Obsession Without Magnificence  
By Maggie Turner  

Saturday, April 8, 2000

Obsession Without Magnificence

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The new hard drive in "The Teenager's" old computer has opened the door to obsession, at least in my own mind. Now that there is storage space available, I have been pursuing its use with enthusiasm. The new hard drive is installed in a Windows 98 computer. The computer I use for my daily business is a Macintosh. I want to store Macintosh files on the Windows machine. This is not just a matter of saving the files "as is" on the Windows hard drive. The files need to be encoded to prevent data loss.

It has been a fascinating three days while I teach myself to setup a server on the Macintosh to encode outgoing files, login to the server from the Windows computer and download the encoded files to the storage partition. I have been assisted by the marvelous members of a Macintosh email list. This is a great bunch of people, who offer assistance expecting no other reward than having helped someone. It all seems so simple now, now that I know how to do it.

A complicating factor has been that all this operates behind a firewall (this prevents access to a computer by other computers) which had to be configured correctly in order to allow my own downloading activity. I played with that for quite a while before I figured it out, it is working. Another complicating factor has been my sense of adventure. I have installed various FTP clients and servers and played with them in both the Macintosh and Windows environments. I also played with Hotline clients and servers on both platforms. I have been having a wonderful, wonderful time. Really, I have.

On top of all that, I have spent the day downloading a new operating system from Apple, Darwin. It is a command line operating system similar to UNIX and LINUX. The silly part of this activity is that I do not own hardware that will run the software I am downloading. However, I might someday. I did say that I considered myself obsessed.