Windows XPiration

Well, with about 3 weeks to go until Microsoft stops supporting one of its biggest and most successful operating systems ever, 500 million computer users worldwide are soon to be abandoned--if they keep running Windows XP. 

I'm one of them. 

I've kept my old Gateway workhorse computer, which I've had since late 2005, running XP and even have given it a refurb. Of course, I couldn't have upgraded if I'd wanted to--Win Vista and it's subsequent generations (all bloated like a corpse in hot TX heat) wouldn't fit. 

So now my options are the same as every other user's: update both the machine and the OS, start using Linux on my current older machine, or switch to Mac (not--it's hard enough having to learn new, needlessly and endlessly updated software and OSes without switching the horse under this rider completely). 

I probably would have gotten to this upcoming milestone in somewhat blissful ignorance except that now that I'm working for a computer service business part-time, well, it's THE topic right now, at least for me. If you want to read more of what I wrote about XP's impending doom, follow this link. (In a future article, I'll write about what you can and should do with your XP machines.) 

That article is a rather serious look at what those who waited must do now that we're down to the 11th hour. This one is different.

Imagine working for an employer who constantly changes the rules about the time you learn your job and how to do it. 

Imagine being in a relationship with someone who has a habit of leaking your personal information to others unless you constantly remind him not to. 

Imagine having a co-worker who performs her tasks just a bit differently from month to month or year to year, leaving you to figure out what the heck she just did.

That's the software bind we've gotten ourselves into--and yes, we've been there for years. There was a time when consumer preference drove the economy and the goods we bought, used, and kept buying. No more. It's now engineer-driven--software engineers, I might add. 

We buy what they design, whether we want it or not. Usually, we don't. 

But we keep buying it like a junkie at a meth lab. Ugly image, I know. But honestly, we're addicted--helplessly so--to our electronic lifestyles. And because we are, software engineers have us by the short hairs. 

How's that feel? Are you squirming, yet? In about 3 weeks and the weeks thereafter, when XP is still running on many thousands of machines, there'll be more squirming when viruses and other malware attack these unsupported systems. They will come, despite the fact that some have said other viable systems make a more attractive target. That may be partly true. But there are others who love destruction for destruction's sake. 

It seems to me that we've forgotten our power as consumers in the act of consuming. And that, my friends, is why XP is going away at all.

Hope is the Thing With Feathers

I've been reading Christopher Cokinos' book Hope is the Thing with Feathers for several weeks now. Slowly. Thoughtfully. Sorrowfully. This book has only enlarged and energized my compassion for birds and their fragile existence--not all birds, of course--but for more and more species, this has become the reality.

Cokinos, who is a poet, became interested in birding and then conservation issues as he became aware of species now lost to us: the Ivory-billed woodpecker, the Carolina parakeet, the Heath Hen, and three others covered in his book. This is the gist of his intensely personal memoir--how six birds now extinct still move him like few other things have. They have moved me, too.

I had a conversation with a friend just this morning about climate change and human agency in the world, and though we differ on how we perceive the changes going on around us, we both agree that more is being lost than we can ever quantify. And it's because of our disregard for nature and our own environments.

Cokinos pursues with a detective's deft drive to know the truth the harrowing extinction of the Carolina parakeet, last seen in the early 1900s, and though the dates vary, the pathos of the loss of this beautiful parrot--North America's only native parrot--is stunning. It was largely shot for sport, horded away in cages as the species' plight began to emerge, or shot for so-called "scientific" reasons and stuffed to be placed into various gentlemen's collections. Cokinos here has exposed me first-hand to the rather ridiculous practice of early naturalists: horde away the "skins" (the entire bird, actually) this way to preserve it for posterity. The stuffed bird was seen as equally valuable to the real, breathing thing.

The Ivory-billed woodpecker, this huge, 2-foot-plus bird with a 2-foot wingspan, that used to rattle the trees in the dense forests of North America, is another striking example of tragic loss. Often called the "Lord God bird" because of it's size (the exclamation of at least one ornithologist), this woodpecker had no equal in the forest canopy. The amazing thing is that these birds, which dwindled to just a few pairs in the vast Lousianna swamps and forests, simply vanished. No one knows where or when the last one was seen for sure. And in 1999, there were a flurry of reports of sightings or "hearings" of the long-vanished king of the forest. Is the bird still around? We don't know. But Cokinos and millions of other birders hope it is still eeking out a fragile life in the fractured, decimated forests--less than 1% of the original mass--on the continent.

Cokinos tells how the Heath Hen, a "goofy"-looking race of the prairie chicken, known only to exist on Martha's Vineyard, was studied down to the last, lone, surviving bird, a male. These hens' populations and traits in various parts of the continent differ some according to region, but all are unique in that they have for centuries made a strange "booming" sound when mating by inflating an air sac on their sides. The males jousted with each other on the low, grassy plains, called "leks," which were the mating areas. Sometimes the scourge of farmers, and in the end the "most famous bird ever" due to public sentiment about its endangered status on Martha's Vineyard, these strange-looking chickens caught the spirits of people around the world. The numbers on the island varied, but eventually took a steep decline, all the way down to one bird. In an amazing kind of mating swan-song, this lone individual flew not in to the lower branches of scrub oak but to the very top of a pine tree and boomed out his last mating call, which, of course, would go un-answered. A farmer on the Vineyard watched this last bird in his fields for perhaps two more years. Then, the bird failed to return there one spring. The body has never been found.

How can we live with ourselves, I sometimes wonder. How can we continue to disregard animals--living beings whose lives intersect our own in ways we can sometimes explain, but often cannot? How can we STOP the pointless destruction of habitat that so many animals need to continue living their equally viable lives?

There are no more Carolina parakeets to grace the skies with their bright green, yellow, and orange plumage. There are no more (perhaps?) "Lord God birds" to hammer away at dead trees and fill the observer in the quiet woods with awe. There are no more Heath Hens on Martha's Vineyard to boom and squawk their ways through the seasons, astounding visitors and natives alike each year.

And there are no more excuses for why there are no more.