Crosswalks to Nowhere

On a Saturday morning a little over 15 years ago, I discovered the radio show by which every technology radio show and podcast I've heard since has been measured.

The show was Computing Success! hosted by Thom Foulks.

I found it completely by accident: I was trying to tune in (what was then) WLUP-AM and instead came across WNVR, which ran syndicated programming by The Business Radio Network. I would have tuned away from the station, but I was intrigued when I heard the host talking about Microsoft's new operating system, Windows 3.1.

After a few minutes, he took a call from a listener who had a question about Usenet and UNIX systems. I may have been new to PCs, but I was already an established Usenet user and UNIX Systems Administrator so this was my chance to "tech out" the host. He passed quite impressively.

What made the show special was the fact that Thom actually listened to his callers' questions and was genuinely interested in getting them the answers they needed. If he didn't know an answer, he'd recommend a book or other resource. Thom never faked his way through an answer, and his easygoing style made the listener, whether experienced or not, enjoy his show.

Thom also reported on the latest technology news, carrying reports from the staff of InfoWorld, PC Computing, and other computer publications of the day. John C Dvorak was an occasional contributor to Computing Success!

I had just obtained my first MS-DOS-based PC (a monochrome Sharp notebook, courtesy of my employer), so I was interested in learning as much as possible about what it could do. Thom's show was a huge help-- he spoke in plain English and kept the jargon to a minimum. While his style was low-key, yet you could tell he was thrilled about the subject matter. Thom wasn't interested in showing off what he knew about computers-- he was interested in sharing what he knew and showed he was always willing to learn more.

Sadly, Computing Success! went off the air about a year after I discovered it. It was replaced with another computer show hosted by a guy who loved to repeat his own name and referred to himself as "your computer answer man" despite the fact that the show seemed bereft of "answers" that did not involve a sponsor's product.

When I listen to today's tech shows that try to accomplish the same thing, I realize how much today's shows are lacking, when taken in the context of Thom's show . Leo LaPorte's The Tech Guy seems to come close, but it's not quite the same because Leo likes to "ham it up" a bit more than Thom did.

Thom Foulks passed away in March of 2004. He was active in the computer arts right up to the end, and if you Google his name you'll find all sorts of projects he worked on, including an extensive geneology project. And here's a link to his Wikipedia page.

I wish I'd taped some episodes of Computing Success! -- it would be nice to hear them right about now.

Apple's new operating system, MacOS X 10.5 Leopard, was released this past October. Since my MacBook is my primary machine, I decided to step very carefully into the Leopard world. I didn't want to find out after upgrading that one (or more) of my critical applications didn't work.

The Mac blogs, forums, and podcasts I checked were jumping with stories of successful (and unsuccessful) upgrade experiences. I heard enough that I was convinced I should wait before I whacked my internal drive with the new OS.

That wait was not very long. I now own a copy of Leopard.

Rather than install it right away, I chose instead to load the OS on a partition on a bootable external firewire drive. This was the safest way to see how Leopard-- and my applications-- would run on my MacBook without destroying my current environment.

This will be the first in a series of blog postings describing my experiences with Leopard on my MacBook. I'm hoping some of you find this useful, and perhaps you'll enjoy the drama associated with bringing up a new computing environment.

Okay, "drama" is an exaggeration. :-) Enjoy.

My first wave of tests with Leopard is complete, and so far things have proven pretty successful, with one unhappy exception.

The following apps work fine, according to my initial set of tests. I did not do any heavy-duty operations with each program, but the basics seem to work. All versions tested were the latest, downloaded from the vendor's site, unless otherwise noted:

Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0
Amadeus II
AppleWorks 6.2.9
Camino
Cisco VPN Client 4.9.01.0080
Cocktail
Disk Inventory X
Firefox
MT-Newswatcher
Parallels Desktop
Samsung ML-2510 Printer Drivers
Quicken 2006
Microsoft Remote Desktop Connection 1.0.3
ViewIt
VLC

All that said, a couple items of note:

SuperDuper, one of my show-stopper apps, could not produce a bootable copy of my hard drive. This alone drives my decision to wait to upgrade. I may buy an additional external drive to use Leopard's TimeMachine feature, but I also like the idea of having a bootable copy of my internal drive. Once there's a Leopard-compatible version of SuperDuper, I will upgrade.

CoconutBattery, a little utility that tells you the charge cycle count and overall health of your notebook battery, reports an incorrect cycle count under Leopard. It reported that my battery was charged and discharged 4 times, which is inaccurate.

Lisa decided to dive right in and go for the in-place upgrade from Tiger to Leopard on her iBook G4. The upgrade went fine, and she has no problems to report right now. No guts, no glory. :-) TThe only thing is that I'll need to come up with an interim backup strategy for her computer while I await SuperDuper's upgrade.

Stay tuned. More to come.

If you grew up in Chicago, you'll remember the neat little stop-animation films they used to show on WGN-TV at Christmastime.

I've ripped the audio portion of these films to MP3, and they're attached for your enjoyment. Click the links to hear them:

Susie Snowflake
Hardrock, Coco, and Joe
Frosty The Snowman

(a Crosswalks to Nowhere classic repost from long, long ago...)

We spent this past Saturday afternoon and evening in downtown Chicago.

After an afternoon of shopping, we had dinner at Heaven on Seven and then walked through the snow that fell over Michigan Avenue.

The streets and stores were certainly crowded...

Sunday morning was beautiful-- I trudged through the snowy streets to the nearest Starbucks.

It sure feels like Christmas!

It's our first Christmas as husband and wife and the first in our new home.

We had the family over and ordered out Chinese food. A new tradition is born.

And one of my favorite moments of the day was Becka talking on the phone to Frankfort, Indiana: "What's up, Curt?"

:-)

Holidays are about tradition, and this year is no exception. Four orders of spicy stuff at Buffalo Joe's in Evanston says "Happy Holidays" like nothing else.

(photo by Becka)