MEET THE NEW CAT, SAME AS THE OLD CAT?

Has there ever been a computer operating system upgrade that did not in some way monkey with your settings and generally screw things up?

Apple launched the 10.6 version of its operating system three days ago, and like a true geek I immediately went out and bought it.

"I've come to monkey with your system..."

Now here’s the good news – it only cost about $30, the disc is multilingual and also contains a full version of the operating system, not just the new bits, and the installation was painless, requiring neither product key nor authentication.

Compared with the crap you have to put up with when dealing with Microsoft this is all very refreshing. You are trusted and not automatically assumed to be a criminal.

Now the bad: well, nothing on the scale of past Windows disasters and nightmares, but why can they not produce an upgrade which leaves your settings alone?

Most people like to personalise their machines and have them set up in ways which suit their usage, and after a couple of years that’s a pretty intricate network of customisations, the upsetting of which can be very vexing indeed.

So, Snow Leopard. What has this beast done to offend me? Two small but annoying things, and one big pain in the arse.

This cat has had its paws in the display settings. Starting up Firefox, the letters have all gone tiny, a serious problem if your eyesight is as bad as mine. Sounds like a snap to remedy, huh? No! I go into the preferences and simply increase the size of the fonts, but this just causes a weird pattern of behaviour in which the pages start out with tiny letters, then suddenly shift to the bigger ones and vice versa, for no apparent reason. Annoying as hell!

Next up, upon booting up the big cat for the first time I notice that the screen looks incredibly dull and dark. Finding the brightness control, I see that it’s reset itself to the minimum. Fine, I can just bring up the brightness level, but no setting looks right, and I can’t remember where I had it previously. Why did they have to monkey with it?

"I've come to Snow Leopard with your system..."

Even worse, but probably something I can get used to, is the fact that the colours look all wrong. Everything is darker. Somewhere deep down in the list of changes on the Apple website they mumble something about changing the gamma settings for the displays. Well, thanks a bundle, it was fine as it was!

Now the big weakness of the Mac, for me at least, is that it has been so stable and hassle-free over the last couple of years that I’ve never had to learn how to go into the guts of the beast to tweak things. Windows was so totally crap that you had to do this all the time so that it became second nature, but now I’m at a loss in this respect.

Europa Universalis III

The big annoyance is a very Microsoft-ish one: my favourite game, Europa Universalis 3, no longer works!!! This game has been my salvation over the last few months, and is vital to my existence. OK, this might not seem like such a big deal, but see, most niche games don’t get the luxury of a Mac version, so this is a rarity indeed. Doubtless the company behind the port will eventually put out a patch, but still, a junkie needs his fix, right?

OK, so apart from these issues everything else is working fine, but the question I find myself asking is what was the point of this upgrade? The hype has it that it is more of an underlying code rewrite aimed at speed and efficiency than a feature-packed bonanza. Well, in all honesty I haven’t noticed any differences in speed at all, and the only new features in evidence are a slight change to some minor aspects of the interface and an updated version of the video player Quicktime, which appears to be just as useless as its predecessor (get the infinitely better freeware VLC player for all your video needs, folks).

So there we have it – an utterly pointless upgrade from my point of view, and one with annoying issues which make me wish I’d never installed it.

And guess what – you can’t uninstall it, once it’s on (not without freshly installing the previous OS, anyway).

So, if you’re thinking of upgrading, first check the lists of incompatible software that are around, and perhaps hold off until the problems have been ironed out, since it looks as if us early adoptors are going to be doing the beta testing for Apple.

THANKS FOR THE MEMORY?

Now electronic stores and stupid impulse purchases go hand in hand, and as all nerdy men of a certain age know, these can often result in mishap.

Indeed, one sometimes takes the plunge with an ill-advised purchase with the full knowledge that the lack of prior research is going to result in the ownership of a white elephant.

At such moments one enters another mental realm in which judgement and reason are suspended and a wild devil-may-care spirit infests the credit card.

I have a cupboard full of the fruits of such hasty transactions: incompatible instruments, mismatched machinery and extra equipment, much of it broken or damaged in the kind of orgiastic bouts of Luddite violence that often ensues when an impulse buy goes wrong and no amount of hammer work will make a square USB plug fit a round DIN socket.

Well, I’ve gone and done it again.

