Think on These Things

One thing I absolutely love about Apple’s OS X is how all the iLife applications seamlessly trade information with one another. Add all your friends to your Address Book and when you want to write an email, you can launch mail, start typing their name and the rest will be auto-filled. I simply find this fantastic. However, it’s always annoyed me how this synchronization of information can’t span multiple computers as well. Well, it can, if you don’t mind paying $100/year for Apple’s .mac service, which is already considered by many to be obsolete. With .mac you can do things like, synchronize mail and contacts and calendars across multiple computers. But why would I pay $100 a year to synchronize such information between my desktop Mac Mini and my PowerBook? It’s a waste of money. Clearly, the .mac service would come in handy if you were synchronizing between home and work computers, but what if your work computer is a notebook which you bring home every day? Also what if your desktop machine were the center of your home office? This is my case. I have a mac mini, which I use for everything while I’m home and a PowerBook that I take with me to school and work. When I add or remove contacts, events, to-do’s, bookmarks, from one computer I’d like to have the changes made on the other. Let’s say I’m out in the school library writing a paper, I get a phone call, some things come up and a few more items are added to me to-do list for the week, I add a couple bookmarks, I write a few e-mail drafts. I add them to iCal/Mail on my PowerBook, and ideally when I come home and set the PowerBook aside to charge, I’d like to synchronize and have all those changes made onto my Mini, where I usually do all my e-mailing and organizing. I’m not going to pay $100 to do this, it seems so obvious, it’s .mac synchronization without the internet. Both of these computers share the same network, why can they not also share such information like contacts, events, and tasks directly? I don’t see any reason why I should pay to synchronize information between computers on the same network. If I knew anything about computer programming, I’d do it myself, but I only have an average grasp over HTML and even that I haven’t used in years. If there are any programmers or Mac aficionados reading this post who know how to accomplish what I seek to achieve, please, please tell me!

The following is an excerpt from the first page of MANIFESTO, a book written by an anonymous author. If you would like to buy the book, you may find a list of vendors at http://dedrabbit.com/. I got mine at Newbury Comics for $5.

I hated school. I hated work. I hated boredom. I had no interests. I had a happy childhood. There was school, adolescence, growing up, questions about the future. I was twenty-one. I had no dream.

I dropped in and out of college. After three years I wasn’t going back.
Students sat on lawns, drank coffee, held books, discussed ideas, wore expensive sandals and footwear. Professors taught classes on the campus greens. Students basket in youth, in the fine times of college. I was told I’d meet my friends for life in college.

Everywhere people smoked, sat on wide steps of academic buildings, enjoyed the outdoors together, like people in glossy-paged catalogues.
I hated college atmosphere.

I left college for the last time as impulsively as ever - free and happy - like I had a bottomless pocket of money, fully funded, like my lungs were fresh and I could still run a mile in under six minutes.
Cars passed slow with the wind brushing up my hair. I listened to the dusty dirt on the bottoms of my new leather shoes. I felt slow like a fish underwater, like a soft cloud pulled along. I was content to be slow, away from the vague traps between cause and effect.
Birds made noise along the roadsides, up high in the light-green pine needles. I smelled the sandy heat. When I closed my eyes I believed I had a grand future; I had no problems; the past didn’t matter.
I was going to make my life an adventure.

I hated being told I needed health insurance. I was sick of car insurance; tired of people that told me to go back to school, earn a degree, make something of my life.
People went to college and got what they paid for. I hated the relationship, the equation, the vending machine dispensing crinkly-packaged candies and chips.
I didn’t want a high-paying job. I hated jobs. I didn’t want and obvious life.

Children played in sandboxes, watched cartoons, grew up; their eyes turned glassy like millions of Americans, until, as adults, they stared like dull fish through the wide windows of cars.

The world wasn’t free. It was a drag to live. It made me ill. I wanted my life to start.