Under the Magnifying Glass

By Steven H. Fyffe

sfyffe@maccompanion.com

Who’s Steve Fyffe? My first thought: I am called Papa by Jared, my five year old grandson. This fact alone drew me down the cobblestone path of digital photography and Apple gadgets, but I’ll explain that in a few minutes.

I recall it was back in the late ‘50s that the television program Superman caught my eye, like many other ten year olds at the time. At the crack of dawn, I would ride my bike to a nursery near a small rural village in Ohio to hoe weeds from around bushes and mow grass for fifty cents an hour. My goal was a tape recorder to record that famous intro, “Look, up in the sky. It’s a bird. It’s a plane. It’s Superman!” With this and the camera my grandma had given me, my fascination with gadgets flourished.

I got the awesome responsibility of running the reel to reel projector for my science teacher in junior high. This motivated my interest in science and I went off to college to study medical technology.

Soon after I graduated from the university, I had my very own Super 8 movie camera, just in time to take movies of my sister’s first baby. A few months later, along the ice covered shores of Cape Hatteras, I was taking movies of my beloved Pam with whom I eloped to North Carolina for our midwinter marriage. Nine months later my first child, Becky was immortalized in Super 8 silent movies and by the time my second girl, Amy,  came along I got a sound movie camera and projector.

Working in a small hospital, I had the responsibility to give a presentation on infection control. I photographed various objects around the hospital and the health care workers performing their duties, and then recorded an audio tape so the folks could listen to the presentation on the various shifts. However, the slide projector operator needed to know when to advance the slides. I had a brilliant idea … a laboratory beaker half filled with water … OK, maybe not so brilliant … you should have heard the laughter when the gonging sound announced each slide!!

I was an early adopter of Pong at home, but my first introduction to computers and programming came in the ‘70s when we got a programmable laboratory calculator with a card punch device. Later, a company came to the hospital to sell control sera for laboratory tests. To sweeten the deal they gave the hospital lab one of those fancy new personal computers. I can still remember the day it arrived. It was a mystery to my boss and he said I could figure out what to do with it. Great!!! The Apple II was moved into my tiny Microbiology lab and I couldn’t wait to crack open the VisiCalc manual. I developed an antimicrobial sensitivity report for the physicians. The Apple II cranked out those reports for several years until I moved on to greener pastures.

I became enamored with this computing tool, uh toy. My wife reminds me, still with a glare in her eye when she tells it, of one Saturday when I was at the hospital and got so involved in programming on the Apple II that I was oblivious to the weather outside. A tornado had hit our little town, and my family was crouched down watching our neighbor’s roof fly off … well I did know it was raining kinda hard and of course didn’t want to get wet.

This gave me an excuse to get my own computer at home, but when I checked the prices of Apple IIs and discovered that they cost as much as my car, I kept looking. Believe it or not, I found a so-called Apple-clone at Toys-R-Us made by Texas Instruments, but it coughed up a fur ball when I tried to load VisiCalc, so back to the store it went. After waiting awhile, I got a Commodore 64. It was great fun and I used it for Basic programming with an application called S.A.M. which talked to my girls when they did their lessons for our home school.

When I started taking Theology classes in the 80’s, the Commodore 64 was programmed by a friend to handle Greek and Hebrew fonts, but eventually I needed a Biblical Greek grammar program only available on a PC running DOS. So in the midst of the illumination from God’s Word, I was drawn to the dark side of the computing world, as I dragged my family off to a quiet Indiana town to go to seminary.

Although I had heard of an all-in-one computer called a Macintosh, I had lost track of what Apple was doing in the ‘80s and ‘90s. I primarily used a PC for writing papers for school and learned a little programming in DOS for work, but never had any formal training in the cyber arts. When Windows came on the scene, it became a necessary burden to deal with at work. Also, I used it to publish a news magazine for our church fellowship and in teaching Biblical Greek in our Theological Practorium, but I had limited uses for the PC at home, except to play games, like Frogger.

Then, along came the Internet, and not far behind, spam, viruses, and a three-year MSN contract I got trapped into. The PC got relegated to an almost unused piece of furniture in the corner and I used Web TV for Internet surfing.

That brings us to 2002. Jared, my grandson, was born. “Honey, I got to get one of those digital cameras.” Soon afterwards, I brushed the dust off the PC & started experiencing constant crashes from what had become “that darn computer.” I started searching for a more stable operating system. When I was reading about UNIX and Linux, I discovered that Macintosh was running an operating system which was the graphic user interface for UNIX. After several visits to Microcenter, I took the plunge. Soon after Jaguar was released, I bought an iBook.

I was fascinated how easy it was to make slide shows of Jared, which included music and transitions in iMovie. Of course, one thing leads to another, and I latter purchased a digital video camera, which of course meant I had to have the more powerful and upgradeable PowerMac G5 dual 2 with multiple displays and several external hard drives.

Now, Jared is getting older and he needs his own Mac when he comes to Papa’s house. Therefore, an eMac was set up in the family room attached to the television, so Jared can play the Cars game and watch slide shows of Papa and him playing on the swings.

Knowing that my iBook was getting long in the tooth, I just had to get the newest MacBook Pro, just in time for the logic board to die on the old iBook. Since we had all these great tools to edit digital media, we needed a way to carry it back to my home town to show my folks. The video iPod serves nicely, thank you. And let us not forget about Jared’s grandma watching slide shows and movies of her grandson in the living room while listening to her favorite music, so along came the HDTV and Apple TV.

Technology has come a long way over the past fifty years and that little tape recorder wore out long ago from playing the Superman intro, but my fascination with gadgets, both as tools and toys, has never faded. In my current occupation as an Infection Control Specialist in a large metropolitan hospital, Keynote helps me to avoid the laughter from the gonging beaker.

In my column for macCompanion, I hope to share my experiences as an every day user of the Macintosh computer and other Apple gadgets. When I was teaching my children in our home school and later teaching Biblical Greek, I found that my students mastered the topic best when I encouraged them to dive right into details of a topic, discover how they fit together to accomplish a task, and then to teach what they learned to others. I hope you will feel like you stopped by for an informal chat with a friend, as you read “Under the Magnifying Glass” and then go out to share with others what we discussed together.

Now, lest you think I have become completely Mac-centric at this point, my beloved wife Pam is center of my life. I spent the last year and half as her care giver, while she was fighting cancer. The Lord has answered our prayers and she is now in remission. Pam and I have many deacon duties in our small congregation. Of course, I did convince my Pastor to get a Mac.

I like bike riding and managed to ride 30 miles in a fund raiser for MS recently. And most important, I must jump into the inflated pool with Jared or take him on a bicycle ride to the ice cream store. Who is Steve Fyffe? Jared’s Papa of course!!!