Mac User Desperately Seeking HP printer driver

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MWF, of a certain age, 4 kids, yellow lab almost 1 year old, loves her intel iMac, can’t get her HP laserjet 4100 to print more than 12 pages.

Note: the yellow lab hasn’t eaten the USB cable, and the F in question writes novels, so regularly churns out 400 page documents.
iMac and HP laserjet communicated sweetly with each other for 3 years, until two weeks ago when iMac ram upgraded.
Note: HP customer service collected $39 and then did not solve the problem. Two separate technicians muttered instructions that did not work, then promised to call back, and did not call back.
Additional note: novelist is a dedicated Mac user and is wondering which printers work well with Mac. Laserjet aforementioned is 8 years old and new printer is under consideration. If Hewlett Packard can’t get their act together to make sure their products work with Mac’s, the novelist won’t be buying an HP!
Novelist using Mac OSX 10.5.8.
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The Art of Asking Questions

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The Art of Asking Questions

There’s a scene in the first HOME ALONE, a truly classic movie, where a child of about 5 years climbs into a van waiting to whisk a large family to the airport. The enterprising child besieges the driver with questions. He leans close into the driver and queries him relentlessly about all sorts of matters, a stunning barrage of interrogatory, verbal machine gun fire. The driver’s brain comes undone. He’s left rattled and nettled and hopelessly askew. It’s the first domino that falls in a trail of them, winding up with… a child left home alone to fend for himself during the holidays.

I think of this scene often (and isn’t that what makes a movie classic, the way particular scenes haunt you forever?). This scene comes to mind because I have a four-and-a-half-year old daughter who regularly enacts it. Daughter? Shall I call her the demon imp of questions, the patron saint of why, how, what, and how come?

As I write this, she sits next to me at the dining room table with a pad of paper. “What do we need from the store? Do we need sugar? How do I draw a ‘K’?” she asks. I surmise that she’s making a grocery list, something she’s watched me do a thousand times. “Can you show me how to draw a ‘K’?”

This is only the beginning. As long as she’s around me, and I don’t turn on the TV babysitter, she’s going to come up with questions. “Then what do we need, mama, after milk?”

“Eggs,” I tell her.

“How do you spell that? Do you like my ‘E’? Does ‘G’ have a kickstand like this? Do we need balloons? How do you spell ‘balloons’?”

It’s partly about observing and making sense of the world. The other day she launched herself like a missile into the bathtub and splashed around happily for a few minutes, making an aquarium of our bathroom. Then she turned serious. “Why does the water get higher when I get in? Why can’t I hear my hands when they clap underwater?”

So my hapless husband and I wracked our brains to explain the volumetrics of water to her.

Sometimes it’s about avoiding an unpleasant activity, like bedtime or picking up her crayons. Nothing will elicit a stream of questions like closing the cover of the last bedtime book. “How come the bear in that story has brown fur? Do all bears have brown fur? What about polar bears? Can you really fly all the way to the moon? How far away is the moon? Is the moon next door to the sun?” How long can she prolong the delicious moments of cuddling and conversation, before we flip off the light and close the door to her room?

And, naturally, the questions are about drawing my attention, or her father’s, or that of one of her three big sisters. This little sprite likes to engage with people. She enjoys the limelight. If she can draw us in with a question–she’s got us. She figured that out a long time ago. Not that it’s entirely self-serving. She can maximize the utility of what she’s doing, and suck in our attention while also… making sense of the world.

Most of the time I enjoy my little one’s questions. Sometimes they fry the gray matter rattling around in my cranium, sure. I get tired, I get exasperated, hey, I’m not the Buddha, and I don’t want to put together an explanation of why the sky is blue while I’m trying to make a dinner salad and, simultaneously, explain to my 14-year-old middle daughter why she can’t attend a football party where there will be 18-year-old men.

But often, in response to these questions, I experience the same piquant thrill that I do when I’m traveling. That is, I’m jolted out of my habitual way of seeing the world, and I look with new eyes, and fresh wonder, at the world around me. Isn’t the blue sky a kind of miracle, anyway?

