Okay, I admit it - I got so caught up playing with my new friend Poppy yesterday (aka my new Mac G4 desktop) that I forgot to write a journal entry! Give a guy a break, will ya? The fact is that I just switched over to the new-style Macs this week for the first time in my life (that is, the ones with USB ports and that can run version 10 of the operating system, or OSX), and there are officially one million new things for me to learn, all of them so cool in nature that you can't help but to just sit there and start getting sucked more and more into it. Look at 'dat Dashboard fly in and out, man! And look how OSX has consolidated all the electronic help manuals into one giant uber-manual, accessible immediately no matter where in the computer you are! And look how fast it all runs! And how I can have like ten applications all open at the same time now! With the smoother fonts and bigger work area that comes with my new 16-inch monitor! Man oh man!

OSX is fucking weird, man, in that it's partly of course based on all the older operating systems Apple has created over the years, so there's still a lot a Mac veteran like me already knows about getting around and finding the information I'm looking for; but then it's radically different enough from the last version (System 9) that it still feels like a whole brand-new user interface for me. So then it's weird to intuitively know how to already do half the stuff this new operating system can do, but then I also have so much new stuff to learn, and moments when I'm getting hopelessly lost. My friend Mark and I were just talking about this the other day, in fact, because he didn't quite understand the history of Apple, and what happened there in the late '90s that is making this new Mac such a revelatory thing for me. So here's a brief recap, for casual Apple followers who need it...

From its invention in 1984 up to the late 1990s, all Macs invented shared the same hardware protocol for hooking up accessories (the SCSI protocol), and ran improved versions of the same style of operating system, meaning that all Macs ever invented could theoretically talk back and forth, exchange information and hook up the same peripherals, given the right software and power. (I've proven this over the years as well - in the past I've been able to successfully run a modern Zip drive off a Mac Classic, a modern scanner, and an OS as high as version 8.) But then in the late '90s Apple got into all this financial trouble, and came very close to going out of business, and in desperation invited Steve Jobs back into the organization, one of the co-founders of Apple who had been driven out of his own company in the early '90s through corporate maneuvering.

One of the first things Jobs did after coming back was make two declarations that nobody else at Apple had apparently wanted to, which of course was part of the reason they were in such a mess in the first place: that the protocol Wintel computers used for hooking up accessories (the USB protocol) was much better and certainly more popular than Apple's SCSI one; and that Apple's operating system had become a real mess by version 9, for the same reason Windows is still such a mess, because of decades of simply slapping more code onto an unchanging core every time a new version was invented. So one day Apple decided to just make a clean break into adopting the USB standard - the day they released the first iMacs, in fact, which is why now you never have to worry while in a store if that new digital camera or MP3 player will be able to plug into your Mac. (For those who are curious - USB is much faster than SCSI, can be used with a "powercord" so that multiple devices can be plugged into one slot, rely a lot less on the physical distance of their connecting cord for performance, and can be added or removed while the computer is still on, a major improvement over SCSI.) And then at the same time the Apple programmers went back and wrote a whole new operating system basically from scratch, which is what's commonly known as OSX, and which can't run on any computer older than an iMac - and this is why the startup time on new-style Macs is so much faster, and why you can run so many more programs at once now, and why new-style Macs hardly ever crash.

The problem, though, is that this then obsoletes all old-style Macs - although it can be done, for example, it's a real pain in the ass to run non-OSX software on an OSX machine, and of course impossible to run any OSX software on a non-OSX machine, or hook up any modern peripherals. So that meant for the last six years or whatever I've just continued to fall more and more behind with my knowledge of this stuff, even as Apple themselves went through four updates of their operating system and five of iTunes, among others. So that's certainly cool, to finally have a new-style Mac in my apartment and the first chance to learn OSX inside and out myself - although it certainly now presents just this huge new learning curve to me, just hundreds upon hundreds of things I all have to learn at once, instead of learning it a couple dozen a time with each new OS update, like a lot of you did who have owned new-style Macs for six years now and counting.

It's all fascinating stuff, which of course is why my attention keeps getting diverted this week and I keep forgetting to do stuff like write my journal; but admittedly, a lot of it is counterintuitive as well to the way I'm used to doing things in the old-style OS, and part of this process involves not only learning new things but also psychologically unteaching myself old routines. Like, I'm starting to do some serious importation now of my thousands upon thousands of digital images, and am throwing them into iPhoto each time I do. But see, the filing system for iPhoto is a mess to look at as a human - all these subfolders broken up by year, and then by month, so that you have to hop around all over your hard drive to find them all. And see, if I was on System 9 this would be a problem, because the easiest way to sort and look through photos on that is to group them all into related folders, then actually open the folders in your Finder in Icon view and scan through them that way.

