Spreading the aloha of Macintosh, Hawaiian music and island culture from the sunset side of Haleakala volcano on the wonderful island of Maui

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Tuesday, February 22, 2005

Ya'll Goes Mainstream Aloha Ya'll! Bruddah Keola over at 'Keola's Culture Hack' points out my use of the 'Y' word, which appears to be spreading north of the Mason-Dixon line. Being an adopted Floridiot with the typical Celtic tendency to feck with the language, misusing such a great word just comes naturally. The Sprawl of Y'all. An interesting article from the Times-Argus site discusses the increasing use of "y'all" beyond the south. Is the South rising again, is it the use of "y'all" in hip-hop, or is the term filling a linguistic hole that isn't easily filled by standard English? Read on. I've caught myself using it a few times, mostly with humorous intent. Scott uses it all of the time, most interestingly after "aloha". 10:03:41 AM    comment [] PowerBook 100 The Best More Credit Where It Is Due The BBC has an article and link to the Mobile PC magazine article on the best 100 gadgets of all time. The remarkable thing about this list is that they got most of it right - and they rank the PowerBook 100 as the very topper-most gadget. I regret that this is one of the few great Macs not represented in my personal collection. The primal PowerBook is hard to find in trash piles and shelves at the Salvation Army Store. The only one currently listed at eBay is going for $77. Expect the price to follow Apple's stock up now that the 100 is a certified 'classic.' What's interesting is that the 100 was actually designed and manufactured by Sony! Apple had blown a hole in it's first attempt with the ignorable 'Macintosh Portable', a seventeen-pound cinderblock with a lead-acid battery and a great display. Under the suspect guidance of Jean-Louis Gasee, Apple had tried to squeeze a Mac Plus into a typewriter. To this day no one is really sure why they bothered. Maybe the errant Frenchman was inspired by the prior-art of the Osborn portable, which could only claim that status through the presence of a handle bolted to the case. Keep in mind that Jean-Louis was also behind the horribly overpriced Mac IIsi, the over-sized Mac IIx and the self-destroying Mac IIfx as well as Apple's policy of not licensing the Mac OS or hardware until after Microsoft had a chance to fully digest their lunch. I hope he's retired and living someplace safe. So Sony was called in to do it right. They moved the keyboard back where it should be, added a trackball, little tilty-legs and a detached floppy drive. This was a raging sixteen megahertz computer that shipped with four - count 'em - four megs of RAM. But you could actually carry, use and enjoy it without embarrassing or hurting yourself. Best of all, the 100 was really cool looking. Instead of the insipid beige that was so popular in Cupertino at the time, the PowerBook came in your choice of groovy dark grey. No fingerprints, no road smudges, no mistaking it for a Compaq. The best, but subtlest feature was that this computer actually knew when it's battery was running low. Until then, using any battery-powered computer was a crap-shoot, you didn't know when the juice would drop below a functional threshold suddenly sending all of your work to data-heaven without warning. Today we take these features for granted. Every laptop is a clone of the Powerbook 100, but few, except for Apple's, show any integrity of design or innovation. I just had the misfortune of using a Toshiba laptop for a few seconds, the damn thing had more undefined lights, buttons and holes than a 747, took forever to boot and of course had a piece of shit for an operating system. All this for the same price as an iBook. Why? One last point to be made here is that once upon a time Sony could actually come up with great products. How the mighty are fallen. 8:56:20 AM    comment []