My sweetie doesn’t do what adults sometimes do: disguise judgments as questions. This is the crucial difference, this matter of innocence. Her questions are really questions, not statements, even if they have an ulterior motive of getting me to pay attention to her or of getting her out of eating broccoli. She wants to know, and to understand. So her questions arise out of the innate art of our human core, the art of genuine curiosity.

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Facebook, Foibles, Mistakes, and Teachability

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Facebook, Foibles, Mistakes, and Teachability

I once drew, upon the wall of a bathroom stall in a college library, a picture of a man performing an obscene act upon a donkey. The man in question shared a mutual animosity with me. He seemed to enjoy torturing me, and he was better at that game than I was, or ever will be. Worse yet, he was winning the battle for the heart of an old beau, who could not decide whether to be a stoner best friend to the man in question, or a diligent, studious, and devoted boyfriend to me. And lest anyone not decipher my crude portrait, I labelled it. Someone later told me that the amateurish drawing enjoyed a certain renown, there in the men’s bathroom of CCL.

That was one of my stupider moments, lived before I was even 20 years old. I’ve outgrown some of my stupidities. Most, perhaps, now that I’m in my midyears, and patience and temperance have crept up on me despite myself. But, alas, not all my stupidities have fallen away. I’ve lived this life more with passion and presence than with perfection. The best I can say is that I’ve enjoyed some good laughs: at myself.

That old incident came to mind this weekend, when I discovered that a pal of my middle daughter’s had stolen onto her Facebook page, assumed her identity, and left grotesquely vulgar, sexually explicit updates as her. Now, my daughter isn’t a pristine child of constant and unceasing virtue, as most of us weren’t. She’s always been the feisty kind to give as well as she’s gotten. But this commandeering of her voice felt like it was beyond the pale. It frightened me.

Facebook, as my older daughter pointed out in her article for the Amherst Indicator, leaves us no privacy. For people who participate in social networking, life is lived on a constant stage. The kids get to stay connected, but they pay a price for this connection. That price is privacy. But must it also include inviolability?

I’m no hacker but I understand from savvy people that it’s not all that hard to get onto other people’s sites. So this security of only “invited friends” seeing a profile is illusory. And nothing is ever truly deleted. Traces remain, for good or ill, of everything that has trafficked upon the world wide web.

But I’m not really worried about my daughter’s 1142 friends. Or am I? Does she really know that many people to send them her personal thoughts, to let them see casual pix of her whenever they choose? I’m 31 years older than her, and do I know that many people?

Are there even 1142 people in the world interested in my personal thoughts and private pix? If so, please go to Amazon.com and purchase my novel IMMORTAL.

But my daughter is a private citizen, and a kid. What concerned me about this incident is the unintended and harmful consequences. Say, the laptop left open on a kitchen table, so that a friend of a friend of the older brother’s walked by, or the food delivery guy, or the cabinet repair guy, or the cable or phone or internet guy, or the lawyer who’s the dad’s best friend, who spied the obscene expressions ostensibly from my daughter’s very self. And who then grew interested in her in an unwholesome way.

For sure, the kid who pretended to be my daughter didn’t think of these repercussions. That’s the deal with kids, that’s developmentally correct: they don’t anticipate all the fallout, all the time. I got terrified, and then I got mad that the kid would endanger my daughter. Then I realized what a perfect opportunity it was. This kid and my daughter, and their peers, could inquire into the nature of the Internet, how it is a tool of awesome power, but, like energy from a split atom, could also become a weapon.

These kids could start to discuss the notion that, just as one’s personal physical space must be inviolable, so must one’s personal virtual space.

In fact, these opportunities for inquiry and discussion are crucial for these kids to grow into socially responsible, ethical adults. They’ve got the burden of an extra world, a complex virtual world, to negotiate, to steward. We only had one world to handle, and that was tough enough for us. But I think they can handle it.

