Rest in Peace, Steve Jobs (1955–2011).

My first computer wasn’t an Apple. It was an Atari 800. As a young boy into videogames, the Atari was the natural step up from the Atari 2600 game console. It was videogames that got me fascinated in computers, and it was the Atari that helped me discover how much I liked making them run.

After a few years, though, I had outgrown the Atari. The system had limits, and the company was reaching its limits as well. As a loyal Atari owner, I disliked the Apple II, with its relatively crude graphics and very un-arcade-like analog joystick. In middle school, though, all the school computers were Apples, and I saw software that just wasn’t available for the Atari.

So, my Christmas wish one year was for an Apple //c. By then, Mom and Dad had learned the true meaning of the word “peripheral”—an education that started on the Christmas morning after I got the Atari when I didn’t want to shut it off lest I lose my programs, having no cassette drive or disk drive.  I had an Apple with all the trimmings. It was a well-travelled computer, making weekend trips to the family cottage in New Hampshire and the occasional trip in to school to supplement the small computer lab there.  I was an Apple owner, but I wasn’t truly an enthusiast yet.

That came in eighth grade. By then, I was the undisputed computer nerd of the town school system; the adults came to me for advice. That’s how it came that one day they asked me to come down to the computer room: I excelled in English, I lived and breathed computers… they wanted me to be an editor of the school newspaper, because they wanted to create it using a new thing they were testing: a Macintosh.

I had read about the Macintosh in Creative Computing and BYTE, and it had intrigued me… but that day in the computer lab, it was love at first sight. I took to MacWrite and MacPaint like a duck to water, and I started to learn the intricacies of ReadySetGo, one of the first of a heretofore-unknown type of software: desktop publishing.

Guess what was on the Christmas list the next year?

I had a Mac Plus back when they were still beige. I have oddly fond memories of the wub-wub-wub noise an Apple 800K disk drive made as it changed speeds, the ka-CHUNK a floppy made as you inserted it. I learned about INITs and CDEVS; I studied Inside Macintosh and learned Pascal. I took BASIC computer programming as a high-school freshman when the class was still being taught on Commodore PETs; being an old hand at BASIC, I breezed through the curriculum and started handing in programs written in Microsoft Macintosh BASIC, including GUIs.

I remember getting my first hard drive, a Jasmine 80MB SCSI disk that sat underneath the Mac, and thinking I’d never find enough things to fill it. I remember playing Epix’ Winter Games on the Mac, sliding the mouse back and forth rhythmically to simulate cross-country skiing. I recall driving from my parents’ home in North Granby, CT to the suburbs of Springfield, MA, not long after getting my drivers’ license, to get my hands on a freshly-minted copy of System 7, and lusting after the Macintosh Portable in all its portable-typewriter/boat-anchor glory while I was there. I remember the magic of the ThunderScan, a device that replaced the ribbon cassette in the ImageWriter II printer with an image sensor, allowing you to use the printer as a crude drum scanner. I spent hours going through my favorite VHS movies with the VCR hooked up to a MacRecorder, creating sound clips of favorite lines to use as beep sounds.

That lead to a particularly favorite prank. The school system’s computer expert was named Dave, and he wasn’t yet comfortable with Macs. One week, he made it known that he’d be taking the school’s Mac for the weekend to learn more about it. I played a little joke on him (with the knowledge of the teacher in charge of the computer club): Before he left, I added a program to the Mac’s startup disk that let you tie sounds to certain system events. Upon ejecting a disk, the Mac played a sound clip from the 1980s revival of Mission: Impossible: “This disk will self-destruct in five seconds. Good luck, Jim!”  He later related that he panicked at first, before realizing that he’d been had.  (This was before computer viruses were on anyone’s radar.)

That Mac Plus was also well-travelled. The latter half of my high-school career was spent at a private school in Hartford; I was a fixture in the computer lab there, and an editor of the newspaper and the yearbook. When crunch time came for the yearbook, that Mac came to school with me daily in its big blue Cordura bag.

Somewhere in there was the summer I sent a resume to MacConnection hoping for a summer job, despite being a teen; they were headquartered in the next town over from our cottage. I managed an interview with the CEO, but I didn’t get a job.

