Nasty Stuff

Naw, that doesn’t happen to me. Heard a lot about it, read about it, and like everyone else gotten dire warnings about it. Every so often somebody tells me or emails that such and so virus is crippling computers like crazy, that I’d better be careful or run out and buy virus protection software. It happens to people I know, but every time I hear the story it’s about a PC running the Windows OS. And each time the answer is, “I use an Apple computer and I’ve never had a virus. I think it’s a Windows thing.” Always an easy answer…until yesterday.

Yes, it does happen on Apple computers, and for a while there some kind of nastiness had my iMac going bananas. Thankfully it wasn’t one of those bad strains that gobble up all your data and leave you dead in the water, but for neophyte me it was frustrating enough. There is no anti-virus software installed on the computer for the simple reason there’s never been a need for it. Other computers get viruses, not mine. Or so I thought.

It started with an image search. Putting together yesterday’s blog post on Viggo Mortensen it came time to find a picture to go with the words and Google was the most likely place. You know the drill; type ‘peanut butter images’ into Google and you get a hundred pictures of peanut butter. I typed the name and came up with several pages of Viggo Mortensen photos. Wanting a larger view of one possible choice, I clicked on it and everything went nuts. The monitor looked like a slot machine when you get five cherries in a row. For a second I thought celebratory smoke was going to come out the top. The noise settled down and a new window opened and began counting all the viruses that had built up in my system. After a couple of minutes it tallied the list and told me to click the remove button. That raised a window asking for my credit card number and how many months of Mac Shield guardianship did I want to purchase. I caught on to the scam then and started closing the windows that had popped up everywhere, dragging the already installed software to the trash. Then came the message about being unable to trash open software. I hadn’t ‘opened’ any software and couldn’t find anything to ‘Quit.’

Then the bad stuff started. Without my touching keyboard or mouse an Internet porno page popped up on the screen. I closed the page, but a minute later another porno site popped up, this time in a different gender—masters wielding whips against the cherry red buttocks of male slaves. In spite of the frustration I had to laugh. Closing that one I wondered what would be next. This is most of the time a G-rated blog site so I’ll say no more than that it involved women with oversized chests on rubber sheets. It was almost as though the demon now inside my computer was trying to determine which way to go, offering up a revolving smorgasbord of smut, trying to find the one that would slow my rush to close it. And then the pop ups switched gears and opened a list of places I could get Viagra at a discount. I quit Safari thinking that would finally turn off the slideshow of Sinderella and the gay dwarfs, but to no avail. This stuff didn’t need a web browser to open its doors and windows.

I tried everything twice then shut down the computer and went to bed. This morning with Apple Support on the phone and explaining the problem, the tech support guy cut in and said, “Say no more. I know all about it because we get hundreds of calls about this stuff. I’ll walk you through it and we’ll get rid of it.” And so it happened. In the process of cleaning the bad stuff out of my system he related a story of his own experience with the same kind of bug that got into his system through email. His final advice… If you click on something that prompts unexpected or unexplained behavior in your computer, immediately hit the ‘Force Quit’ in your Apple menu. You might catch it in time.

Not Italian Gelato

Among the thirty plus boxes of stuff I shipped from Japan to Florida last year was an obsolete gadget that intrigued me for a while in the early 1990s, but is today all but useless. To the technically-minded it might have value of another sort, but in my eyes it has devolved into nothing more than a curiosity. I was looking at iPads in the Apple Store yesterday, the store rep saying something about the development of this or that feature and I suddenly recalled the Apple Newton MessagePad 120 that sits in pristine hibernation in a bottom drawer of my desk.

Apple’s Newton was an early version of what eventually came to be called the personal digital assistant, and the company’s first foray into the tablet platform. For better or worse, it was one of those ‘great ideas’ from Apple that didn’t pan out—at least not initially in the earliest form. Ask around today and you won’t find many who know what an Apple Newton is. Development started in 1987 and by 1998 Apple had ended the project. In the Apple Store yesterday I asked the store rep if he knew much about the Newton and his answer was basically, “The what?” Young guy, early twenties who understandably doesn’t remember much about electronics in his diaper days. But then few are unfamiliar with the developments that came out of the Newton—the iPhone, iPod Touch and most recently the iPad—all children of the first tablet platform, the Newton.

The MessagePad was a PDA developed by Apple for the Newton platform in 1993. Electronic engineering and manufacture of the devices was done in Japan by Sharp. It ran the Newton OS, which included handwriting recognition software. I recall this feature and stumbled about with it for a long time while the software learned my handwriting. It was clunky but fun at the time. Lots of double taps to choose a word from the correction popup. The device measures eight inches in height, four wide, with a one inch thickness. Weight is one pound. Trust Apple to come up with a catchy codename; it was ‘Gelato’ for the MessagePad 120.

I suppose we could sit around and imagine Apple scrapping the whole idea when they discontinued the Newton, but somebody would have picked it up, and probably somebody with less pizazz and daring than Apple. Sitting here now and holding the Newton in my hand I try to trace the line from heavy clunkiness to elegant magic that describes the iPad 2. Though basically ignorant of the work that goes into computer development, it impresses me that Apple went from Newton to iPad 2 in just thirteen years. But as the iPad commercial says, “It’s only the beginning.”

Desktop Demise

This past Monday my old iMac began showing some ominous symptoms, signs which in my experience didn’t bode well. Despite its decrepitude (a seven year-old hard run machine) I wasn’t too eager to add my contribution to the Apple coffers, figuring there were other things the price of a new computer could be channeled into. So, I called up my meager technical skills in a last ditch effort to staunch the drain of life from my old, dependable standby. But those skills were not enough, and I watched late Monday as the final curtain literally came down on the iMac screen. A slowly descending curtain of transparent gray scrolled down the screen, and a message window struggled through to suggest restarting the computer. But I knew the life blood was running thin and at last ebb, that a restart would raise no heartbeat. Sayônara old friend.

On Tuesday morning I put up a post on this blog using the MacBook Pro laptop, then got out my thinning wallet and called the Apple Store. I considered it a good sign that the store rep I spoke to had the same name as Apple co-founder, Steve Wozniak. The guy (unrelated to the Apple “Woz”) has probably sold a hundred or more Apple computers, still I felt a little bit special buying a new iMac from someone with a name so meaningful in Apple history.

Whether the Apple rep’s name had any significance or not, no one short of Steve Jobs could ask for better service than I got. My order for a new iMac was processed after 4:00 p.m. on Tuesday; the computer was delivered to my door at 11:30 Thursday morning. In other words, it took forty-one hours for my order to be processed, shipped and delivered to my door. In this case, I believe the computer shipped from Pennsylvania. Mr Wozniak, the Apple Store sales rep is in Austin, Texas. Pretty good service by anyone’s standards.

With this iMac I didn’t exactly experience the ‘plug and play’ claim Apple has long made, but that was the fault of no one. I spent an hour running around looking for a new connector cable for my external backup drive. It was essential to copy the files from the deceased iMac onto its successor, and that’s easy enough provided your Firewire plug fits into the slot on the new computer. But standards have changed, so I had to drive to Daytona for an adapter cable.

Once the new iMac was up and running with all the transferred files and system settings—thanks to Apple’s terrific Time Machine software—I ran into problems with the Photoshop Essentials software and spent two hours on the phone with Adobe tech support in New Delhi.

But there is now new, vibrant and lightning fast widescreen life on my work table and I feel the exhilaration. Especially thrilled with the HD resolution of the iMac screen. What a huge difference in the screen resolution of then and now.