CONFESSIONS OF AN IPOD ROADIE:
FROM CLASSIC LEGACY TO THE OS X GENERATION
Our peculiar form of iPod madness began last June in
conjunction with my partner Neil’s Big Five-Oh birthday. For months, I’d been
fretting over what to get him. Something special, something interactive that
would involve all his friends for such a momentous occasion, but what?
I needed a happening, but I kept drawing a blank. Zip,
zilch, nada. Neil had just been laid off his teaching job and he was not going
gentle toward the half-century milestone. More like kicking and screaming.
Fifty body blows to the psyche. The bases were loaded. No way to ease his pain
as the dreaded birthdate inexorably drew nearer.
Pondering that notion, I found the answer at the bottom of a
bright yellow MacWorld Expo bag, a poster. I unrolled it. I was gazing at
Apple’s 20th anniversary “Think Different” commemorative poster of that amazing
1984 TV commercial of the woman runner—who so famously interrupted half-time
and changed computing history as we know it.
For the 20th anniversary poster, the jogger is updated with
an iPod. Very cool. Synchronicity struck with the force of a sledge hammer.
Give him an iPod to ease his pain!
We decided to update Neil O’Neill (who is a musician, actor
and teacher) with an iPod for his 50th birthday. He was constantly losing CDs
and his CD player was acting strange. Via clandestine emails, I tapped some 50
friends to fork over some music and dough for an iPod and accessories galore.
When I had collected enough moolah to buy a plane ticket to
Tahiti, I ordered an iPod, an iTunes music store gift certificate and
chotchkies from Apple’s red tag store and it arrived the next day!
Now, I had a an elderly cobbled together Mac PPC
9600—someone’s obsolescent technology was my ticket to paradise (alas, no
firewire; OS 8.6), so I couldn’t upload music onto the iPod even if I knew how
to do it, which I didn’t.
I smuggled the iPod off with a bunch of Neil’s favorite CDs
(Beatles, Van Morrison, the Corries, Bob Dylan—Neil shook Bob’s hand, and
wouldn’t wash it for a week! But that’s another story). I took the iPod to a
friend with an iBook to DJ it up. (Friends also gave him a favorite CD to
download special songs into the iPod.)
During the party, while Neil, now officially 50 and loaded,
was jamming with Mike Husser on the base guitar, I ushered everyone into the
back room where they signed the 20th anniversary “Think Different” poster. It
was a cool sacrilege.
Neil was pretty blown away when the iPod was presented to
him hidden inside the poster—after he blew out all 50 candles that melted the
frosting, singed his hair and nearly set the deck afire. We all ate cake with
wax, jammed on, and a good time was had by all. A real 49er send-off. Hello 50,
the last good decade to be middle-aged. Time to hit the road, Jack. Have to
pack our things and go.
We took off on vacation and shared earbuds as the new iPod
sweetly serenaded us with a little Ray(ban) Charles at 40,000 feet, on a series
of rather hellish plane rides with far too many layovers (and 12 hours of no
food) from Oakland to Florida. Most fellow travelers will whip out pictures of
their kids faster than pistols at the OK Corral, so we retaliated, we drew out
our iPod and fired back a tune or two.
The iPod did famously at Miami’s “unconservatory“ school of
music; most folks we met had never seen an iPod in the flesh—er—chrome and
Lucite. The musicians loved it. Everyone oohed and ahhed—especially over the
accessories. It had a stereo adapter? a FM and a car cassette converter? a microphone? Hook it up to MIDI and
digitally record with it? Use it as a jump drive? You could see their (click)
wheels spinning.
The iPod was such a cross-cultural smash success, even our
friends’ Cubans relatives all wanted an iPod too. No translation needed. I
think I must’ve “sold” a few dozen virtual iPods while in Miami.
I didn’t know a thing about downloading music into iPods or
how to use iTunes, neither did anyone else. Hot Miami nights, no AC in the
practice studio, plenty mosquitoes and geckoes galore. While the musicians
jammed on Calle Ocho (a kilted Neil in a Cuban guayabera playing “Those Were
the Days” to a frenzied Cuban audience is another wild cojone story), While a former Californian, composer and
world class pianist, Kirk Whipple, and Neil were in the studio talking shop, I
was figuring out how to use iTunes, and the iPod on a borrowed iBook with OS X.
Baptism by fire.
I was a classic OS 8.6 California girl mesmerized by an OS X
world. Luckily, MacWorld’s Mac 911 guru, Christopher Breen, graciously came to
my virtual rescue; he was my sweet email roadie guide; he told me how to upload
tunes (you need to be online to get the titles? I’d typed in about 50 titles),
and how to make playlists. I uploaded a little Margaritaville (Jimmy Buffet),
Gypsy Kings, Celia Cruz, and Kirk Whipple & Marilyn Morales’ nocturnes,
“Elemental Portraits,” (for which I’d written a suite of poems in
collaboration) and we were good to go on a little road trip of our own.
After our unconservatory gigs were over, we took off for a
little snorkel trip down to the Florida Keys and the Dry Tortugas—until three
whopping hurricanes chased us home. We shared the iPod with musicians in Key
Largo, we listened to the iPod as we drove across the Seven Mile Bridge to the
old bridge at Pigeon Key—that’s Flagler’s Folly, Key West railroad bridge for
the Havana-bound gamblers during the Depression. The bridge was featured in
“Key Largo” with Bogie and Bacall, and again in “True Lies” with Arnold
Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis.
We put our lips together and blew a few sultry tunes to the
iPod as we kayaked and snorkeled (it stayed on the boat, alas no wetsuit, but
Chris Breen assured me even that was possible) we saw manatees in the
mangroves, swam with sea turtles, and dolphins. We even took our iPod on those
famous Key West sunset cruises (their music seriously sucked.)
