Dean's Blog

“Whaddaya mean command-click!?” I remember the frustrations of my first introductions to the Mac, and the input devices that came with that experience. The Apple iPuck mouse aside, the Pro Mouse was, by it’s name, something I expected to be professional. I suppose there are many who love it, but on a personal level, it wasn’t a favorite. The wear pads had worn down to nothing in a few short weeks, leading to a scraping and dragging experience, frustrating my attempts at smooth mouse movements for media design. I tried utilizing a mouse pad, being as I’ve always used one, and my Logitech Optical mouse at home has no issues, but the Pro Mouse couldn’t properly track on the surface of the mouse pads I tried.

The other issue that always bothered me, was the single mouse button. Now it seems unnatural and inefficient to me. I have 4 fingers and one thumb on my right hand, so why is there only one (huge) button? Maybe astronauts with their space-gloves or chefs with oven mitts could find it useful, but c’mon, it’s silly. Even automatic transmission cars have an accelerator and a brake pedal. You don’t accelerate with your foot and then push a button over by the glove box to brake. Unless it was an iCar perhaps. The other poor design issue of the Pro Mouse is that when the wear pads wear down, pressing the button, which is essentially pressing down on the mouse, causes the button bezel to contact the desktop surface, causing further drag.

Anyhow, imagine my surprise when the Apple Insider indicates that Apple might have a 2 button mouse in the works. It’s wireless, so that you can avoid the ridiculous self-knotting feature of the Pro Mouse USB cable. But for me, it is too little too late. One of the first things I did when in college was buy a Logitech optical mouse to pack with me to classes. It was the better solution all around, and considerably less money than the Apple product.

The Pro Mouse that was attached to the computer I am blogging with right now has been retired for over a year. I took it out of the drawer to examine it’s shape, and again, the wear pads are worn out, and it’s full of grime. Bleh. As long as it doesn’t rise from the grave to strangle me in my sleep with it’s cable. In the meantime, I have a Logitech MX310 mouse connected to this machine and it is wonderful. Programmable buttons on the mouse make productivity fun, and it works on a mousepad. I have also replaced the Apple keyboard with a Microsoft Natural Pro USB keyboard. The Apple device was becoming very painful to use, it’s low profile seems very anti-ergonomic. We’ll have to see what the future brings.

Ever since the combat-style one on one and multiplayer games were invented, I’ve been frustrated by the constant application of toe death. Meaning, if for whatever reason you are low on health, and someone hits your toe, you die. There is not provision or a need for a fatal blow or deadly blow to the head, groin or torso to finish you off, just a simple tap to the toe. To me this seems to be a glaring fault in many combat style games. That is like kicking the tire on a car and having the car blow up because it is low on fuel.

So, the other morning while waiting for the bus so that I could travel the third leg of my trip from home to work, my stomach took some time to inform me that it was empty. I glanced at the nearby clock on Stephen Ave and calculated that with the bus being reliably late, I had enough time to make a quick trip down to McDonalds and order some breakfast, loaded with essential vitamins and minerals such as Verminium and Vitamin Z.

Quickly negotiating the slippery sidewalk I made a fast trip to the McDonalds. After waiting in a long line behind a guy with a non-functioning debit card and in front of a guy who was wheezing the tune to “my kidney stones are moving,” for a few minutes, I was able to place my order. Usually, on the rare occasion I order breakfast from McGonads, I stick with the basics, which is a Sausage and Egg McMuffin Meal with Orange Juice. This time I thought I’d do without the hashbrown-like substance and go for two Sausage and Egg McMuffins with Orange Juice. However the lady behind the counter didn’t seem to understand the order, and rang up two Sausage and Egg McMuffins. Deciding that it was getting too close to the reliably late deadline to catch my bus, I didn’t argue, being as I was only charged for the sandwiches, and the possibility of an enormous language barrier of some kind was apparent. This was reinforced when I asked for ketchup, to which the lady behind the counter said, “Two Sasuage and Egg McMuffin.”

This leads me to some thoughts about the fast food industry. Technically speaking, with touch screen technology and debit cards, we could circumvent a need to have a person behind the counter to deal with orders of frustrated customers, or even a drive-through intercom. Touch the screen to select your meal items, insert card, pay and pick up the order from the window. Inventory tracking would keep the menu up to date, and if they ran out of fries, you simply couldn’t order them. Inside fast food restaurants, the ordering terminals could be in a central location, removed from the pickup counter, so that we can avoid the crowding mixture of people waiting to order, and people waiting to pick up their order.

