question for fellow keyboard jockeys.

The office package on this PC is Office 2007, which is all shiny and glitzy.  It's very comprehensive, weighs in at 623MB on the hard drive, and sports a new look that makes its predecessors look like relics from the dark ages of computing.

However, there are two things it still cannot do.  The first is to remember its cursor position in a previously edited document.  When you open a document, it dumps you at the beginning of it by default, and you have to scroll down and insert the cursor in the proper position before you can start typing away.  That's a pretty minor grievance, but it's one of those little things that save five seconds every time I open a document.

The other thing is something that only one word processing program has ever managed to incorporate: different colors for text and page background.  I'm not talking about differently colored text that prints out as such, but rather text that only shows in your color of preference on screen, yet prints out as regular black-on-white text.

I don't like to look at black text on a white background on backlit screens.  It's like watching ants on a light bulb.  Word used to let you display white text on a blue background as an alternative, which is an improvement, but it's still not quite the way I want it, and they seem to have dropped that option in Word 2007 anyway.

On my old Macs, I run a 1990s-vintage word processing program called Corel WordPerfect 3.5.  It lets you configure any background color and any text color you'd like to see on the screen.  To my eyes, amber text on a dark green background looks most relaxing, and that's what I have set in WordPerfect.  That color scheme greatly reduces eye strain, and the ability of WordPerfect to let me make all documents appear in that fashion makes it my favorite word processor.  I even put up with having to export the document into HTML and then re-import and -format it into Word, which is a bit of a hassle. 

Why is it that no other word processor offers this simple feature?  Or do any of you know how to make Word do what the long-discontinued Mac version of WordPerfect delivered ten years ago already, and let me specify a text and background color of my choice?

(Yeah, you can change those system-wide through Display Properties > Appearance > Advanced, but then all document windows in all applications change color.)

on primitive computing.

A few days ago, I started a little experiment.

Before we moved to New Hampshire, I sold or gave away most of my small collection of vintage Macintosh systems. The only ones I retained were a Powerbook 3400c (because it's still useful with its built-in CD-ROM and network connection, because I have an entire spare 3400c for parts in case something breaks, and because it'll make a dandy first computer for Quinn), and a Color Classic (because it's cute as a button.)

Now, the Color Classic is an obsolete computer by any standard of the definition. While the Powerbook can run Office 2001, Internet Explorer, and other modern software, the little Color Classic doesn't have the wheaties to cruise the web or serve up YouTube videos. It's an all-in-one akin to the original Macintosh, a small beige box with a floppy drive and a very sharp and crisp 10" Sony color monitor built into the case. The main processor runs at 16 MHz (even cell phones have more powerful CPUs these days), and the system has 10MB RAM and an 80MB hard drive. It runs Mac OS 7.1, and very little else.

When I purchased my Alphasmart Neo, I discovered the benefits of minimalist computing. The Neo only does text--no web browsing, no email, no WiFi, nothing but you and whatever it is you want to commit to paper. In the six months since I bought it, my word count has increased dramatically, because the Neo's One-Trick Pony nature allowed me to concentrate just on my work, without distracting me with Instant Messages or tempting me with games or a Wikipedia safari.

Well, I took another look at the Color Classic, which had been stored in my closet since I got it for free from one of fellow Robin's Ph.D. candidates at UT a few years back. Then I realized that the little Mac might have the same decluttering effect on the creative process, since it couldn't run serve up any modern distractions, either.

So, I dusted it off, replaced a dead PRAM battery that prevented it from booting up (the original half-AA cell had finally run dry after 14 years), and fired the little thing up.

And you know what? There's something liberating about that old technology. You don't get Google or streaming video, but that little Color Classic boots from a cold start to the OS 7 desktop in ten or twelve seconds, and shuts down instantly. I spent a few hours on the Internet looking for a suitable word processor that would let me save my stuff in a format the Windows box would understand (I do my final formatting and printing from Office 2007 on the modern machine), and found one called Nisus Writer that actually fits on a single floppy.

I wasn't expecting too much from Nisus Writer. I mean, how sophisticated can a program be that fits on a floppy disk and takes only 1MB of system memory to run?

Pretty sophisticated, it turns out. Nisus Writer, last updated in the early 1990s, lets me do everything I usually do in MS Word. It has a thesaurus, a spell checker, word count, and all the formatting features I routinely use. It even opens previously edited documents to the precise location where you left off, which is something that Word still hasn't learned even in the 2007 version. In addition, Nisus Writer saves its files in plain text format, which can be copied to a floppy and then opened by Word (or any other word processor) on the XP box without any loss in formatting.

