POWER OUTAGES, PETER GABRIEL AND OUTLINES...
POWER OUTAGES, PETER GABRIEL AND OUTLINES...
Sent: 11/20/96; 10:30:03 AM
From: jurgen@set.gov.bc.ca (Jurgen Schaub)
Greetings, Dave!
Just read "Rainy Season", and it hit so close to home that it was funny! I live in the middle of Vancouver, quite an urban area, and we haven't had a power outage in *years*. Well, until Sunday night. The food was just finishing cooking, and I was listening to Douglas Adams read me "Last Chance to See" from the CD-ROM --an EXCELLENT Voyager 2-disc set, by the way. It was released back in 1992 or 93 when 2 CD-ROMs was considered a HUGE amount of data. It's basically a show-and-tell slide show. Very funny- and Douglas has a great speaking voice. Anyway- the power went out. Boom. No lights. We stumbled around in the dark, trying to find candles and matches... I used the light of my PowerBook's screen to root around for said items- it's got a very nice blue glow, ya know. So we had the coziest dinner in a long time- candlelight, wine, everything was quiet. No phone calls (all my phones are cordless!), no buzzing devices, no fans, nothing. It was so peaceful! We built a fire, and talked and talked.
Then it got rather disturbing- it's been about 2 hours now with no power - and we were running out of things to do. The fire was nice, but it was becoming rather dull. What can we do? Nothing. Is ours a society so addicted to electricity that we cannot do anyting without it? Perhaps it was the company I was in- we could have played cards, board game, etc... but it didn't cross our minds. All we though of is all the things we COULDN'T do because the power was out. We're not used to dealing with having no power. I sit here at work, and we've got 8 UPS's of various sizes to keep things running during power interruptions. We buy massive batteries whose sole purpose is to prolong the life of these machines after the power dies (well, they also hold up some shelves, but that's beside the point).
Peter Gabriel- ahhh.... Love to be Loved is a great song. If you like that CD, be sure to pick up "Plus from Us"- basically stuff Peter was listening to while he was writing and recording "Us". It shows many of his varied influences- opened up a few new worlds of music for me. Funny thing about him- many of the .. erm .. "public figures" that I respect are turning out to be fans of his. Similar tastes in music could work out to similar thoughts in general? I wonder how that works... Firefly seems to be on to something here.
My 2 cents about outlines now- I think your outlines should be unique. Don't make them Mac-like, and don't make them Windows-like. Make them Dave-like. Create your own style, make it obvious, and run with it. Look at what HSC's been doing. Don't go that lush (Bryce's interface is excellent for Bryce, but would be WAY too much for an outliner!). They basiclly ignored the Mac "look", and created something that is totally their own, and works well. I challenge you (ha-HA!) to do something similar with outlines. Do something with the interface that will knock our socks off, on both platforms! Don't be Mac, don't be Windows. Be Dave.
PS- We're toying with buying a high-end PowerComputing box, running BeOS and WebSTAR (runour has it's being ported!!) for our web server. Any chance on a Frontier port to BeOS? Hm? Hm? :-)
PPS- That particular smilie was a combination of "don't hit me" and "if I smile nicely, maybe he'll think about it".
PPPS- Wow, this is long- sorry about that.
Regards,
....................jurgen
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| | jurgen schaub, internet guy at set-bc, jurgen@set.gov.bc.ca | writes magnetic poetry: http://www.set.gov.bc.ca | "mad knife men want punod" vancouver, bc, canada | "language always drools" where is that shift key? | | set-bc, his employer, wants nothing to do with all this. |
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