Eccentric Flower:199811/technical difficulties

twenty-four eleven twelve

technical difficulties

Maybe I'm having flu in installments. Last week my body hurt like flu but my throat and sinuses were fine. Today my body is fine and my head feels like someone's been stuffing sandpaper into all its cavities and rasping it. Go figure.

Only one of you was blunt enough to point it out, but I did promise multiple entries yesterday and I didn't deliver. Mea culpa, and I apologize if you kept checking to see when the promised words would come in. It wasn't apathy, it was my monitor.

Let me digress. This is a very long digression, but I need to dump this out of my brain before I can proceed:

As early as kindergarten we learn about mixing paint. We learn that there are three primary colors, red, blue, and yellow; three secondary colors obtained by mixing any two of those, orange, violet, and green; and that when you mix all three primaries together, you get black.

That's an oversimplification when you're actually mixing paints, because the colors described above are theoretical ones, and tubes of paint aren't pure colors ... but that's too much of a digression, and besides there's an excellent book on it, called Blue And Yellow Don't Make Green.

When you work with computer graphics, even a little bit, sooner or later you have to come to grips with the fact that monitors use a different system. The three primary colors are red, green, and blue. There are also three secondary colors: cyan, magenta, and yellow. Mixing all three primaries gets you white.

"Cyan" and "magenta" may seem like vague terms, but in computers they have a very specific meaning. (And in printing. The "CMYK" or "four-color" process refers to the fact that color pictures, like in your newspaper, are printed as a Cyan layer, a Magenta layer, a Yellow layer, and a blacK layer. But that's another digression, and we shouldn't go there since, from a computer point of view, you have to mix the colors backwards.)

Cyan, in the computer world, is what you get when you mix equal amounts of blue and green. Looking at the color, this is the most intuitive of the three. It isn't hard to visually imagine that this light aqua color could be the child of blue and green. Nor, with a little more twisting, is it difficult to see magenta as equal parts red and blue. It's a purple-red; no problem.

But mixing red and green to get yellow? That's truly counterintuitive. When I'm making RGB hexes (the little codes for colors in HTML, like #FFFFFF), I can usually get what I want by working in my head (it helps to be able to think in hexadecimal) ... but yellows are always the ones I have to go look up.

I'll never have to look it up again. The "blue gun" in my monitor has begun to go out. No more blue. Now, think about that. If a white dot means that the blue gun, the red gun, and the green gun are all hitting that point with full intensity, but the blue gun isn't working .... All the white areas on my screen become yellow. Everything acquires a yellowish tint. And blue areas show up as black - meaning nothing's hitting those pixels at all.

Actually, using the yellowed screen wouldn't be a problem; it's the steady flicker back and forth that's distracting.

Like I said, a long digression. I had to get all that color-theory stuff out of my head. Anyway, that's why I didn't write last night. My monitor's dying.

This is really annoying since the monitor has already been repaired under warranty once - several months ago, when the red gun went out and everything looked like it was underwater for a few days.

- - -

Most of the things I wanted to write about yesterday are now uninteresting to me. I was going to mention the problems at Boston Latin school with their racial admissions issues, but on second thought it's a no-win situation and I'll keep my mouth shut. The paper's moaning about the Patriots leaving and for once I find myself agreeing with inflammatory ultra-conservative columnist Howie Carr: Don't let the door hit you on the ass on the way out.

I am still upset about AOL and Netscape, though. I loathe AOL, I use Netscape, and if AOL buys Netscape, I will have to face the very real fact that I may have to curtail web usage somewhere down the road because I do not have an acceptable browser.

(I will not use the Microsoft Product, for two reasons which have nothing to do with my dislike of Microsoft. One: it's intrusive; it likes to intertwine itself into your system and set itself up as the default handler for various things you don't want it to touch. Two: On a Mac? You must be kidding. Microsoft products haven't run well on Macs in years.)

Actually, Netscape already has more features than I use, so I can just stick with this version for a long time to come. It's too big, of course - the program should, by rights, be half its size and run twice as fast. But all software is these days - I've come to accept bloat, even though I will never learn to be quiet about it.

Here is a quote from today's paper from industry analyst Danny Rimer which tells why I oppose AOL's potential purchase of Netscape:

"It used to be you could claim that AOL was the on-line service for beginners and then you graduate to the Internet and to Netscape. This gets rid of the myth."

[Hyphen in "online" and caps on "internet" are his. I take no blame for either.]

Yes. From now on, no one will graduate at all. It will all be dumbed down and all the good parts will be locked away. Too dangerous for us feeble users.

If you use AOL: I have nothing against you personally. However, you are probably already aware how much your reputation is being besmirched by the company you're keeping.

The other thing is that this will undermine the anti-trust case against Microsoft. True! They are already beginning the strategy. ("See? See? We can't really dominate the market as much as you say if our competitors can take action like this!") That's a horrendous reason for this crucial fight to fall apart. If AOL really does unseat the Microsoft trial with this greed-inspired move, I may have to go Unabomber and start sending strange packages to Steve Case in Virginia.

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