Yesterday I was loping around the Mac section of Hiroshima‘s main purveyor of electrical wonderment, gazing at the latest iMacs with a mixture of envy and anger.

See, I was an early adopter of the Intel-based iMac, getting one in late 2007 and finally escaping the horror of Windows.

As I wanted my new machine to last, I opted for upgrades to hopefully give it a life longer than the average 3 years of my previous computers. For this I paid around $2,300.

Today, of course, a mere 20 months later, the same machine would set you back only $1,300, and to add insult to injury, a far better version still retails for under $2,000. Such is the perennial fate of the early adopter.

So there I was, wondering if I shouldn’t buy a new one and try to flog the old to some unsuspecting cohort to offset the bill.

But try as I might to get the mad impulse buying snowball in motion, I could not get past the fact that given an impoverished future heaving into sight and that my current machine does all I require of it adequately, it just didn’t make much sense.

However, I consoled myself with the idea of an upgrade. Why not soup up the old warhorse with a dab of RAM?

Aha! Here was a way I could satisfy my desire to buy something nerdy I didn’t really need, but make it all seem plausible. After all, you can never have enough RAM, right, lads?

Now I had actually researched this a bit, and had the correct specs noted down in the old iPhone, and it wasn’t long before I had found the right gear.

PC2-5300 SO-DIMM SDRAM 667khz 200 pin, to be exact.

So, I bunged a couple o’ 2GB sticks down on the desk, wincing slightly at the $170 price tag, but then the helpful clerk suggested another brand which was only $140 – sweet!
I double checked all the numbers on the box, and noted to my satisfaction that it even had the word ‘Macintosh‘ emblazoned upon it.

However, I now realise that this moniker must have referred to a certain type of rainwear, since it certainly could not have pertained to a well-known Cupertino-based computer manufacturer.

For, having installed the new bits, as per instruction, and firing up the machine, all that could be heard was a sad wheeze, a depressed whir, and an unmistakable atmosphere of general non-functioning.

Since neither maniacal laughter nor banging the cranium against the plaster work helped rectify the situation, it was with great regret and a little wry amusement that I was forced to haul my sorry bottom back to the shop this afternoon, there to do battle in the linguistic arena and try to get some functioning replacements.

Those ex-patriots with an incomplete mastery of the local patois always dread such moments, and the following description of the exchange will illustrate why.

1. I approach small female clerk who looks likely to be sympathetic to my woes.
2. I begin to explain situation in pigeon Japanese.
3. Small female clerk seeks to escape entanglement by looking for other clerks to intervene.
4. Male clerk takes over.
5. Conversation ensues in Japanese in which I state that the RAM doesn’t work, and that I want to exchange it for some that does work. The clerk‘s response can only be partially understood, and doesn’t seem to be offering any kind of resolution. I restate my case in what to my interlocutor must appear to be the language of a 3 year-old. He restates his case in full Japanese, making no concessions to my obvious inability with the tongue. I fail to grasp the point. This cycle repeats itself about four times.
6. Clerk suddenly switches into fluent English. I feel like an idiot.
7. Clerk orders the correct RAM, currently not in stock.
8. It costs another $110 making a grand total of $250 for something I didn’t really need.
9. I leave the shop, dressed in sack cloth, ash smeared on my visage, flagellating myself repeatedly with a large branch, for had I known the infernal bits were going cost that much, I’d never have bought them in the first place.

The funny thing is, just a few months before an acquaintance had done exactly the same thing with his iMac, and I had thought to myself then that I would never be caught out in such a way.

Will I learn from this costly experience? Will I buggery!

EUROPA UNIVERSALIS

A few years ago I was a wargaming nerd who bought hundreds of computer games, the majority of which I never actually played.

The joy was mostly in the acquisition, exploration and testing out of the games, and it was only a handful at which I became adept enough to take on other nerds via email.

See, this was the realm of the hardcore meticulous historical reconstruction of obscure battles, not some dumb arcade game first-person shooter that the masses play, you know, those games which are basically just ‘Quake‘ set in Normandy in 1944 with the mindless Strog replaced by the Nasty Nazis.

To give an indication of the complexity and shear insanity of the world of hardcore wargaming, I present “War in the Pacific,” published by Matrix Games. The main campaign in this giant simulation starts at Pearl Harbour in 1941 and ends some time in 1945.

Since the astonishing attention to detail means that you’ll be lucky to get through a day’s planning, movement, resupply and combat in one sitting, it is more than likely that completing the scenario will last longer than the actual war!

