The Weakest Link

seacablesarticle.jpg

There’s this accidental damage to the international internet nervous system which was bad enough.

But THREE cables severed in a few days?

(CNN) — An undersea cable carrying Internet traffic was cut off the Persian Gulf emirate of Dubai, officials said Friday, the third loss of a line carrying Internet and telephone traffic in three days.

Dubai has been hit hard by an Internet outage apparently caused by a cut undersea cable.

Ships have been dispatched to repair two undersea cables damaged on Wednesday off Egypt.

Okay. This post also is my first with an image since getting the Mac on Tuesday. I miss SnagIt. Is there an app to resize, apply borders, drop shadow etc without opening up PhotoShop?

Oh did I mention: without using the Mac keyboard, I can’t open my Superdrive bay to insert the Photoshop installation disks–the cost of my non-Mac ergonomic keyboard? Surely there’s a solution. Tra-la.

Addendum 11 a.m: Just in case some other poor NOOB soul has a similar exasperation for a superdrive that won’t open on a Mac Pro, I finally found this tip: hold down the mouse key during a APPLE/RESTART. That seems to have put the “smart” drive back on the map. Macs are intuitive, are they? Well, not entirely.

Share this with your friends!
fred
fred

Fred First holds masters degrees in Vertebrate Zoology and physical therapy, and has been a biology teacher and physical therapist by profession. He moved to southwest Virginia in 1975 and to Floyd County in 1997. He maintains a daily photo-blog, broadcasts essays on the Roanoke NPR station, and contributes regular columns for the Floyd Press and Roanoke's Star Sentinel. His two non-fiction books, Slow Road Home and his recent What We Hold in Our Hands, celebrate the riches that we possess in our families and communities, our natural bounty, social capital and Appalachian cultures old and new. He has served on the Jacksonville Center Board of Directors and is newly active in the Sustain Floyd organization. He lives in northeastern Floyd County on the headwaters of the Roanoke River.

Articles: 3007

5 Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

  1. Well, see, that’s how it is when you join a cult: you not only have to learn new ways of acting and thinking, but you also have to repudiate your old ways. Just keep repeating to yourself: “Macs have superior usability… Macs have superior usability…”

  2. Instant Shot is a decent little program for the Mac, similar to Snag-It (which I use on my Wndows PC and wish there was a Mac version). There are few freebie grab programs out there.

  3. according to google, the ‘f12’ key will open the super drive on some non-apple keyboards.

    you can also add an ‘eject’ icon to the menu bar that runs along the top of the screen. in the finder, go to /System/Library/CoreServices/Menu Extras/ and double-click on Eject.menu to add it to your menubar.

    from a terminal window, incanting ‘drutil tray eject’ does the trick for me.

Related Posts