Happy happy joy joy (you'll have to visualize the dance). My first online blog with infopackets just got published! If you clicked the link on Dennis Faas' site to get here, welcome to the circular world of link clicking.

I think we need a word for links that bring us back where we started (and don't you hate websites that uselessly send you in circles like that - usually when looking for vital technical information to fix the 'puter!)

So what's a good term? Enclickled? Reclickulated? Clickerang? Clickcycled? Circumclickunambulated? Link rebound? Vote for your favorite, or submit one of your own. If we get a winner, maybe we can get it on one of those lists of words that grown into the language each year ....

First Story Submitted!

Awright! Prize for first submission goes to A. with this story about a computer malfunction, though in fact it isn’t really about the computer at all. What surprises me is I didn’t even know she checked her email that often; way to go!

"One of the funniest things that ever happened to me with respect to computers is when I was dating (name deleted to protect the guilty). He had a master's degree in computer engineering and worked for some of the top silicon valley companies here in the Bay Area. Anyway, I was having trouble with booting up my old pc and asked him if he could troubleshoot it for me. He came over and spent about two hours doing everything possible to get it to work. Finally he said, "I don't understand this. Nothing seems to be working. You might have to get a new computer." He got up and went to the kitchen to get away from my beast of a machine. While he was in the other room, I looked at the monitor then realized that the keyboard wasn't plugged in!"

A Brief Introduction:

So what is “Zen samurai computing,” and why should you be reading this instead of any of the other millions of pages on the Internet? I suppose it’s appropriate to write an introduction, to give a bit of background on who I am so you can understand where I come from in my approach to computers.

What I intend to do on this page is put a human face on using computers. I’m not a deep geek, the kind of guy who codes for a living. What I am is someone who likes my machines to work smoothly and do what I expect of them, whether the vintage Harley I rebuilt or the home-built computer I’m using to write this post.

I’ve spent my life bouncing between two poles, music and martial arts. As an aspiring rock guitarist, I learned the technical side of putting together musical systems. First it was guitars and amps, soon to be augmented by an increasing variety of sound effects. From there it was a short step to synthesizer arrays and recording gear. Eventually I ran one of the first MIDI recording studios in the SF Bay Area, first doing mixes for demo tapes and moving into electronic background and sound effects for live theater groups. At one point I was one of the final four applicants out of hundreds for an editing job at Mix Magazine, the largest recording publication in the business (the job went to Pink Floyd's longtime tour engineeer).

As technology moved from black boxes to programmable synthesizers and mixing consoles, the music industry stayed in the forefront of consumer interaction with computers. From Atari and Commodores to Macs and PCs, musicians have been struggling with ever-changing technology for the past 30 years. Though the computing environment is more sophisticated, the basic needs have been the same. The goal isn’t really about the gear, fascinating as it may be, but about one’s ability to use it to achieve an end product.

Knowing how to use the gear is a skill set; knowing what to do with it is art. Whether it’s the next great hit or an elegant spreadsheet, the computer allows virtually unlimited capacity to be creative and express oneself. To do that, one must become one with the action, and that means a clean and transparent interface with the equipment. One must overcome fear of the tool and become master of it.

Just as in martial arts no one masters all aspects, it is the same with computing, but just as it takes boldness to succeed in martial arts, it sometimes takes courage in making choices to control the powerful machine in front of you. That’ll be the gist of what I talk about.

The great Japanese swordsman Miyamoto Musashi used the fine penmanship of calligraphy to refine control of his sword, and the boldness of his sword to express himself through art, examples of which now hang in Japanese museums as national treasures. Zen samurai computing is a metaphor for becoming one with your machine so that you tap into your creativity. The Zen part is finding the stillness within, and the samurai learned this to find balance in the moment in order to act decisively with clear intent. Our goal is to cut through the confusion that surrounds the esoterica of the computer so that we can likewise create from our experience in front of it.

I’d like to give a special thanks to Dennis Faas of Infopackets, one of my online resources for keeping up with the computing world. He’s been very supportive of my writing and is the inspiration for starting this site. I hope to be contributing articles to his newsletter in the near future. His newsletter is free and written for beginning to intermediate users like myself, and probably anyone reading this so get on over and sign yourself up.

To buy or not to buy, that is the question; whether tis better to weather the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or byte the bullet and repair the damage.

Hardware damage sucks. Particularly when it's a laptop. Especially when it was totally unnecessary, gratuitous violence, and there's no one to blame but the kid ....

I had a laptop. I got it so I could enjoy getting outdoors to work, taking my computer to the back yard, the park, wherever. Of course it was a better fantasy than anything I actually put in practice, and so my kid sort of took over the machine.

Amend that. She confiscated it.

It sat in her room and she got addicted to the internet. She also absconded with the better sound system, and soon streaming punk music was rocking the house. Surprisingly the cats didn't seem to mind. They still hung out in her room.

Anyway, one day she was playing catch with her best friend, tossing an old dead cellphone (painted Goth black and red long before its demise) when one catch didn't ... and ... into the open laptop screen it sailed.

The damage made a nice broken-window pattern, with spiderweb cracks running across half the screen. The computer still worked fine, as long as everything was on the left side of the screen.

The three year warranty at Best Buy doesn't cover this kind of damage, of course, and they kindly suggested I get their repair at $700 or so (meaning more). That was the cost of the computer when I got it on sale. Their other suggestion was to simply toss it and buy another machine. At that point I dug up an old monitor and connected it as an external screen.

Now we had a dual monitor system, meaning we had fun moving the cursor from one to the other. Unfortunately, all the taskbar stuff was still on the busted screen. I couldn't quite figure out how to make the new monitor the primary one, but as soon as I left the room, the teenager fixed the problem behind my back. Brat. But it's the least she should do, since it's her boo-boo and her computer to use.

So now the laptop is a desktop. I did find sources for replacement screens online for about $425 plus shipping, if I do the replacement work myself. It's not that hard, it's just that I don't want to spend the $$ to reward bad behavior. Oh, and I'm still paying off overage charges for her text messaging on the cellphone. Double whammy. Face it, kids are a joy, but if you don't have any, take your time!

Finally, Best Buy was right. I just saw a faster new laptop at Fry's for $499, and they'll throw in an Epson printer/scanner for free (after those #$%! mail-in rebates that half the time never get paid off). The only thing holding me back is remembering how often I actually used the old laptop out in the yard, the park, etc. Just about zero.

It can wait.