{"id":198,"date":"2003-08-20T08:09:28","date_gmt":"2003-08-20T12:09:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/wordpress\/the_road_to_digital_nirvana"},"modified":"2003-08-20T08:09:28","modified_gmt":"2003-08-20T12:09:28","slug":"the_road_to_digital_nirvana","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/2003\/08\/the_road_to_digital_nirvana.html","title":{"rendered":"The Road to Digital Nirvana"},"content":{"rendered":"

We have all these Devices. We buy these Devices because we think they’ll make our lives a little better or easier; at the very least, we hope that they won’t make our lives worse. And we expect that at some point, the Devices that we cobble together will just work<\/em> — they won’t crash, they’ll do what we tell them to do, and they’ll communicate with each other seamlessly. <\/p>\n

I’m not sure what Digital Nirvana is, but I’ll know it when I see it.<\/p>\n

And although it’s a process of trial-and-error, I think I’m headed in the right direction. For example, not so long ago I had a computer that crashed every two or three days. Now I have a computer that has been running almost continuously for the last year and a half, with only two crashes. This is Progress. Other steps are smaller in scope but still important. DragThing<\/a>. NetNewsWire<\/a>. A decent web host<\/a>. Flexible weblog software<\/a>. The list goes on and on.<\/p>\n

Of course, sometimes I make mistakes. For example, a couple of months ago I bought an old Palm VII for twenty bucks at a local garage sale. The guy was a pretty serious geek, judging from the used books he was selling. We bonded. He threw in two serial cradles, a keyboard, and a classy black leather case. Clapped me on the back. “Go forth, young man.” Well, maybe I added that last part. Anyway, I was stoked. I took my very first PDA home and spent an hour going through all the functions, learning Graffiti<\/a>, generally having a ball. Then I discovered that the only way to sync the Palm with my desktop would be to get a serial-to-USB converter, and that said converters would cost more than I spent for the PDA in the first place. “Huh,” I said. Since then, the Palm VII has sat in my Big Drawer of Extra Cables and Electronic Detritus, safe and sound in its classy black leather case.<\/p>\n

Then there was the time I decided that I was tired of writing journal entries in Moveable Type’s tiny little browser textbox, and it was time to find a more elegant interface. So I downloaded a well-known weblog editing tool for OS X and fired it up. I hadn’t configured my site info yet, but I figured what the hell — let’s see what this bad boy can do! I pressed the Connect<\/code> button, expecting to see some sort of pop-up (“No default blog available. Please enter your URL, name, and password…”). Instead, the program went into a frenzy of trying to access… nothing, apparently, and froze up. Annoyed, I killed the application process and started over. I entered my blog info like a good little user and tried again. Success! At this point, I was afraid to create a new post, so I pulled up a recent entry instead. To my horror, the entry appeared with the whitespace horribly mangled, along with a number of strange tags after each newline “<Unknown Escape><\/code>“. Whoa! I don’t know about you<\/em>, but I consider conversion of newline characters between Linux and Mac OS X to be a solvable problem. Something I sorta kinda expect my weblog editing software to take care of automatically. Now I was really annoyed, and worried that I might overwrite my old entry with a bunch of invalid crud. So I went to close the window, only to suddenly notice that the standard red “close window” button had been inexplicably disabled. Huh?? Sigh. Command-Q, drag folder to Trash.<\/p>\n

My latest project: Entering the Wireless World. I’ll admit, it is a bit<\/em> ambitious of me to set up a wireless hub. My desktop does fine and dandy while wired, and so really only my laptop would benefit. A wireless network of One is not so impressive. But hey, I like to plan ahead.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For example, not so long ago I had a computer that crashed every two or three days. Now I have a computer that has been running almost continuously for the last year and a half, with only two crashes. This is Progress.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-198","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tech"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=198"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=198"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=198"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=198"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}