I like this computer-groovy generation. They’re an interesting lot. Many of them seem ADHD, as if all the technology has hard-wired their brains differently. They’ve become so used to constant stimulation and rapid images and cell phone texts that they can’t sit still and focus for hours at a time. They like to move about.

But they’re good kids, and they’re smart. They can multitask. They can care about each other and learn from their mistakes. They can tolerate each other’s imperfections and stay connected. Boy, do they stay connected! I have high hopes for them. Maybe it will be young adults texting each other around the Gaza Strip who finally bring peace to the world. They’ll offer each other respect based not on whether they worship Adonai or Allah, but on how many friends they’ve got on Facebook, how many texts they field in any hour, and who knows where the fun spots are. It seems unlikely to me that the weighty issues will be resolved by any final philosophical adjudication. Fun and connectivity stand a better chance.

In the meantime, kids will be kids. I’ll occasionally blunder. Lucky for me, some enterprising janitor long ago washed away my pencilled expression of disrespect. Ironically, the graphite marks in the material world had a shorter shelf life than the 1’s and O’s from my daughter’s mischievous pal will have in the virtual world. I can only hope that no unsavory sort comes across those salacious updates, which have been removed, but are never truly gone. Finally, for anyone interested, the man who graced the bathroom stall is now a respected doctor, with kids of his own. I hope they’re torturing him, as only kids can torture their parents.

THE PHYSICAL vs. THE FACEBOOK, by Jessica Hendel, (my beautiful daughter)

THE PHYSICAL vs. THE FACEBOOK, by Jessica Hendel, (my beautiful daughter)

