Into the Woods – Page 179 – Watching a bewildering world from the middle of nowhere

Remember when people thought Apple was dead?

Vintage 1997: The Power Macintosh 5500

It’s amazing how much abuse Macintoshes used to take from people who thought that Microsoft should, and would, rule the world. I put up with this for virtually my entire career in newspaper publishing. But without, I hope, being too boastful, I think the entire world now sees what we technology heretics saw decades ago.

I offer as evidence a piece I wrote in the San Francisco Examiner on Jan. 12, 1997. Because the Examiner closed in 2000 and its staff merged with the staff of the San Francisco Chronicle, this piece is now in the archive of the San Francisco Chronicle. The article’s headline is: “Next Up for Apple: Saved by Unix?”

What had happened then was that, in December 1996, Apple acquired NeXT, the company Steve Jobs had started after he was ousted from Apple in 1985. In July 1997, Jobs returned to Apple as CEO and started Apple’s Renaissance, including the development of the current Mac OS X operating system.

My article in the Examiner was published on a Sunday. Apple’s stock price the Friday before was $17.62 a share. As of today the share price is about $196, more than 11 times higher. In this piece, I argued that Apple was now on the right track, technically. However, I took no position on whether Apple’s technical strategy would succeed in the market, because the market is so fickle and Microsoft was so predatory.

That article, by the way, was noticed by investors and was widely cited. I, however, didn’t have the good sense to buy Apple stock.

I might also mention that, in my role as editorial systems director for the Examiner, I had the opportunity to talk with Gil Amelio when he came in to meet with the Examiner’s editorial board. This was during Amelio’s last months as Apple CEO, just before Steve Jobs returned as CEO. Amelio, in my opinion, deserves far more credit for Apple’s turnaround than he is generally given. I also had the opportunity to participate in a workshop with Apple’s human interfaces design team when they were designing and testing the look and feel of Mac OS X.

Remember when NASA used to thrill us with space age technology? No more. These days, who does, other than Apple? To build the beautiful human interface of Mac OS X on top of a Unix (FreeBSD) was an amazing feat.

Still, to my mind, the greatest computer operating system ever developed is Sun’s Solaris, a true Unix. Oracle bought Sun Microsystems last month. I hope Oracle respects what they now own.

From the good old days…

My cherished Selectric III from the San Francisco Examiner

If I had the space and the money, I could happily fill a warehouse with a collection of vintage technology. Typewriter technology, after steady development for at least 150 years, reached its apex in the 1970s with the IBM Correcting Selectric III. I own one of these. I salvaged it from a basement junk pile at the San Francisco Examiner. During the 1970s, newspaper newsrooms were filled with IBM Selectrics. Reporters and editors used them, and the typed pages were sent to the composing room, where the text was scanned from the pages. In those days, computers were too big and too expensive for the desktop, so typewriters still ruled.

The San Francisco Examiner copy desk, c. 1978.

My Selectric still has its Typewritorium sticker. The Typewritorium was made famous by Herb Caen, the columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, because that’s where Caen’s “Loyal Royal” was sent when it needed repairs. Caen’s Loyal Royal is still on display in the Chronicle’s lobby.

Can you espy the cat?

Hint: She’s black.

The coffee of yesteryear

Buffalo china cups, Victor mugs

Those enormous coffee mugs and gigantic paper coffee cups are symbols of the rat race. Once upon a time, it was understood that a cup of coffee was something to relax with and savor. The drinking vessels reflected that.

There is a science, of course, behind the new style and the old style of coffee drinking.

The science of the new style is simple: Get all the coffee you’re going to drink into a single vessel, and chug it fast while on the run. Still, it’s guaranteed that the first third of it will be too hot, and the last third will be too cold.