I remember two treks from New Hampshire down to Boston for MacWorld Expo, back when it was a massive affair occupying two conference halls—and before the era of the Stevenote. I brought home bags of goodies, and a wonderful memory of spying Harry Anderson, star of Night Court, from afar as he negotiated a sizable purchase from one of the big Mac mail-order companies at the back of one of their booths. (Anderson was one of the most famous Mac enthusiasts of the era.)

Late in senior year, I hit Grandma up one more time, and made it count: I got the top-of-the-line Macintosh IIfx. (It’s often joked that the name expanded to “Macintosh Too F—ing Expensive”.) I got a stripped-down model and added my own hard drive, memory, and keyboard. I loved that thing.

Around that time, I was a beta-tester for a friend’s program, Wallpaper, which let you set color desktop patterns larger than the Apple-approved 8 square pixels. One of the background patterns I created featured in the advertisement for the program that appeared in MacUser magazine.

When I went to the University of Rochester, I remember setting it up in my dorm room on the Computer Interest Floor and having someone come in and exclaim “Woah! You’ve got a workstation!” (The E-Machines 16″ Trinitron monitor was physically imposing, and computer monitors bigger than 13″ were still uncommon then.)

That IIfx saw me through college, and through my first job and much of my second job. Then, I convinced my employer that I’d be more productive if I had a PowerBook, so I got a PowerBook 1400c. Sadly, when I left, they wanted it back… but I picked up a discarded Power Macintosh 7100/80AV to replace it. Meanwhile, the IIfx continued on as the girlfriend’s computer.

While at Global Crossing, I upgraded to my first personally purchased new Mac, a Power Macintosh G4 Dual 500MHz. For some time, that second processor sat idle, unused by virtually any software, until Mac OS X came out. I got that the day it came out, and lived with its shortcomings because it was cool, and it was UNIX. I also saved up for the original Cinema Display, the first of Apple’s awesomely huge displays. (That display was in nearly constant use until earlier this year, when the backlight started to flicker and I replaced it so Dad could keep using the G4.)

When I’d been at Bank of America for a while and replenished my funds, I bought a Power Macintosh G5 Dual 2.7GHz and a new Cinema Display. That served me well for years, and became another hand-me-down. It currently resides in my basement, awaiting rebirth as an Ubuntu system; the Cinema Display is my second monitor for my work laptop when I’m home.

The G5 gave way to a 24″ iMac Core 2 Duo 3.06GHz; that was my workhorse system until the girlfriend’s 20″ Core 2 Duo iMac flaked out and I found that 4GB of RAM wasn’t enough for a power user; I replaced it with a 27″ iMac Core i7 Quad, and gave the 24″ iMac to the girlfriend.

This spring, for graduation, my girlfriend’s daughter and her friend got MacBook Pros; I now have OS X Server and Remote Desktop to manage the household network.

I wasn’t the first person in line to get an iPod, but it didn’t take me too long to get one. I loved that first-generation device; I took many long walks with it. Sadly, it died after I handed it down to Mom and Dad, when they didn’t realize it wouldn’t take well to being left on the dashboard of their Jeep in the Florida sun.  By then, my girlfriend had given me a fifth-generation iPod.

I was waiting at the door in my Apple t-shirt for the UPS driver on the day the iPad was released. I’ve used it every day since. I am a voracious reader, and five years ago I would’ve said that I would never stop buying paper books. I love books, and I love bookshelves. I have visited a bookstore once in the last six months; I now buy almost all my books for the iPad, because it’s so much more convenient. I have my iPad with me in places I’d never lug around a book, so I get to read more.

Last Christmas, I got an Apple TV. The household has three Apple wireless access points.

Prick me, and I bleed five colors, modern monochrome logos notwithstanding.

Back in the late 1990s, when Apple was struggling and the faithful engaged in guerrilla marketing to help the company, I managed to read about Apple offering the first set of “Think Different” posters in time to order a set. Dad built some fames for them; they have places of honor in my office. (Well, except for Picasso, because I’m short on room, and frankly, he’s creepy.)