What this gargantuan undertaking means is that you, sitting there at your PC in your smelly pyjamas ramming doughnuts into your face, take on the role of the supreme commander of either the Allies or the Axis.

Now in reality, you would have had a whole menagerie of underlings to do all the tedious stuff like making sure food got to your troops, while you just concentrated on the strategy and the glory ( or gory) of combat.

Not so in this game, for you must do everything yourself, from loading up and sending out oil tankers to every single base and airfield across the whole of Asia and the Pacific, to deciding which aircraft engines to mass produce back home. Oh, and very occasionally there’s some fisticuffs, too.

Total insanity, but anyhow, I am now out of this particular realm of leisure pursuits. Why? Not because I’m not attracted to such distractions, but because I changed from PC to Mac a year ago.

Now these small-run niche market games are largely not made for the Mac, and rebooting into the copy of XP I have on a partition is just too tedious to bother with.

So is it goodbye to all that gaming goodness? Is it fudge! For luckily the fine folks at Virtual Programming have been doing a nice trade recoding games for the Mac crowd, including the fabulous Europa Universalis, which I have been indulging in nightly as a release from that tedious millstone known as ‘real life.’

Where's Joan?

Now Europa Universalis is not a hardcore wargame at all, although it is similarly rich and complex. Rather, it is an empire-building game which goes much deeper than the familiar Empire Earth, Age of Empires or Civilisation.

Graphically, it’s just a map of the world in 1453, with all historically extant nations and their provinces mapped out. Your job is to choose one, then guide it through the ensuing 350 years, ensuring its survival and hopefully leading it to greatness.

You do this by building up trade, colonizing unclaimed territories and defeating rival nations on the field of battle. Now the depth, realism and richness comes in how you do this.

You can choose various ‘national ideas‘ for your country: will you be pursuing trade, heading for the New World or looking to make advances in science? You can decide the balance between such things as mercantilism and free trade, how much other religions are tolerated, the level of centralisation, and a whole host of other considerations.

Caught short in Navarre?

On the economic front, you must carefully balance the books: how much of your income will be invested in land technology and how much in trade?

Unlike other games, finance is modelled realistically in Europa Universalis. Suddenly involved in a war? Well, recruiting armies takes time and money – troops must be paid and are costly to maintain. Suddenly the delicate balance of your economy is upset. You can raise war taxes – at the risk of revolts springing up at home ( and there’s nothing worse than seeing the red and black flag of anarchy waving in your home territories while your troops are fighting a desperate struggle at the front). You could take a loan and hope there’ll be enough money in the coffers to pay it off later, or you could just print more money. Keep that up for long, and very soon you’ll find yourself in an inflationary spiral of epic proportions.

Maritime fisticuffs

See, war is an altogether serious business in Europa Universalis.

Then there’s diplomacy. You can sweet talk other nations with gifts of cash, or bind your nations together by marrying off your ugly daughters. You can propose and enter into alliances for mutual defence, you make make trade agreements, and you can even send an insult.

Act like an idiot on the world stage and your reputation will be in tatters and no one will go near you, or, even worse, they will band together and crush you.

Now the great thing about this game is its often leisurely pace. You can choose how fast time slips by, but even at a cracking rate there will be years without much going on, so you can sit back and enjoy a cup of tea whilst surveying your empire (or miserable little third-rate dictatorship). When things start to hot up, you can conveniently pause the game and give your commands at your own pace, so there’s no mad click-fest to get you all wound up and enraged.

It’s a gentleman’s game, and I can almost see my ruff and codpiece as I sit here deciding whether or not I should accept the proposal for an alliance from Austria, who to my mind look like a bunch of dodgy bastards who might well lead me into a Balkan quagmire. And nobody likes a Balkan quagmire, eh folks?

Oh look, the peasants are revolting!

Perhaps the best thing about EU is its fantastic value for money. Your $40 digital download will get a game that is infinitely replayable. You can assume any country in the world – The Marmeluks, Khmer, The Golden Horde, Cree, The Aztecs or Sibir, as well as the more European-centric Castille, Burgundy, Teutonic Knights and Venice. And each time it’s totally different, with different challenges and events cropping up.

If that wasn’t enough you can also try several alternative and more historically-focused start-off points such as The Hundred Years War or the American War of Independence. There’ even a Napoleonic add-on taking you up to 1820.

