“Professional service
that won't make you nervous”

F.A.Q. - Frequently Asked Questions:

If you have a question that you think belongs here, drop me a message. :-) Meanwhile, I've tried to anticipate some of your questions in advance...

Are you an Apple Authorized Service Provider, or an Apple Certified Technician?

Not currently. I hope to be, but the primary problem is being able to afford the cost of being one. Apple does things a little differently than those who support Windows systems. Anyone can take the MCSE-type tests. In order for me to take the "Apple Certified Technician" tests, I must have an Apple Authorized Service Provider number, i.e. either be one or work for one. I've discussed this issue with Apple Computer, but for now this is pretty much how it works.

Basically this means that I have to purchase any Apple parts from an Apple Authorized Service Center, if necessary. Depending on the circumstances of your problem, I may instead refer you to a company that is one, rather than attempt the repair myself, simply as a protection measure for you, the end-user. If your machine requires hardware servicing and is still under warranty, in fact, I would only refer you back to an Authorized Service Center, such as an Apple Store, or possibly your original place of purchase.

At all times, I intend on keeping your interests in mind as a top priority, and not try and do everything myself just to make another miserable buck. I pride myself on the quality of my customer service, and I intend to keep it that way.

What kind of experience do you have?

I've been involved with Macintoshes ever since I got my first Macintosh model '512K' in 1987. I've owned six of them since then, upgrading over the years to my current PowerPC G3 400MHz system. Nearly all my Macintosh knowledge has been self-taught, or obtained through my own researches, asking questions, etc. What parts of it have not been, were gained through my experience in Sales and Support for various companies that worked with Macintosh systems -- a good four years of which dealt specifically with the PrePress and Graphics industries, while I worked for Tegra Varityper (a company that built imagesetting systems for high-end film output).

My knowledge is particularly well-suited for people in the graphics industry, and my sales and support background enables me to make comprehensive recommendations for client purchases. Since I'm no longer involved in sales, my interest is solely in ensuring that you get quality components from quality companies; You won't have to worry about whether I'm recommending a particular product because the company that makes it is offering the salespeople a $100.00 SPIFF for it that week.

In addition, I've been heavily immersed in Perl programming since around May 2000, and have also been delving deeply into Red Hat Linux / Fedora Core since January 2002. In fact, you can generally find me lurking around irc.freenode.net as "WebDragon", generally in the #web, #css, and #vim channels, and occasionally in the #fedora channel doing live support.

Why Macintosh and not Windows?

Oh, there's a thorny field.

I got hooked on the Macintosh back in 1987 when there was only DOS, and PC's were known as "IBM-Compatibles". Back at a time when you had to print from WordPerfect to actually see what your file looked like, go back, edit it some more, print again, and so on... Contrarily, on the Macintosh, you could see what you were printing before you printed. That, the whole menuing system, everything about it, just drew me in. I was utterly and completely hooked from the moment I saw tear-off menus in HyperCard under MacOS while visiting a friend who had one.

Since then, I've occasionally peeked over the fence, and while there has been improvement in the Windows camp, the continuing security problems of the operating system, and the business practices of MicroSoft, their utter incompetence at integrating W3 standards for HTML 4.01 and CSS2 that are more than seven years old into Internet Explorer, have only further served to continually justify my decision.

My current Macintosh is over 7 years old and still going strong, albeit with a few upgrades inside it. Plus I now am using both Macintosh and Linux side by side and taking full advantage of the various uses each tool has to offer. I can't wait to upgrade my hardware on the Macintosh side and get into OS X. It's just beautiful. And that new iMac finally looks like a computer from the 21st century should look! (In My Never Even Remotely Humble Opinion :-)

...and there is yet another reason I've stuck with Macintosh despite the slightly higher entrance fee... Complete hardware and software integration. Apple is the only computer company out there that still makes the whole kit from top to bottom. Rather than being an amalgamation of off the shelf parts with an OS grafted on, to me, it is a computer. Apple continues to dominate the field in raw innovation, and I have not yet seen anything that was so compelling to me that I could justify switching to Windows just to have.