While the Atari got me into computing, Apple products shaped and fed my interest throughout my life. If it weren’t for Steve Jobs’ company, I wouldn’t be the person I am today. I wouldn’t have gotten half the jobs I did—my first job out of college, working tech support for Xerox printers, came about in part because of my computer knowledge, and in part because of my long experience with desktop publishing.  I may never have met the man, but he had a profound impact on my life.

Last night, Kingston held its annual Fourth of July fireworks show… a week early, as usual. Due to budget cuts, the show wasn’t as good as it has been in past years.  On the other hand, because there was no budget for a weekend-long festival in the Rondout District this year, the crowds weren’t as obnoxious and there weren’t lines of brightly-lit, diesel-belching busses blocking the view, so that’s a plus.

I got some pretty good pics with my new Nikon ultracompact.  It’s nowhere near DSLR quality—I’m a bit disappointed in the image detail under normal use—but for a stick-it-in-your-pocket camera, it does pretty well.  It certainly did better than I expected with the fireworks show!  I’ve posted the pictures to Flickr.

As I sit here, I’m listening to Christmas music piped from my Mac to my home stereo over my home’s Ethernet network, under the wireless remote control of my iPad. To most people, this sounds like an incredibly geeky accomplishment—perhaps even science fiction brought to life.

The thing is, despite this feat of digital integration, I know there’s so much more that my house should be able to do, but can’t… and most of it is due to legal or policy restrictions that do little except inhibit innovation and preserve outmoded business models.

For instance, both my TiVo and my Blu-ray player have network connections. Neither, however, can play videos that I purchased from iTunes. Everything with a video output seems to support Netflix nowadays; where’s the AirPlay support? For that matter, why can’t the entire industry agree on a standard for sending high-def video locally over TCP/IP, and implement it everywhere?

My TiVo used to be able to record shows that it thought I’d like to watch. Since Time Warner implemented switched digital video, forcing me to accept a buggy “tuning adapter,” that function works rarely if ever, and almost never manages to find the high-def channels. Of course, it’s a bit of a crapshoot if some of those high-def channels will tune, or if the tuning adapter will punt on them. The sad thing is that the tuning adapter is little more than a customized cable modem, and I already have one of those in the house. There’s no technological reason why the TiVo can’t send its tuning requests to Time Warner via TCP/IP. My opinion is that Time Warner will take any action it can get away with that makes TiVo ownership painful, in hopes of renting its own substandard DVRs to customers instead.

TVs now come with Ethernet support to retrieve movies from Netflix and YouTube. Imagine if you could also use this capability to send video signals within the house: Networked televisions could all draw on the same feed from your TiVo to let you watch a show as you wander from living room to kitchen to laundry room without them being out of sync, and without huge investments in video distribution infrastructure.

Gigabit Ethernet switches are cheap. HDMI splitters are not.

I bought the VGA cable for my iPad. I could use it to put presentations on my TV, or YouTube videos, but not movies I bought from iTunes; apparently I’m not allowed to watch anything at resolutions above 480p in analog form any more, as I might bootleg videos that way. (Of course, if I’m technically competent enough to use an iPad and a VGA adapter with my television, I could probably find a way to copy that video in digital form if I were truly so inclined.)

There’s a vast market for “universal remote controls.” The technology in all my entertainment-center remotes is identical; why do I need to spend even more money on integration? Why can’t vendors sit down and create a universal standard for commands, the way that USB has a universal standard for keyboards and Bluetooth has a universal standard for headsets? For that matter, HDMI was supposed to enable this, by letting components talk to each other and share command information: insert a disc in a HDMI-equipped Blu-ray player, and it could tell your audio receiver and your TV to make appropriate settings changes, and the TV could pass back remote-control commands it receives from its remote. In practice, this technology only works if all your components come from one vendor, and even then it’s often half-baked.

There’s so much that could be done with our existing technology, if only we could keep scared businessmen from prohibiting it.

I’m not a rabid open-source advocate of the Stallman camp, the type who believes that all software must be free of charge and free of restrictions. Open-source software has its uses, and there are places where proprietary software is necessary to ensure growth of the ecosystem. Whether the software is free or not, though, the protocols need to be free and unencumbered. Proprietary devices are more useful, and thus more likely to be profitable, if purchasers can use them in novel and unanticipated ways. In the modern world, what your widget does isn’t as important as how it plays with others.