So there you go, you can now conquer the world on a Mac as well as a PC. Huzzah!

iBLOG

Blog looks different, huh? I changed it last night from blogsome to wordpress, not because there was anything wrong with the old one, but because wordpress have released a little application that allows blog integration with the marvellous iPhone. Yes, you heard right, buddy, this cat went out and grabbed himself one o’ them 3G wonders the day it was released here in Japan, and now I’ll be able to productively utilise my comatose Starbucks sessions to wax lyrical more frequently thanks to my tiny-keyboarded electronic bundle of over-priced joy! Huzzah!

However, as I type this it suddenly occurs to me that what with the iPhone‘s full web browsing capabilities I could have just gone and blogged on the old one as usual, buy hey! a change is a good as a rest and there’s nothing like a new gadget for doing a whole load of pointless and time-consuming things that didn’t really need to be done…

Still, the new blog layout is rather fetching, isn’t it, what with the exciting colour scheme and that cool banner shot of some bimbos in Nagasaki chirping to an audience of umbrellas (one of my all-time classic photos, methinks, oh so modestly).

And don’t worry, I will of course be porting over all of the old posts in yet another gargantuan task of time-wasting analness. If that is not a real word, that how about ‘anality‘?

However, all has not been well with some other of Mr.Job’s products. On July 6th my iMac winked out of existence before my very eyes, and was shortly carted off by some men in white coats and dark glasses. More than a fortnight elapsed before the machine mysteriously reappeared with a terse note to the effect that some unspecified bits had been changed. Luckily not the hard drive as I had feared, and thus my enormous collection of men’s relaxational cinematic renderings were saved, albeit probably sullied by the gaze of some grinning Mac grease-monkey at the depot.

MUC iDOESN’TWORK vs MICROSHAFT WEIRD

Ugh, just come to the end of a couple of weeks o’ slow torture. What? I hear you ask, were the natives keeping you in a bamboo enclosure buried up to the neck in the burning tropical sun? Oh no, silly person, of course not. It is winter now, dolt!

No, I speak of the activity I have recently been dragged into by my Greco-New-Yorkian mucker Mr. Danny Itoh. For we have been writing a faux English textbook allegedly to be employed upon the poor unsuspecting gruntlets out in some godforsaken rural backwater who “study” in a two-year grease monkey ‘n’ hairdresser college. So yeah, like it’s dumbed down to “me blue-eyed Aryan god, you slouching disaffected Oriental yoof with a stupid haircut.” Or somefink like that.

Anyways, normally one sets out on the road to publication with a good wadge of time before those nasty little things called deadlines appear. But oh no, not us. Mr. Danny Itoh informs me that the alleged textbooks must be landing on students’ desks by the first week of April. Hmm, wait a sec, so that leaves us with…..what the….?!??

And so it is without pause that I have been connected to sexy MacBook all hours of the day and night, usually in some branch of a well-known caffeine supplier famed for the economic rape of Ethiopia, desperately grappling with the duplicitous and gargantuan problems involved in the pea-brained scheme.

For ’tis not the actual material for said tome that is tricky (nay, as a professional headucator of long standin’ I have of course accrued and sequestrated away an whole bunch of crap wot I can employ in any hestablishment of higher learnin’ at the drop of a mortar board, or was that mortar shell?), no, my friends, it is the translation of said material from the cobwebby collywobbled lobes of your humble narrator to the helectronic page that is the nub of the problem.

See, these here computers look all shiny and nice an’ all, but when it comes do doing anything serious with ‘em, they go all uncooperative and try their hardest to block you in your creative endeavours. The worst offenders, of course, are word-processing softwares. You all remember that nauseating and annoying animated paper clip that would pop up in early versions of Microshaft Weird, right? You know, it would keep offering you suggestions that you didn’t want, and even when you’d actually worked out how to turn the bugger off, he’d secretly start screwing with you from inside the programme, monkeying with your lists, automating this, automating that, preventing you from moving this thing here without all these other carefully aligned bits to disperse throughout your project like startled pigeons.

I’d hoped that Mac’s word processor would be a little better – but oh no, same old shite here too, meaning that more than half of this would-be author’s battle is with the very machinery allegedly designed to help him.

Bah! Mumble-grumble, mumble-grumble….(slopes off into background and kicks something…