A few games? All the best ones get ported cross-platform nowadays anyway. Applications? Most of them are also cross-platform, or have an equivalent. In fact, an Apple Macintosh can not only run all the Mac software (both legacy OS 9, and current OS X), but also damn near all the open-source software written for Unix/Linux!, and as a transition measure you can temporarily run Windows software under emulation until you replace it with something native! No other computer can make this claim. Hardware? Other than the CPU and Motherboard, most of the peripheral hardware only requires the proper drivers to function equally well under the Macintosh. (I am in fact using a Microsoft Intellimouse on my 7-year-old Macintosh thanks to a USB add-on PCI card.)

What's this about Linux then?

I got involved with Perl programming thanks to the work of Matthias Neeracher, Vicki Brown, and Chris Nandor in bringing Perl to the Classic MacOS. After playing with MacPerl for a while, I got interested in working with it cross-platform, and started testing things on the shell account at my ISP at the time.

I swiftly ran into roadblocks with various system administrators being unwilling to keep their Perl installs updated with CPAN modules and various bugfixes. It was like pulling teeth to convince them to upgrade anything despite the obvious advantages of having bugs fixed. So, after a time, I determined to explore doing it myself, either running a PPC linux distro dual-boot on my PowerPC, or on a separate system entirely.

This, and Apple's move to the unix-based OS X, eventually led to me wanting to explore linux for its own sake; partially to get my feet wet with 'the real thing', partially to prepare myself for working with a unix-based MacOS, and partially to further my explorations of Perl programming in its native environment. Additionally, this gets me experience with more of the low-level stuff that powers the Internet itself. Since I've always been a bit of an info-sponge, things have progressed to where I am now using both systems side by side, each tool for the job it does best.

The Macintosh is happily firewalled behind the Linux server; I do most of my graphics work on the Macintosh, and most of the programming stuff on the Fedora Linux system. I expect this will change somewhat once I get an OS X - based Macintosh, which combines the best of both worlds into a single operating system. I can't wait. :-)

Questions? Comments? My e-mail address is only a click away... I'll be happy to add to the FAQ as the questions come in.

About the Site

I hope you like the new site redesign. Just finished the last of it as of late November 2005, I basically stripped away the tables-based layout and replaced it with a more modern CSS-based design with true separation of presentation and content/markup. I'd greatly appreciate any comments or suggestions you may have. The good thing is, maintenance is far easier, so I'm likely to update more often now. :-)

I've also added a new section to the site for HTML 4 and CSS 2, with some samples and examples of some of the more modern techniques being used to produce websites with along with some of the experiments I performed along the way in my own learning process. There are many others who have been providing excellent examples and articles for modern website design far longer than I have, so rather than re-invent the wheel, I'll provide some links to what I've found to be useful information, and write my own articles for things they haven't covered, or to show off things I've discovered on my own.

Open Source Web Design

In July 2002, the website was redesigned from scratch to work better with modern web-browser technology at the time. The original site design used then was based on a template called Pretension, by krsna77. I claim full credit for shredding that concept down to its basic theme and redoing it (by hand, completely from scratch) in modern HTML4/CSS2 (instead of XHTML) for this new site redesign.

Visit Open Source Web Design for some interesting design templates.

In Steptember 2005, the site was again redone from scratch, recreating the site using the new table-less layout techniques possible with modern CSS, completely separating the markup from the presentation. Consequently, the new site takes up less space, downloads faster, and I can change the look of the entire site in moments.

I can recommend the following web-browsers for their quality in properly rendering modern websites: The new Mozilla Firefox is quite nice (particularly for its AdBlock extension, and Chris Pederick's WebDeveloper extension). I have also recently been very impressed by the latest releases of Opera which is clean and extremely fast, and have switched to it as my primary browser. Macintosh users have Safari for MacOS X, or if you prefer an all-in-one web suite there's Mozilla. Additionally, iCab is back, with a 3.0 beta release that runs on OSX and OS 9! Users of MSIE 6, which is still stuck back in 1997, are pretty much on their own and at the mercy of Microsoft.