The science of the old style was much more complex and sophisticated. It required skill and attention from whoever was serving the coffee. The drinking vessels were made of heavy china. The cups absorbed heat from the first pouring of coffee, cooling it to a more drinkable temperature. Thereafter, there was the ritual of “warming up” the coffee, which required pouring more coffee at just the right time, before the cup was empty. This not only refilled the cup, it also brought the coffee back to the ideal temperature. This ritual was repeated until you’d had enough coffee. This is how the English serve — or at least used to serve — tea from a teapot.

To my lights, the ideal coffee mug was the mug made by the Victor Mug Company. This mug holds about 8 ounces when filled to the brim, or about 7 ounces when filled to a drinkable level. The ideal coffee cup was made by the Buffalo Pottery Company. These cups hold about 7 ounces when filled to the brim, and about 6 ounces when filled to a drinkable level. These mugs and cups were sold as restaurant china. They’re now collectable.

When looking for cups in the housewares section of a couple of chain stores, I was not terribly surprised to find that they don’t even carry cups and saucers anymore, and all the mugs are huge. eBay is the answer.

I really feel for the people who have to drink their coffee from huge vessels, on the run. Now that I’m retired, I drink coffee (well, a coffee substitute) the old-fashioned way. I used my large set of Victor mugs during my working years. But now I’ve slowed down to cups and saucers.

A classic poem for a classic snow day

Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

— Robert Frost, New Hampshire, 1923

The photos were taken under the shelter of my front porch.

Potassium broth

Now that I’m back on the cold and snowy East Coast, I’m remembering how good it is to have an arsenal of warm drinks. How about a bit of old-fashioned broth?

It was from Jethro Kloss, in the hippy handbook Back to Eden, that I first heard about potassium broth. Kloss’ version of potassium broth included oats and bran to give the broth extra body. He frequently prescribed it for people who were sick and couldn’t handle solid food. If you Google for “potassium broth,” you’ll find many versions. They all involve fresh vegetables, peels and all, simmered for four hours or so and strained.

The broth I made today included a beet, a turnip, a couple of potatoes, some celery, onions, turnip leave stems, collard stems, and the outer leaves from a cabbage. It’s still simmering, but I think I will add some tomato paste to the broth after I’ve strained out the vegetables, to make it taste more like vegetable soup.

It seems a waste to strain the broth and discard the vegetables, but I’ll drink the electrolytes, and my chickens will be happy to get the pulp.

Moonset

With the snow clouds gone, the snowscape was very bright last night from the nearly full moon. Here the moon sets during a very cold sunrise — 13 degrees. The photo was taken from the window of my radio room.

The same photo, converted to grayscale, with contrast increased.

Snow day

It’s been snowing for about 20 hours. Here in Stokes County we have about 10 inches or more on the ground. On my deck, where the snow and rain pour down from the valley on my roof, the yardstick is showing a pile of snow 31 inches deep and growing.

Lily does not like the snow. She’ll go as far as the front porch, tiptoe around for a few minutes with a look of wonder and disgust on her face, and then demand to be let back in the house.

This has been a pretty good winter for replenishing the underground water aquifers. The nearest USGS measuring wells are in East Bend and Mocksville.

A fuller full moon

spaceweather.com

The moon will be full tonight. It will be the biggest full moon of the year. That’s because the moon’s orbit is elliptical, and the moon will be at the apogee of its orbit, about 30,000 miles closer to earth than at its perigee. According to Spaceweather.com, that’s makes the moon 14 percent wider and 30 percent brighter than lesser full moons.

Unfortunately the moon probably won’t be visible here. The sky is cloudy, and up to 16 inches of snow is forecast between now and Saturday night.

Solastalgia?

New York Times

The New York Times Magazine for Sunday has an interesting piece on the developing field of ecopsychology, which explores the ways in which mental processes and mental health are affected by the environment.

Solastaglia is a word for what we experience when we see damage to our world. This experience varies from place to place. But around here, that would be what we experience when we see a beautiful farm we knew as children bulldozed away for a development. Or woods cut down for timber, leaving behind stumps and mud. Or a new road cut through the countryside. It makes us feel sick.