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The Physical vs. The Facebook
reprinted from The Indicator, volume XXVIII, issue 2, October 8, 2009
Exploring the effects of technology on our social lives.
I bring my phone with me everywhere. It sits in my backpack during class, next to my tray at Val and on that communal bench at the gym. It’s in my jacket pocket when I walk to town, and it’s charging on my desk at night. It’s in my purse at parties, or when I’m out seeing a movie, and when it isn’t in one of these places, it’s in my hand. My laptop, if not as frequent a companion, still manages to accompany me to most classes, to the library and even to Schwemm’s. Cut to Friday night. A few friends and I are scattered around the common room of my suite in Stone, casually watching TV and chatting. I’m sitting on the couch with my laptop on my knees, browsing Facebook. A friend of mine is checking her Blackberry. Another friend is playing an online game on his phone. I look around. Most people are either texting, IMing or playing with a phone or computer, while continuing to have a conversation and watch TV. We call this “hanging out.” Everyone is talking to each other, but no one is even looking at each other. We are all too busy distracting ourselves with various forms of digital technology.
This kind of activity is far from uncommon, especially in our age group. Generation Y grew up in an era of constant innovation in the area of electronics, and studies show that we use digital technology and the Internet with significantly more comfort and frequency than did members of earlier generations. From phones to computers to MP3 players, almost every college student is toting around a token of our electronic age. One question that inevitably rises from this nearly ubiquitous phenomenon is what sort of effect does it have on our social lives? In favor of exploring this, I’m going to disregard the academic merits of technology in order to delve into the inner workings of our culture’s most prevalent digital commodities, Internet sites and electronics companies, including a few possible reasons behind their widespread popularity. From this I hope to draw out an inquiry about the positive and negative effects that technology has had and continues to have on our social lives as young adults.
Looking at these issues, an appropriate place to start seems to be with the Blackberry. Over the past few years, Blackberry has grown into a common perpetrator of the coolphone-I-can-never-put-down frenzy. It began as the must-have handheld organizational tool among urban businessmen, quickly earning itself the nickname “Crack-berry” due to its owners’ penchants for incessant usage. But it soon spread into the realms of non-business and even teenage life. These days, as my 14-year-old sister desperately tried to explain to my mother over dinner one evening, “All the coolest girls in school have one!” Somehow, Blackberry made the transition from business tool to coveted socialite necessity, and Amherst can boast of at least as many Blackberry users as can any other elite liberal arts college campus in the nation.
On the other side of the marketing war, Apple and iPhone enthusiasts prove even more feverishly obsessed than their Crack-berry counterparts. Upon the release date of every slightly modified iPhone number-letter-letter, masses of consumers around the world pour into stores at 7 a.m. like churchgoers flocking to holiday services, ready to drop $300 or more to get their hands on the latest heavily marketed upgrade from Apple. As the self-deprecating owner of an iPhone, I have to admit to all of you-with shame-that I can totally dig it. Apple. You’re not even supposed to capitalize it.
Even now something about it looks wrong, like it’s lost some of its cool, its accessibility. It’s not even just that Steve Jobs meticulously crafted every detail of that company, from product design to customer support, to make it as universally appealing as possible. Or perhaps it’s just that. Without Jobs’ creative and organizational genius, Apple wouldn’t be the poster boy for friendly-yet-competent modernism that it is today. Cultish followers aside, people widely consider Macs to be the most “trustworthy” and “user-friendly” computers out there. Some even think that the iPhone is the biggest step forward in digital technology since the computer itself. It’s hardly surprising that Apple has made its presence felt on college campuses like our own. Between iPods and MacBooks alone you can hardly go an hour at Amherst without spying that gracious Apple logo somewhere-far beyond academic settings-with its preoccupied owner typing away.
And yet, whether you own a Mac or a PC, an iPhone or a Blackberry, or even a mobile phone less worthy of worshipping, the underlying question remains the same: why are we all continuously using, coveting and even obsessing over digital technology? The answer seems to be that the motivations behind this cultural fascination are primarily social in nature. Whether it’s via texting, IMing, online gaming or Facebooking, most facets of digital technology provide some means for an individual to plug into a social network that is different from the one he or she is physically in.
Recognizing this phenomenon, it becomes easier to detect the seductiveness of the Blackberry. Aside from being almost as multifaceted as the iPhone, it has one other “improvement” that all other cellular phones lack: Blackberry Messaging. Blackberry Messaging, or BBM, is a messaging system that only works among Blackberry users (you need to provide your contacts’ PIN numbers). Unlike regular text messaging, you can scroll through the entire message thread as if it were an IM, so it’s more similar to a sustained conversation than separate texts. More importantly, BBM lets you see when your contact has read your message and when he or she is typing a response. It holds all the allure of bourgeois exclusivity while also providing even more intimacy (and even less options for escape) than texting or Instant Messaging. None of your BBM contacts have the option of ignoring you and getting away with it. It isn’t hard to see how readily these novelties play into both the friendliest and the cattiest aspects of our social lives.
And yet not even the ex-girlfriend infuriating capacities of BBM can compare to the innovations of one of the most popular Internet sites ever created: Facebook. Facebook along with MySpace (although the latter has declined somewhat in popularity since Facebook gained prominence) are the most widely used vehicles within our age group, in particular for the type of activity we call “social networking.” On a psychological level, these sites hold an undeniable appeal. Aside from the patent enticement of being able to essentially stalk any friend (or enemy) of your choosing without fear of being discovered, you also receive a web page entirely devoted to the online reinvention of yourself, complete with interest lists and hundreds of pictures for anyone you allow to see (which for many people is a thousand or more of their peers). The imaged representation of one’s self along with the secured anonymity of its viewers gives the ordinary individual an opportunity to become a sort of pocket-celebrity. Everyone gets to showcase himself, and everyone gets to judge other people’s showcases. This development has essentially redefined what it means to be a young person living in our society. With Facebook available for 24-hour use, more and more of us find ourselves checking it multiple times a day, and spending a considerable amount of time overall on the addictive website.
So what do we lose by continuously tuning into these nonphysical social networks? For one thing, we lose the ability to enjoy a night out without someone stopping the festivities for five minutes of contrived photo taking. For God’s sake Jim, I’m a doctor, not a professional model. Much more importantly, we lose a considerable amount of privacy. Facebook has given us a way to live our lives on a stage, and with everyone from our best friends to our most arbitrary acquaintances watching, can we truly say that our lives are still our own private matter? Privacy can be defined as “freedom from the observation, intrusion or attention of others.” Our generational compulsion to showcase ourselves on the Internet seems mutually exclusive with that concept. This applies to cellphone use as well. Can we say that we have privacy when we can’t even ignore a BBM at any hour without the person knowing? Can we ever say that we’re safe from the “intrusion or attention of others,” when we can be called or texted at virtually any time? It’s becoming necessary to reassess what the concept of privacy even means within the context of a digitalized lifestyle.
Linked to that idea is the notion of independency. A part of any healthy social life is the ability to be comfortable apart from it, to be independent. In this day and age, can a college student call himself an independent individual, or is he, along with all of us, already dependent on electronics? How much do we count on the digital diversions from physical reality that are always immediately available? In the words of the lategreat George Carlin, perhaps we all need to “turn off the Internet, the CD-ROMs and the computer games and .. stare at a tree for a couple of hours.” Why? Just so we can remember what it’s like to be alone. I doubt many of us students can say that we often spend the day truly alone, sans cellphone and all.
These are ideas that we, as the generation of digital technology-users, need to bring into the collective consciousness. However, I said that I would look at technology’s merits, so I’ll take the time to mention that we would be largely out of contact with many of our friends in distant places without the invention of cellphones, computers and the Internet. The course of our Westernized lives involves at least a few changing of schools and institutions in which we take part. Innovations like texting and Facebook have made it vastly easier for us to keep in contact with our friends from our younger lives when we move on to different colleges, universities or even different countries. We can remain in touch with almost anyone we have met. I myself still maintain an email correspondence with a girl my age whose family hosted me when I stayed in France a few summers ago. Given the relative labor-intensiveness of snail mail, I don’t know if we would have still kept in contact with each other if email hadn’t been invented. The ease of reaching out to faraway friends, family and acquaintances is a great thing, and by no means do I aim to devalue such benefits in this article. I’m sure the Amherst students who hail from different parts of the world can attest to that.
I do however hope that we can all weigh the benefits of nonphysical interpersonal contact with the cheapening of other important aspects of life. Ask yourself: How much do I really care about my privacy? My independence? How much do I even care about living in the moment? There’s a happy balance somewhere between these concerns, but we have to remember that the trade-off for close contact across distances is that we’re less connected to the friends right in front of us, and maybe even to ourselves.
Jessica Hendel ’12 is a Contributing Writer for The Indicator, a fortnightly journal of social and political thought at Amherst College.
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Yoga & Love