I only wish that consumer-electronics manufacturers would realize this.

I’ve published my quick and easy chicken soup recipe elsewhere on the website.

Now’s a good time to freeze up a batch before the fall cold season starts.

A few months ago, I finally got around to sending my Saab 9-5′s Information Display off to be repaired.  (That story would make a good blog post itself…)  Soon after it came back, now with 100% working pixels, my Saab wanted to test it out.  It did so by telling me: BRAKE LIGHT FAILURE.

Okay, no big deal; you can replace the brake light on a SportWagon with the provided screwdriver and about three minutes’ time.  (The only trick is realizing that you have to sort of rip the thing back and to the side after undoing the two screws, as the front edge of the light assembly is held in place by two friction-fit pop-in pins.)

I have my girlfriend Kim go around back while I step on the brake, so we can identify which light has failed.

They’re all working.

So this happens sometimes; you get a bulb with a loose filament that gets intermittent.  I push CLEAR on the SID.  A day or two later: BRAKE LIGHT FAILURE.

But they still all work.

This goes on for a few weeks, before I remember to go searching the Internet for the answer.

The first recommendation: Sometimes the sensor gets confused if the impedance of the bulbs on either side of the car becomes different.  That could happen if the bulbs are from different manufacturers, or if the contacts in the bulb socket on one side have gotten corroded.

I replace both bulbs from a new package. While I’m at it, I clean the sockets with a pencil eraser, even though they look reasonably clean.  I also don’t see any broken wires.

A day later: BRAKE LIGHT FAILURE.

Well, according to the Internet, that left one thing: the center high-mounted brake light. It’s an LED strip on the SportWagon.  Apparently, sometimes the circuitry flakes out and it ceases to identify itself as “good” to the sensors even though it works just fine.  (I wonder if it’s yet another component sourced from Lucas Electric, the Prince of Darkness.)

Being LEDs, the CHMBL is expensive: $142.99 at eeuroparts.com, my preferred vendor of Saab bits.  But I’m tired of BRAKE LIGHT FAILURE, so I pony up.

There’s another problem that this may help, as well.  For some time, I’ve had water leaking in through the back hatch, making wet spots on the cargo cover. It seems that this can also be caused by the CHMBL.  Sometimes the foam seal around the edge goes. Sometimes the lens cracks. Sometimes the plastic ears on the back that hold the bolts in place crack and it loosens from the car.

Soon thereafter, the replacement CHMBL arrives.

Among the things I adore about my Saab is that the engineers clearly considered routine maintenance when they built it.  The parts you might have to replace are generally easy to get to.  In this case, the trim panel at the top of the back hatch pries off easily, and there’s the three nuts that hold the light in place.  Disconnect, loosen, remove, insert, tighten, connect, and pop the cover in place… no sweat.  The hardest part was finding where I’d left my metric socket set; it’s one of the few lighting repairs that can’t be made using the tools provided with the car.

(I really love that Saab, unlike other GM vehicles, uses stout metal push-clips for trim pieces that are designed for repeated use without loosening or breaking.  American carmakers have always loved those plastic once-if-you’re-lucky trim panel clips that usually need to be replaced every time you remove a panel…)

The original CHMBL did indeed have a cracked lens, and the plastic ears for the center bolt were loose as well.  My theory is that water got in through the crack and/or seal when it poured, and possibly damaged the circuitry, as well as causing the damp spots.

A few soaking rain storms later, I have no damp spots in the cargo area, and no more BRAKE LIGHT FAILURE on the SID.

Hopefully this post helps a few other people who run into a similar pattern with their Saab.

I miss the Lilac Festival in Rochester… even though when I was there, I always hated trying to navigate the extra traffic in the South Wedge… especially when I lived in the South Wedge…

When we moved into our current house and started sprucing up the very sad gardens that were there, my first order of business was planting some lilacs.

They’re definitely at peak bloom today.  For the past few days, if the windows are open, the whole house smells like lilac.

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