Just a thought on IT job creation.

So, I’ve been operating apple computers for 4 years now, not by choice, but by professional compulsion. Like many people who grew up with a computer hobby, there was always this mysterious zone people whispered about called ‘Apple Computers’. We would hear all sorts of interestingly tantilizing titbits, such as, “Risc processors (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) can manage moon landings,” and “Apples taste great”. Fast forward a decade and as I found myself sitting in my very first modern Macintosh lab, I was not quite prepared for the Mac Experience in all it’s glory.

You see, that was 2001. Sure it was a G-4. Sure it had 384 MB of RAM. Sure it had a round puck-like mouse that was as precise as soap on a rope. It reminded me of something Fischer Price would have made. That aside, I gave it the benefit of the doubt. I quickly found out what OS-9 stood for: -Operating System that crashes 9 times while trying to open or run an(y) application related to multimedia.- My first impression was poor, however the two Macintosh fanatics in the class assured the rest of us that this was only due to having so many programs installed on the computer. Well that makes sense, I thought to myself, because 747’s always crash when they have 450 passengers on board.

Two semesters later the school had upgraded. More Ram, the Macintosh ‘Pro-Mouse’ which looked more like an actual bar of soap than the puck mouse, and the advance to Mac OS X. The two Macintosh fanatics, after 36 weeks of persecution from the rest of us stood up on actual apple-scented soap boxes at the front of the class and proclaimed loudly to us all that: ‘Macintoshes were now and forever better than anything PC because Mac OSX was based on UNIX.’ So, basically there is no Apple left in the Apple? It was too good to be true, and it was. Restarting in ‘classic mode’ otherwise known as OS-9 on your desktop in order to run the editing suite and compositing effects software soon proved tiresome and solidified my impressions that Mac isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. OSX was better than standard OS-9, for sure, but lockups, crashes, and stalled drives were commonplace. All this along with the Macintosh design scheme of form and no function. I mean the case is great if I wanted to, for example, throw the Mac G4 off the top of a ten story building, it has handles on all four corners for ease of transport. Hardware is another issue. I mean, can I just whip down to the shop and buy any DVD-R drive for the machine? Nooooo I have to buy a Macintosh supported version that is 3 generations behind in technology.

That aside, what does the Mac have to offer? As far as I can tell, there are only one thing that Mac is good at, and that would be video editing. Unfortunately the PC software has not quite become as polished as Final Cut Pro has been for Mac. It still crashes now and then, but due to the fact that it is mostly a rip-off in functionality of the AVID system, it works like a charm. All the rest of it, Photoshop, and everything else, can be had on a PC for less money and probably the same performance.

Subject yourself to major delays, extend your travel time by 1 hour, get less sleep than ever, but you’re saving money. Be exposed to an incredible cesspool of diseases left behind by hundreds of thousands of other travellers every week. Enjoy highly uncomfortable seating accomodations on our stained and filthy.. oh nevermind, they are full of screaming female teenagers and craggy old men. Stand up and enjoy the view while the accumulated slop of winter oozes about your footwear and stains the bottom of your pantlegs. Enjoy the aural relaxation of 87 people sucking back snot and semi-coagulated mucus all around you for the duration of your delayed journey. Be crowded beyond all compare, and enjoy being close enough to carefully examine your fellow Calgarians every zit and boil. Best of all, enjoy the crisp morning air, typically around -30 degrees C as it permeates your body while waiting for the bus that was supposed to arrive 37 minutes ago, and be amazed at our automated schedule phone system, which will insist we are always on time for you. You only have to pay $70.00 per month to enjoy all that we have to offer. You couldn’t do anything else for $840 a year, ($1680 if you are married)

Yeah, last night I stood outside the office at the bus stop and waited for the bus for 21 minutes. At the 14 minute point I was rather frustrated as it is the critical moment where I know that I could have walked to the train station by now. I wantonly thought about the spotting scope I received for Christmas in 2003. If I had it , I could scan up 17th Avenue and look for the wretched number 2, to the probable confusion of the crowd of also-waitings who might have assumed I had just retrieved a black weapon of mass destruction from my bag and ferociously wielded it. The bus did show up eventually. The annoying part is that it was late, and therefore totally packed to the rafters.