Well, if you use a piece of hardware for a specific purpose only, and it does that job as well as any modern hardware, can you really brand it as "obsolete"?

Now the Color Classic is sitting on my desk as the in-house writing machine. I still use the Neo whenever I go out, or feel the need to move around in the house, but the Color Classic now serves as the screen-and-keyboard version of the Neo. It doesn't take up much space, it looks good on the desk, it's just as useful as any other computer for the limited task of word processing, and it's fun to use.  Electronics recycling at its best, no?

high-speed (sort of) internets.

Well, we have satellite Internet now, after having to pay the installer $225 extra for a custom install (digging a hole by the tree line and putting a hundred pounds of concrete and a pole into it). 

The good thing is that the speed beats dial-up by a fair margin, and pulling web pages no longer feels like a masochistic exercise in patience. 

The bad things are:

• Cost.  $60 a month, plus $300 for the standard install, plus the aforementioned $225 for the custom install because the line of sight to the satellite is poor from the side of the house.
• Latency.  Because the signal has to travel up into low-earth orbit twice, there's a built in latency that makes it impossible to play, say, first-person shooters online.  Scratch anything that requires fast reaction times, in fact.  World of Warcraft is playable, but only just so--last night, I initially got 8000ms (!) latency, but it slowly improves after a few minutes to where your actions and spells only have a lag of a second or two.
• Bandwidth restrictions.  This one's a biggie.  Hughesnet has a "Fair Access Policy" that limits the amount of data you can download within any given 24-hour period.  For our price plan, that's 200MB.  Exceed the quota, and they switch you to a speed that makes dial-up feel like broadband, and you stay there for 24 hours.  We maxed that out just testing stuff and downloading one lousy video card driver package from ATI yesterday afternoon.  I have no idea how much bandwidth World of Warcraft uses with two clients running, but we'll find out tonight.  I may have to upgrade our plan from Basic to "Pro Plus", which bumps the download threshold to 425MB, and the download speed to 1.5Mbps.  For big downloads, they have you use the 3-6AM timeslot, when the data moved doesn't count towards your quota.  The FAP is teh suck, but unfortunately, they're the only broadband game in town.  Being out in the sticks does carry some sacrifices with it, I suppose, but we do miss our old, fast, reliable DSL line.  Alas, it may have the unintended positive side effect of forcing me to use the Internet for essential stuff only, rather than waste a morning playing Wikipedia Safari.

The roof may not be as expensive as originally quoted.  I'm having a few more roofing companies come out to look at the repairs needed, to get some different opinions.  Asking a roofer whether you need a new roof is like asking a barber whether you need a haircut, so I want to follow some of the excellent advice you folks in Blogland have tossed out, and make sure I'm not being taken.  The good news is that keeping the roof clear of ice dams has stopped all the leaks save the one in Quinn's room, which is rather substantial.

The really good news: booze is cheaper in NH than in TN, and the NH state liquor stores are open on Sundays.

t-5 days.

I'll be picking up the moving truck on Friday, and then we're rolling north on Saturday and Sunday. There's much packing to be done yet, but my brother is flying in for unpaid slave labor...err, a family visit on Wednesday, and he'll be a big help.

One fly in the ointment for us is the limited availability of high-speed Internet. We're used to our DSL connection, and out at our new place, the only options are dial-up or satellite Internet. I do have some dusty old 56k modems around, but I'd rather not revert to the computing Pleistocene. Satellite is fine and dandy for bandwidth, but it sucks for latency (big deal for World of Warcraft and Battlefield 2), and it comes with installation fees and monthly plans that are measured in "buckets of precious metals".

I was already resigned to having to dial into the Internets again like it's the frakkin' 1990s, but apparently there's a startup company in the area that provides wireless ethernet. The current owner of the place says that his neighbor has it (described as mysterious "waves from the sky" that are "not satellite"), so chances are good that we'll be able to tap into it as well. I dashed off an inquiry to the company in question, and their rate plans do not require metric tons of cash. We'll see.

Push comes to shove, we'll be back on dial-up, and chalk it up as a sacrifice in exchange for privacy, living space, and ten acres of Ours.

what would tolkien roll?

I'm currently downloading a free trial version of the Lord of the Rings Online MMORPG.

