruce Anderson, in his Indy piece last 12th May, typically cocked up the West Corkonian reference).

After thought:

The Skibbereen Eagle reference is well-known: Anderson (see above) regarded it as an:

old joke ... [that] has long since grown green mould.

What is less well-rehearsed is the follow-up:

... in 1917 after the success of the storming of the Winter Palace the Editor of the Southern Star which was the successor of the Skibbereen Eagle received a telegram from Lenin simply saying, “spassiba kamerad”, “thank you, comrade”.

Malcolm may yet be saying the same to Jobs, when he has grown accustomed to the new surname@me.com dispensation. Sphere: Related Content

Knocking spots off Redmond


It's Leopard day, and Malcolm is starry-eyed and on his way to the MacExpo, armed with credit card.

At least it stops him bemoaning that he didn't, in the late 90s, buy Apple shares at $13 (at a time when Apple had the equivalent of $13 a share tucked under the mattress). They closed last night at $182.78: down $3.15 on the day. Ah, he muses, the wisdom of the Market.

Phew! say the rest of us. Another quiet day on the Malcolm front, just as he was waxing loud and lyrical about Percy French and the West Clare Railway. Sphere: Related Content