So where did this leave me? It left me wanting for a portable early warning system. Forget iPods and Rios and PDA’s. I want something that can track everything in the universe. It would tell me, from the warmth of the office or bed, just how late my bus is really going to be, and when an accident is going to delay and trap me on the C-train for 2 hours. Further, such as the case this morning, it could warn me that even though I am laying in bed a 6:00am, feeling ok, and thinking about getting up, that in 12 minutes I’ll be sitting on the toilet and my bowels will be spewing out what seems like litres of unabsorbed nutrients, leaving me feeling very weak and sore all over. And despite my efforts to go to work and get things done, I’d still feel like total crap all morning and all day, and that dude who gets up and goes to the bathroom everytime I get up to go use the bathroom will continue to do it like he has every day for the last year.

DriveCreator seems to be working well today.

Well, I might as well jump on the whole operating system debate as well. I seem to recall in the very early 1990’s that the only reason you had an operating system was so that you could run a program. Command line program execution was a very simple task, and if someone didn’t have the ability to type or navigate a file system, the dosshell command would allow them a rudimentary GUI that they could tab around and eventually get Wolfenstien 3D and Duke Nukem to run.

When windows became popular, something it really didn’t until version 3.1 was included pre-installed, suddenly things became more complex for the sake of being user friendly. Instead of ‘run wolf3d.exe’ it became ‘click click click’. The intelligence and knowledge base of the user could decrease, while the computer became more powerful, according to Moore’s law. Suddenly I don’t have to type anymore, I can just point and click. Suddenly I begin to wonder why this ease of use doesn’t apply to other aspects of modern life. For some example, I can’t define a button called ‘Empty Recycle Bin’ on my arm with a magic marker, press the button, and have my body autonomously go and use the facilities while I have the freedom of the unused 34% of my brain processes to think about how I am going to commit tax evasion next year.

Getting back to the point. It is my feeling that the trends in amalgamated Operating System / User Interface have taken the ‘personal’ out of Personal Computer. It seems to be that there is a tendency for the operating system to suddenly be a form of mind numbing entertainment. I do not need to see my windows animating and swishing around the screen when I want to close the program. End Program means stop immediately, don’t do a Redmond-dance clogging step for 4 seconds while eating up precious cpu and memory resources. All I need out of an operating system is a way to manage files, a way to manage memory, and a way to launch programs. It’s that simple. However, I’ll slam Microsoft a bit on this one now, the next generation OS known as Longhorn has had it’s list of hardware managing features and tools reduced significantly in order to meet the 2006 launch deadline. However all the hyper animated window effects and other related eye candy are still in place, and will probably rank highly in terms of developer (developers developers developers) resources.

So, why don’t I jump ship? Well, I might. If Apple and Adobe started developing for Linux. Oh sure, you can get Photoshop to run on Linux, but at the expense of several tools in the library and stability issues. In the end, there isn’t a current ‘catch-all’ Operating System environment. Sadly, the corporate empires will continue to think that a competitive and cutting edge operating system has to be developed by Industrial Light and Magic rather than hardware optimizing engineers. With aims at crushing each other with market share tug-of-wars and economic murder schemes, it doesn’t look too bright on the horizon. Or rather, I’d like to see the horizon, but I can’t through all the 64 bit dancing windows and point releases.

I have a theory that Monday Mornings have been created to test the strength of a species. Why are dinosaurs extinct? I think it may be because they could not deal with monday mornings. 65 million years ago, Swampbucks Bronto-Coffee might not have been enough to provide long term sustainability for an every increasing population of sauropod luddites. So what happened in the end? Some red-eyed and sleep deprived Hadrasaur probably turned the knob to eleven, or pushed the shiny red button, and -poof- It was the end of the world as they knew it. The caffine content in their decaying bodies leached the calcium out of their bones, replacing it with sedimentary minerals, and thusly creating instant fossils. 65 million years later, several people make a living scratching these fossil deposits out of the rocks, and contemplate what sort of sneezing habits the Diplidocus might have had, while fuelling up a freshly brewed cup of french roast embalming fluid. All the while, unknowing of the direct connection they share with the very extinct species they are studying.

How this all relates to Monday Morning, we will probably never know. But this is the sort of wisdom one commonly finds within the bowels of web logs.

I don’t know where you get your delusions, laserbrain..