When I asked Robin (who's a big World of Warcraft fan) whether she'd want to give LOTRO a try, she replied, "not at all." Now, this was a bit surprising, as she loves Tolkien's work. When I asked her why, she replied something along the lines of,

"I'm sure it's gorgeous and exciting, but the first time a Level 2 hobbit or elf walks up to my character and says 'R U A GURL IRL?', or 'how u mine for fish lol", it'll completely destroy the immersion and suspension of disbelief for me."

Maybe some things are better left on paper, after all.

ask a geek.

Today's free tech support incident goes to visitor #107,645.



Yeah, the Inspiron 8100 will play World of Warcraft okay, as long as you dial back the graphics options some. Set it to 800x600, move back the sliders for details in the in-game video options, and you'll be able to enjoy WoW tolerably well. The 8100 is no speed demon anymore, but they came with decent discrete graphics cards even at the low end (GeForce 2 Go), so as long as you have at least 512MB of RAM in that thing, it'll run WoW surprisingly well. It won't look nearly as pretty as it does on a desktop with oodles of RAM and an up-to-date graphics card, but it'll still beat the crap out of Spider Solitaire for those boring evenings at the hotel when you're on the go.

quiet day.

I took the kids over to our weekly play date at a friend's house. We usually alternate between indoor playtime and trips to the zoo or the park.

When Quinn was sitting down for lunch with his little pal Greta, they started squealing at each other in turn. One of them started, and then the other responded, and for a few minutes, they had a great time having a squeal conversation and laughing their little heads off at each other.

It's kind of hard to have a bad day after watching a three-and-a-half year old and a two-and-a-half-year old conversing in high-pitched sounds and then sharing belly laughs.

In other news, the magic elf box under my desk is now a Core2Duo system, thanks to the humbling and amazing generosity of my friend Mark. Those new Intel Core 2 chips are something else...half the heat and two thirds the power consumption of the Pentium 4 line, and twice the performance. My old Pentium 4 runs at 2.8GHz, and the new C2D is clocked at 1.86GHz, but the C2D canes the P4 in every conceivable category by a very wide margin, despite running at a gigahertz less. I need to wait a few more days for the new video card to get here, but once that spare PCI-E slot holds some nVidia goodness, I'll be making MS Flight Simulator X my bitch.

(If you didn't understand half of the previous paragraph, you're probably not a computer geek, and you may safely disregard everything past "belly laughs".)

legion at ease, i gotta feed the baby.

Bottle-feeding an infant is a time-consuming process that ties up one hand to boot, namely the one holding the milk hopper in position. I usually entertain myself with various computer-related activities while feeding munchkin #2, but my favorite games are out of the question because they require either an uninterrupted block of time, the use of two hands on mouse and keyboard, or both.

Thankfully, I found the ideal game for this scenario--Rome: Total War. I bought it a few years back when it came out, but I hadn't played it much, since most of our computer play time is taken up with communal World of Warcraft questing. Rome: Total War is a turn-based strategy game with real-time battle sequences, so it's perfect for playing turn by turn as time allows. I can play two or three turns per feeding session, and then just leave the game running in the background until I'm ready to hit the "end turn" button and advance the action.

Now, the strategy part of the game is pretty cool, but the really fun part is the real-time battle module. When you shuffle your legions across the map, and they come in contact with an army or settlement of the opposing factions, you can choose to have the battle resolve automatically (if you don't have the time to fight it out), or you can take charge of your army and test your mettle on the battlefield. If you choose that option, you're in control of unit deployment, formations, marching orders, and so on. When the battle commences, things usually go to hell quickly, and it's a lot of fun watching thousands of little animated legionnaires under your command duke it out with the Gauls, Macedonians, Carthaginians, and other assorted adversaries.

Yesterday I was wrapping up my conquest of the Greek city states, advancing an army on Athens.

(geeky battle narrative follows)

The Greeks oblige by marching their army out and meeting mine in front of their capital, which means that I won't have to start a costly siege and pry the defenders out from the streets of a fortified city. I deploy in standard manipular formation--skirmishers out front, cavalry on the flanks, and the center consisting of Hastati in the front and Principes in the back. The Greeks have mostly hoplite companies--hard to crack from the front, but easy kills when you flank them. My plan is to have the skirmishers thin their formation a bit, then hold them by the nose with the infantry and kick them in the ass with the flanking cavalry.

So far, so good. I advance my little troops in neat formation, ready to tag and bag the Greeks, when Greek reinforcements arrive on the battlefield. Just entering the battlefield in the distance are a bunch of Spartan hoplite companies whose presence in the area was unreported by my scouts.