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Yoga & Love

I came to yoga, the ancient physical system for opening the heart, by way of heart break.

It was a bleak February years ago during the bleakest part of my divorce. The end of a twenty year relationship, of which twelve were spent in marriage, doesn’t qualify as easy. I found it fraught, a spiky tangle of anger, relief, grief, and confusion. I couldn’t integrate the double vision I experienced when I interacted with my former husband. There were now two of him: the sweet man I’d married, whom I’d always love, even if we couldn’t make a happy life together, and the difficult stranger who did not mean me well, when things came up to negotiate. It was painful. I was a mess.

I wasn’t alone during this time. I had a boyfriend. He looked like the reason I had left my former husband. But the higher calculus of the heart metabolizes change with infinitely more complexity than that, and no one ever leaves one mate for another. You leave a union for yourself, for the person you hope to be. “She left one man for another” was simply the judgment people made, uninformed people who hadn’t lived the emotional poverty of my marriage.

This boyfriend had a lot of patience for my desolation, but at a certain point, the change in my feelings over the elapsed time wasn’t an impressive differential. He’s a practical man. “Time for you to fix yourself,” he said. “I’m calling the Ashtanga place downtown to send you a teacher.”

So I began a practice of yoga. My teacher Laura arrived with her mat and didn’t want to hear any sad tales about my divorce. She wanted me to practice mountain pose and standing forward bend. She kept adjusting my sacrum. She kept telling me to drop my shoulders down from my neck, where they were squeezing my cervical spine in a relentless grip that would do any pit-bull proud. In retrospect, it’s amazing that any blood was getting up to my brain at all.