It’s a long way to the Dry Tortugas, a civil war fortress a
tiny coral atoll in the middle of the Caribbean, several hours from Cuba,
Cancun or Key West by fast boat. You have to want to go there. Samuel Mudd
(John Wilkes Booth’s doctor) was incarcerated there, and Ernest Hemingway was
shipwrecked there after a hurricane engulfed the atoll.
When the coffee and booze ran out, Hemingway fashioned a
raft and made for Key West, 70 miles back to civilization to write “For Whom
the Bell Tolls” before Cuba beckoned for good.
Our boat ride back to Key West was hellish, with pitching
indigo-black seas, frothed with 10-15 foot swells, lightning striking the
water. The first of four storms, Hurricane Bonnie, was brewing. Oblivious to
the storm, Neil was in the cabin happily iPodding it with a little Led Zepplin
while I rode shotgun outside to avoid mal de mer. I was distracted by dolphins
and flying fish off the bow, a wayward barracuda miscalculated a wave and
nearly jumped into my arms. Finding or losing Nemo?
Everything was going swimmingly until we got home and
decided to upload more songs. We were getting a little tired of what was on the
iPod and wanted a sea change. Change is good. But we had very little spare
change and an elder Mac, a PPC/9600/200MHz. No USB, no firewire.
So I snagged a beige G3 mini-tower off of Craigslist.
Dangerous learning curves ahead. I learned to swap parts, I put in USB and
firewire PCI cards, rearranged a few ATA and SCSI hard drives, haphazardly
flipped SCSI ID switches until I got everything to load.
I replaced the wonky modem, loaded OS 9.2.2 so we could use
iTunes and download music from the iTunes music store. (The USB card is not OS
9.2.2 friendly; it only works under OS 8.6; I’ve tried various combos of USB
drivers. No luck, To use my jump drive or download pictures, I have to load OS
8.6).
I added more memory, a 500 MHz Sonnet chip to speed the
Gossamer G3 up, but we still couldn’t use the danged iPod, other than as a hard
drive. I was able to load an old version of iTunes under OS 9.2.2. But it
didn’t recognize the iPod. We’ve got great playlists, with some PC speakers,
our G3 is a really great juke box. Neil rarely uses the analog stereo or the PC
anymore. Well, I gutted the PC, so he couldn't use it anyway—even if I wanted
to get it up and running again.
Back to the drawing board. It turns out, this particular
iPod needs OS X. Well, I found out that first generation G3s (ROM v.1) are not
happy with OS X, especially with a 500 MHz Sonnet card.
(I won’t mention the Superdrive (v. 105) I installed, that
needed serious convoluted software patches under OS 9.2.2 because Apple doesn’t
have a DVD Player driver in classic mode (not an issue under OS X. No
media/video card meant the Superdrive was merely a hood ornament/CD -R burner.
DVD files show up but DVD Player won’t load. Alas, no Nemo screensaver for us.
But at least we could burn CDs of our growing iTunes collection).
I loaded OS X (10.1.3) onto an auxiliary hard drive, and it
worked for a while. I loaded iTunes 4.6 needed for this third generation iPod,
only to find out that it in turn, needed OS 10.1.5. ARGHHHH! It actually worked
for a while. The IPod showed up in iTunes! We were good to go. Not.
Meanwhile, all manner of strange things happened, mainly
Siberian-sized freezes; I was eventually able to jumpstart the G3 off an OS 9
formatted hard drive after hitting every panic button I could think of, but the
OS X christened hard drive became a shy truant, it quit showing up to work on
the desktop altogether. So we’re back to using OS 9.2.2, and using friends’
Macs to load new music.
I am at present cobbling together yet another beige G3 (ROM
v.2) with OS X (10.2.8) to tide me over the next few weeks (or months) until I
cobble together a blue and white G3, or maybe even a G4 (but I can’t use my
Sonnet card in a G4-and all the G4s at 300 MHz are slower than molasses: 500
MHz is bare minimum requirement). I need a Mac with SCSI PCI card slots &
serial adapters so I can still use my legacy SCSI & serial stuff.
If money were no issue, horses were wishes and pigs could
fly, I would’ve bought an iMac last summer, and a Mac Mini, last Fall. But hey,
I wouldn’t have learned all this obsolete Mac technology. I can now rebuild
damn near any PPC you put my way.
The lucky recipients of my rebuilt PPCs are the public
schools where I work as an artist in residence through non-profits, Young
Audiences and California Poets in the Schools. A Title 1 (poor) school, Golden
Gate Academy, in the Western Edition got a carload of my 75xx series PPCs.
I believe in the Apple credo to think differently empowers
us, it changes people’s lives. It changed my life. As a practicing dyslexic, I
could not use computers, it was their way or the highway. With Mac, I can
problem solve in any manner of ways. If one way doesn’t work, at least I can
fix it. I discovered too, along the way, that I could strip & rebuild a PC
too if needs be...I ripped wires and hard drive out of our dead PC to fix up
the G3—Neil was once a confirmed PC junkie but he's since seen the light.
As soon as I get a new Mac, I’m fixing up all the old G3s I
have lying around (3) for Cabrillo School in Fremont. Meanwhile I’m waiting for
my ship to come in, onboard is a Mac Mini and a Powerbook. And maybe an iMac
with Airport Extreme while we’re at it. It looks nice coordinated with the
iPod. maybe a buddy, an iPod Photo would be nice too so a California girl can
dream big. Maybe take a few pictures, play a few tunes of her own.