And so there's still a part of me that's panicky over my photos getting spread all over my hard drive in this haphazard way, because I keep thinking, "What if I need to find a specific one and make a copy of it or whatever?" And I keep having to remind myself, between the new OS and all the powerful new hardware, iPhoto is your primary way of managing your photos in OSX, not just viewing them. And this actually makes a whole lot more sense, because there are just so many more powerful options involved: you can instantly see previews, and instantly scale the preview images; you can toggle the photo's title on and off; you can physically scan through them on your computer screen much more quickly than you were able to in OS9; you can sort them by all sorts of different criteria, from date taken to alphabetically, versus just the one criteria you chose for your folder in the OS9 way of doing things; you can assign keywords to photos, much like tags work in Flickr, and then search that way; you can set up "smart folders" that will automatically add incoming new photos to certain sets, based on certain criteria (if it has a certain keyword assigned, if it was taken on a certain date, etc); and of course with the new "we're so cool and powerful now that we're going to make the entire user interface visually driven" attitude of OSX, to copy files you simply drag the photo's icon to the icon of your disk.

There's literally no reason anymore to need my files neatly arranged in a series of strict heirarchial folders, and I'm trying to learn to embrace that instead of fighting against it, and constantly feeling panicky about my files being spread all willy-nilly over my hard drive. This has been a big enough overall issue in my life, in fact, that I guess you could call it a legitimate paradigm shift for me, which I imagine that a lot of people like me who grew up on '80s computing and the strict file/folder system have gone through recently as well. Like, I remember how hard it was for me to get used to Gmail at first, with its system of labeling old emails instead of storing them in specific folders; but then once you get used to it, of course, you realize how much more powerful a system it is, since you can assign multiple labels to a single message and have it be a part of several groupings at once, versus the one grouping assigned to it under the old folder system. And that's how it is with a lot of the old files I'm importing into Poppy these days, because of the way not only iPhoto works but also iMovie, iTunes, and all the other in-house iLife software that comes with OSX; once you're able to let go of the old file/folder way of doing things, you see how much more powerful and intuitive the tagging/sorting way of doing things is, and how it lets you not only find something in a specific application much more easily, but for related apps to share files easily with each other.

And that's pretty cool, I have to admit - going to the Audio portion of a new project in iMovie, for example, and automatically getting a list of all the songs in my iTunes library. And clickable as well, which means I can sit there in iMovie and listen through snippets of iTunes files, until finding the one I'm specifically thinking of. Or having a Dashboard widget for iAddress, which is getting fed data from my Treo because of iSync; that way, any random moment I need to look up a phone number, instead of quitting what I was going and opening iAddress, I can just click F12 instead, and instantly pause everything else while the Dashboard is open, and then click F12 again to go straight back into what I was doing.

I guess the biggest thing for me to keep in mind is this idea - that Macs have gotten so powerful now, and its operating system so clean and useful, that they can now do a lot of the things for me that I used to have to do myself in Systems 1 through 9. (Yes, I'm a veteran of all previous nine versions - I've been using Macs at least weekly, in fact, since 1984 when they were first invented.) That's a long damn time to get used to a certain way of doing things, and it's certainly going to take me longer than just four days to change all that learning into a new way of doing things. And I guess I just got so used to doing a lot of this stuff on my own, because of the former limitations of Macs; to group all my related files myself, in a series of folders embedded within a series of other folders, because the operating system had no real good way of grouping these files on its own and presenting it to me in a fast, searchable way. I'm still getting used to that, which is why I'm probably going into my Finder windows more often than an OSX owner really should, for example. As always, it's all really fascinating, and I'll be continuing to share my thoughts over the next couple of weeks, as more and more new things get revealed to me.

Okay, okay, so what's going on with me? Well, I keep meaning to take this bike adventure through the West Park System (including the "green boulevards" that connect them all), but other longish trips keep getting in my way; yesterday I had to bike almost to Wicker Park, to pick up some office supplies, and today I'm visiting my friend Erik in Bucktown. So maybe tomorrow? Hmm, we'll see! And then my idea is to basically run a 2,000-word history of the West Park System here on the day I'm making the bike trip itself, because it's a long and utterly interesting history that's going to take 2,000 words to tell. And that way you can read the history and then see where exactly on the trip I am at that moment, through the Jason Pettus Instant Locator™ (found elsewhere on this page, if you're reading this at the website). And then the next day, of course, I'll write a full 2,000-word report on my own trip, and rerun all the photos on one page.

Then after that I have several ideas for journal subjects that I was thinking of finally getting to, since I'll mostly just be working on Poppy over the next couple of weeks and won't have too many exciting stories from my own life to share. One of the ideas, for example, is what some people call "memory maps" - annotated Google Satellite images of places from your past, with each annotation telling a little story about what happened at that exact spot. I've actually compiled three static images from Google Satellite for such a project - the neighborhood where I grew up, the neighborhood I'm in now, and the campus of Six Flags over St. Louis (although I just realized it'd probably be interesting to do one of my college campus as well). So I'm hoping to get to those over the next couple of weeks, along with this whole other series of entries I promised before, concerning the schism between the mere collection of cultural documents and the sorting/organizing of them, which has real-world implications for not only Google Print but podcasters, search engines, the Shoah Project, citizen journalists, iTunes, my upcoming arts center and more.

Out of space! Talk with you again soon!