It's hard to be sane.

Everywhere I look I seem to come across some new memorial issue of Steve Jobs.  Recurring themes: The perfectionism, the attention to detail. Design more important than function. No point asking consumers what they want, if you're going to do something really revolutionary they won't know what they want until they see it.


It seems safe to assume that the authors of these pieces did not spend the years 2000-2007 grappling with the new CJK GUI of OS X.  (Ah me ah me, what evil looks Had I from old and young, Instead of the cross the Albatross About my neck was hung . . .) 

It seems equally, sadly, safe to assume that the authors are not members of that elite band, the readership of paperpools.

If Time magazine can dust off old pieces on Steve Jobs, we at paperpools can do no less.  We link now to an early post, our tribute to the man who believed in us when we did not believe in ourselves. The man who believed that American Mac owners, attempting to input Chinese/Japanese/Korean on a nice new Mac, might once, thoughtlessly, have preferred Help in their mother tongue, but would recognize the value of something more revolutionary when they saw it (the chance to work on their Chinese/Japanese/Korean while deciphering Help written in the language in question).

I'm going over to Washington tomorrow for a few weeks to visit my mother, who has had another operation; probably going up to New York for a few days the second week of February. Might have another brunch somewhere in DC if anyone would like to come.

Meanwhile, a minor annoyance: spilled a drink on my MacBook a couple of weeks ago, had to replace. The good news: the new MacBook had Snow Leopard; it was possible to install Creative Studio ME, which I had previously only been able to install on the older Powerbook which was running on Tiger. The bad news: now that I have transferred all my Sites files over to the new machine, I am unable to connect to the server, and none of the sites turn up in the Files panel when I try to Manage Sites - even though there is no problem opening the files. (Somewhat unfortunately, the last time I did anything much with Dreamweaver was back in 2006.)

I wondered whether there might be a reader in either the DC area or in NYC who is au fait with Dreamweaver and would be willing to sit down with me and these luckless machines; it would be nice, obviously, if I could do everything on one.

any ideas?

I wanted to install Microcharts on my MacBook, which can run Windows XP, hence Office for Windows. I am using Parallels because it allows you to copy from Windows documents to Mac documents. I had not yet installed antivirus software but thought I'd better. So I buy the Norton Dual Antivirus package for Macs which are also running Windows; there are two downloads, one for the OS X package, one for the Windows (setup.exe). Symantec does not explain whether one has to go into IE and Windows to download and run the latter, or whether, if downloaded within the Mac OS, clicking on it will automatically start up Parallels and do what's needed. I try first going into Windows IE but can't get access my account in Symantec, so I go back to Firefox and download Norton for Windows, start up Parallels again, click on the setup.exe icon.

In the past Parallels has run Windows XP and Office quite happily. What it now does is bring up a Windows desktop with no taskbar, no start menu, nothing. So not only is it not possible to install the antivirus software, it is also not possible to run Windows XP. I'm at a loss. I try uninstalling and reinstalling Parallels, which doesn't work. I wonder whether I can reinstall Windows XP, but when I put the CD in the drive and click on Setup.exe I get the same thing I was getting before:

(As you can see from the menu at the top, it is not possible to get the Windows Desktop or Taskbar; what you can't see is that if you try Start Menu nothing happens.)

I think about 35% of readers of this blog use OS X. If any of you are using Parallels and have run into this problem and found a fix, I hope you will let me know. (It shouldn't be necessary to say this, but Yes, I have checked the FAQs and Forums on Parallels and hunted around online; I won't say the answer is nowhere to be found, but I didn't find it.)