OS X blog, the upgrade.

August is going out with neither a bang nor a whimper. Warm and sunny today, very nice, but hardly the kind of thing I associate with declining summer, which is still supposed to be hot, so hot that you’re looking forward to fall.

The iMac man showed up at the office yesterday, bearing my upgraded machine. It’s the friendly old shell my company bought for me in 2000, nice and turquoise, but it now has more memory (256 MB), and more importantly, OS 10.3.4 humming along in its silicon heart. As usual, I’m far from the ranks of early adopters, but my take on that is, who cares?

Naturally, since I’ve been using OS 9 for so long, there have been some transitional difficulties, mostly psychological. Mostly they boiling down to: it’s not like it used to be. Still, it isn’t vastly different, so only after a day of using the new system, I’m getting acclimated. Some of the features even make me smile, such as the way the documents and whatnot shrink and expand, reminding me briefly of a cartoon tornado.

There was a moment when Internet Explorer refused to open up GlobeSt.com for me, a very important web site in my work. It had been opening it all morning effortlessly, without murmur or qualm. Then, suddenly, I called the site up and got this message:

None of the range-specifier values in the Range request-heade field overlap the current extent of the selected resource.

As fine an example of opaque computerese as you could hope for. Read it a few times, roll it around your head, and laugh. After a few uncertain minutes, I finally figured out that the machine wanted me to drop the www from the GlobeSt.com address, after which it worked fine. Would it be so hard to dream up an error message that says: “Something’s wrong with your address line, fool” ?

Guess so. Now that I have OS X, I’ll have to look into Mozilla.