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12th May 2001

KEN ABOUT ... GEOWRITE
AND 3.00 IN THE MORNING

petlibrary@bigfoot.com

 GEOWRITE 2.1 ( from near zero )

It's a WYSIWYG text processor with a preview option as a means of seeing more than the working window. To start you need just GEOWRITE, some fonts and some free space on a disk with a desktop on. On firing up GEOWRITE the first screen asks:

• Create new
• Open existing
• Quit

The 'Create new' option opens a file on disk right away that will be used to save the file, instead of creating a name at the end of typing, (good habit to get into anyway!).

In versions of GEOWRITE prior to 2.1 the page width is restricted to 1.2'' - 7.2''. In V2.1 the page width can be from 0.2'' to 8.2''. This is selected from the options menu - 'make full page wide', (which when translated from the imperial is A4 wide).

On the ruler are M & P 'tabs'. M sets the margin widths and P sets the paragraph indent for the document. On the disks that GEOWRITE / GEOPAINT live on are clipboard areas, photoscrap and textscrap, used for holding a picture or section of text when the copy command is used. The clipboard areas are the places that the paste command looks to when used. For more than one item the desk accessories, (DA ), PHOTOMANAGER and TEXTMANAGER can create 'albums' to hold items for future use, (similar to the Mac's Scrapbook & Notepad). Pictures can be imported into GEOWRITE but they're black & white only and limited in size to the maximum of the GEOPAINT window. They will be positioned centre justified. The disk also has to contain the various fonts used in the document, so that they are available when the document is reloaded. The fonts have to be available in all styles but only in certain sizes.

To import text files into GEOWRITE format the utility 'WRONG IS WRITE' converts to and from ASCII, PETSCII and earlier GEOWRITE versions. (There are other conversion programs to do the job but it's down to personal preferences). There are other packages that do more than just word process, such as GEOPUBLISH, but I've not had any dealings with them. These packages will allow formatting into columns, etc. and inserting pictures as & when can be done with them.

When the dedicated Mac user isn't using his/her favourite machine what else to do but make paper models of them?

http://www.zdnet.co.jp/magazine/macuser/craft.html

Tired of talk about stealth technology ? - go to the other extreme! http://www.west.net/~brianl/peacemkr.htm

And this is just one of those extreme concepts that never came to reality.... http://www.space.com/news/spacehistory/moose_000923.html

Many years ago, when I first saw 2001, it was the Kubrick film and it was around my birthday. The real thing was somewhat different. This year, my birthday was spent, at one point in the small hours of the night, in Kingston hospital while waiting for the morning to arrive along with my wife's surgical procedure.

A few years ago I saw a picture of the total computing power aboard Apollo 11, a few hefty steel boxes with a total of 256K. My Mac uses that much RAM as a disk cache and I've probably got more computing power available in my total collection of CBM stuff than the whole of NASA at that point.

Now I'm playing at mission control for real, talking through procedures in calm measured tones. The next moment I'm in unexplored territory, relying on hi tech equipment to tell me what's happening, awaiting experts to tell me what to do next. I dread the message, ''Kingston we have a problem.'' I'm like swinging around the dark side of the moon - I'm cut off from all my normal communications.

On the forms which came around they asked me what I believed in. Sadly, no box to be ticked for Mac OS & Commodores. Faith in technology sounds a bit lame after events of the past few days but I've a technical background and what I know is that machines tell me the situation isn't critical, a flight plan is in place and this is just really a countdown until technology can take over again. In Asimov's Foundation series there's a quote along the lines that a religion based on science is one that works and therefore I must believe.

It's now 03.15 and I'm sitting at a nurses station scribbling these notes in the twilight world of a hospital night. Medical facts abound on the web but sadly most of them are misleading. The few very good sites are not much fun, are heavy on the text and require the ability to interpret them. My wife asked me to look up the subject on 'the search' as she calls it - but I had to refuse as I knew the sort of results that'd turn up and in this case the freedom of the Internet would have been in all likelihood a danger. The Internet is the new frontier with little or no regulation or checks. Some of us wear white hats and do what we can but there isn't anything we can do as the bad guys are still out there beyond our reach.

Where did I envisage myself when I first saw 2001? Beyond another curtain a machine beeps and bloops for a while, when it's being tended, then the lights go out and all that's left is the sound of humanity at sleep.

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