I know how hectic things can become during the holiday season and how busy everyone is with various festivities and all. So chaotic are things in fact, that many of you may have forgotten to put together your own lists of New Year's resolutions for 1996. As a public service, I am offering you some of mine that that you are encouraged to adopt for yourself. Feel free to send me some of yours. Have a great New Year.
How many of us have ever actually read through all the wonderful documentation that came with the computer we use? Why not resolve that we will go back and read the manuals and learn how to really use our machines. Understand how to use "drag-and-drop." Discover how to "rebuild" our desktop files. Know how to determine whether we are still connected to the network or not. Figure out how to restart our Macintosh with the extensions off.
Maintenance. Are you still running with a system that was current when the Beatles were on Ed Sullivan? Just like your car, your Macintosh needs to be kept up to date with the latest versions of the Mac/OS, network drivers, applications, and such. Why not resolve that we will invest time periodically to make sure that we are staying current with most recent software available for our systems.
(Just a personal thing with me.) Please resolve that you will not print off anything unless you absolutely need it. And on the rare occasions when you really do need to print something, get up from your chair immediately and go get it. If I had a nickel for every page that came off a LaserWriter printer and was never picked up I wouldn't need to be writing these articles.
Support staffs make efforts to inform users about important announcements, notices, changes, etc. - in general things that we should be aware of. Let's resolve that we will pay attention and be mindful of information that pertains to us. Read the newsflashes, bulletins, lists, Omnibus, etc. to stay abreast of current events. What is the sense of writing documentation if no one is going to read it?
Before we telephone for help, we will resolve to make sure that we have read the directions, followed the instructions, know what we were supposed to do, and can describe exactly what is it that is ailing us. Let us resolve to think and try, before we dial.
Lots of us belong to lots of mailing groups, Listserv lists, distribution bands, Publisher's Sweepstakes ClearingHouse files, junk mail magnets, etc. Let us resolve that when we grow tired of the mail we receive from the lists, that we will actually un-subscribe from them, rather than just keep throwing the mail away as it comes. Sign off if you no longer want to get mailings. Fix the leak at its source instead of just emptying the bucket. Stop e-mail junk mail.
Delete, File, or Save the items in your QuickMail Mail Box and Mail Log. We will thank you, your system's performance will thank you, and the other folks on the same server as you will thank you. Thank You.
You've heard it before, you'll hear it again. (And you've probably already made this resolution several times before.) But with the hardware and software technologies available now, there just isn't any reason not to have your hard work on your hard disk safely backed up. So this time follow through and resolve to back up your hard disks faithfully. Sooner or later hardware fails. Be safe, be happy, be backed up.
Why do bad things happen to good people? It's true that no matter how nice you are, sooner or later, chances are you won't be able to start up your computer. Upon startup, you will hear either a loud "boing" sound or else be presented with a flashing question mark on your monitor. Maybe even something else; but the bottom line is that your Macintosh won't start up for you as it normally does. What do you do then? That's when you need your "emergency startup disk" (esd). An esd is a floppy diskette that you can start up your Macintosh from. You can't do much else after you started with it, but you can usually take a look at your hard disk so that you can determine what is wrong and make repairs. An esd is an indispensable tool to have available. You can use the "Disk Tools" diskette that came with your system, you can copy the "Network Access disk" from the ASHD server, you can use a "Norton Utilities Emergency Disk", or you can make your own. Just resolve to have this lifeline handy when you are invariably going to need it.
"Score" as in "a complete description of a composition". Although this definition is usually applied to music, I'm applying this to your Macintosh system. One very useful piece of information to have is the recipe that took your system from a vanilla 7.5 Mac/OS system, to the state that it's in now. Specifically, I like to know every change that I made to my System Folder; what was added, what configuration parameters I changed, etc. so that I could easily reconstruct a duplicate copy if I had to. This is also invaluable in the rare instance that we begin to experience "crashes" or "system bombs". By seeing what the most recent changes were, we can usually track down the source of our problems.
Well, there you have some of my resolutions. Perhaps one or more of them can become yours as well. If you have additional ones that I should have added to my list, please send them along to me. Have a terrific 1996.
Peter Furmonavicius is a senior research programmer for C&IS Technology and Planning