The first few weeks were a haze of twisty pain. I didn’t notice it at first, but I wasn’t as obsessed with the cycle of stories that had been playing in an endless loop in my head. It wasn’t until after a month of lessons that something clicked. I was watching Laura demonstrate trikonasana, triangle pose. Gracefully, consciously, she let her straight back leg pull her front body forward until she was clasping her big toe. She rotated her torso while extending evenly through it. She reached up in harmony with her breath while looking up, and it was such an expression of balance, strength, openness, and ease that the light-bulb flicked on over my head. I got it: there was a better way. A better way to move. A better way to feel. A better way to live.

I started to pay close attention to yoga. I asked questions: “How do I get an angle closer to 90 degrees in my leg in warrior two? “How do I better feel the relationship between my breath and my pelvis?” “What does my focus point mean to my mind?” Most of the time, the answer was, “Keep practicing.” Laura told me that all poses are led by the heart, and I took that seriously. Something inside me began to heal. The scars would remain but I was moving forward with my life. After a while Laura told me it was time for me to move on from her as well. She said I needed to attend a variety of classes and to pursue the practice of yoga in the way that I was led to, from within my own heart. It was a gracious example of setting someone free.

So I continue to practice and pursue yoga. It spills over into the time off my mat. When I stand at a street corner and wait for the light to change, I tune into my body. I drop my shoulders and check my pelvis and let my body flow softly into mountain pose. The subtle changes in position open up my breathing, and I remember that all movement is led by the heart.

The Time Traveler’s Wife, District 9, and so forth

The Time Traveler’s Wife, District 9, and so forth

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Okay, so this blog page is just an excuse for me to post this photo, which contains a rather nice image of me. Considering that I’ve reached the age where it’s ‘flaunt what you’ve got left,’ I think I’m entitled. (That’s me on the far right, in the black wrap dress!)
Now, the movie which was the excuse for this party, The Time Traveler’s Wife. It was all one long 2nd act. There was no first act, and no third act. They can’t be together, they can’t be together, they can’t be together, he’s going to die so they can’t be together, and now he’s dead so they can’t be together. That’s the plot. The 2nd act. The entire movie.
Not that I minded. This was an enormously appealing movie. I mean, it’s about LOVE, how can you not love it? And Eric Bana is a stone cold hottie (I’m pretty sure my undies crept up under my armpits while I watched him), and Rachel Macadams is a world class beauty. They’re fun to watch. I thought their chemistry was good. I was suitably sighful at the end. Yep, good fun.
Just goes to show: who needs a 1st or 3rd act when you’ve got love, Eric Bana, and Rachel Macadams? Screenwriting classes be damned! Rules were made to be broken!
Now, terms of screenwriting. Let’s talk District 9. This was really well done. I wouldn’t call it ground-breaking like Bladerunner. But I would call it well structured, well acted. Compelling. I saw it at the upscale Loews 68th Street movie theater, the big one with the bas relief elephants and the red velvet curtains, and the jaded NYC audience broke into applause at the end.
District 9 was about justice. Not about love, though I won’t go into the effort it must have taken to make a cute little alien baby prawn who could cry, with heart-rending effect, “Father! Father!”
The transformation of the hero in District 9 was just that: a transformation. On many levels. Complimenti to the screenwriter and the director. We don’t get to see transformation very often in movies because, I suppose, studio execs think we don’t need it or else can’t handle it. Maybe it’s not even about them, but about the theater owners, who want plentiful butt$ to come fill $eats and buy conce$$ion$. Perhaps they don’t believe that transformation accomplishes that goal. But love and big stars will.
So why are so many of the really good screenplays and TV shows written by non-Americans? Did you see Torchwood: Children of Earth? It was excellent TV, the kind of first-rate writing I haven’t witnessed since M*A*S*H or Roots. We used to know how to write good stories, the kind that have values that suck in viewers. But now we’ve got love and big stars, so we don’t need good writing and strong values….