Festive. Now I'm the meat in a hoplite sandwich, with a Greek army in front of me, and a Spartan army coming up from behind. Splitting my army and taking both on at the same time is not an option--I'm already outnumbered, and I don't have enough cavalry and velites to go around to support two different infantry battles.

Fine--screw the original plan, says I. The forward formations of skirmishers are just about to make contact with the Greeks, and I whistle them back and have them retreat through the ranks of advancing infantry. The Hastati and Principes get new orders: double-time on the advance, and rush the Greek front without the customary exchange of skirmisher missiles. The enemy skirmishers dart out in front of the hoplites, trying to bother my infantry, but I order in the flanking cavalry and disperse them.

The main lines clash, my line of Hastati holds, and I send the Principes around for a flanking attack, while riding the cavalry all the way around the enemy formation to nail the coffin shut from behind. The Greek line crumbles like a stale muffin, and their units start routing. My little digital legionnaries want to pursue and mop them up, but I order all units to halt and reform. I get them back into formation and wheeled around just in time to engage the Spartan army which has now traversed the battlefield. Lather, rinse, repeat, and the Spartans are sent packing as well. Athens is mine, and the Greeks have lost two fair-sized formations against my understrength one. I am Maximus, baby--a military genius who can direct his legions while topping off the tanks of little Miss Lyra.

Vanquishing enemy armies while feeding the baby: how much of a geek am I?

it's important to be polite to bugs.

I'm sitting in the back yard again for our afternoon outdoor time. Quinn is bending over to study the occasional ant or bug scurrying on the warm concrete of the patio, and he's being very polite. Every time he finds a new one, he says, "It's an ant. Hi, ant!", or "It's a bug. Hi, bug!"

Ah, technology. Wireless networks are great fun. I can drag this Powerbook to everyroom in the house, or the front porch or outside patio, and still be tethered to the Intarwebz. In fact, the only drawback about our plan to move out of suburbia and to some more secluded property is the unlikeliness of high-speed Internet access. I'd say that I have what it takes to become a Luddite, but I'd be lying...I've had DSL for nigh on eight years now, and every time it's out (which happens three or four times a year), it's a major inconvenience. You don't even realize how much of your daily routine requires an Internet connection until you have to do without one for a day or so.

There's always satellite Internet, of course, but it's expensive as hell, and you still have to tie up a phone line for the uploads and download requests.

In other geek toy news, my iPod's screen bit it last week, and I was already resigned to writing off the $250 I had to shell out for it, when I stumbled upon my receipt from the Apple Store and discovered two months left on the factory warranty. I turned it in for replacement at the Apple Store at West Town Mall, and picked up a brand new replacement today. Talk about tech toys that have made themselves indispensable...there are ways to listen to your music without an iPod, but they're just so damn inconvenient once you're used to carrying your entire CD collection around your neck on lanyard earphones.

why computers are a bad investment.

Here's a group of vintage Macintosh Powerbooks.


These were state-of-the-art machines back in 1998. From left to right, they're a Powerbook 3400c, a Powerbook G3 "Wallstreet", and a Powerbook 2400c. I got them off eBay and Macintosh swap lists for $75, $125, and $150, respectively. Each came with accessories, extra disk drives, and (in the case of the 3400c) enough spare parts to build another machine. They're all fully functional and just as useful as the day they left the factory.

In 1998, the aggregate value of those three machines was almost $12,000.

The 3400 in that configuration retailed for $4,500. The G3 "Wallstreet" as pictured went for close to $4,000, and the little 2400 subnotebook would have set you back $3,000. I bought all three for a grand total of $350. That's amazing depreciation, isn't it?

I use those old 'books strictly as word processors, a task to which they're still well suited. In fact, they make better word processors than the new Apple portables, because the keyboards on the old machines are far superior to the ones on the new laptops. You don't need a whole lot of processing power to run Word. Those three "obsolete" rigs are even all hooked up to my home wireless network via Skyline WiFi cards.

I remember drooling over those laptops in the computer store on Storrow Drive in Boston back in 1998, so I guess part of my enjoyment of this little collection is undoubtedly some sense of delayed fulfillment. Still, they're only "obsolete" because there's newer and shinier stuff out there to be had, not because they can't get the job done anymore.

Plus, there's an undeniable retro chic aspect to using a decade-old Powerbook for productive work. Dragging one of those into your local coffee house and firing it up in the sea of state-of-the-art laptops is a little like showing up at Tactical Rifle Skul with an original Colt SP1 with triangular handguards, prong-style flash hider and no forward assist or shell deflector.