We had quite the sunset the other night. And tonight brings a micro-moon, in which Luna is at apogee and will appear to be the smallest full moon of 2014, according to National Geographic.
With cyclo-cross nats over and a couple of deadlines beaten into submission, I finally have a bit of downtime, and as nature abhors a vacuum, the to-do list is filling up like an open bar at a press conference.
First and foremost, of course, is cycling. The weatherperson says we have an extended stretch of fitty-sumpin’ ahead of us, so, yeah, time to sweat a little gravy. I have a review of the Cinelli Bootleg Hobo due in a couple weeks, and just got hold of a Kona Sutra, which is next up in the Adventure Cyclist pipeline.
Then there’s grocery shopping — seems some fat bastard has eaten everything in the house — and last but not least, I should perform a spot of computer maintenance.
Anyone out there upgraded their Macs to Mavericks yet? I’m thinking of making The Great Leap Forward with the two Macs that can handle it, the iMac and MacBook Air, but the tales of technological horror I read online give me pause.
Herself has successfully updated her MacBook Pro, but she is beloved of the gods. Me, not so much.
Tags: Cinelli Bootleg Hobo, Kona Sutra, Macbook Air, MacBook Pro, Mavericks, USA Cycling Cyclocross National Championships
Mad Blog Media 
January 15, 2014 at 10:40 am |
I’ve upgraded a bunch of iMacs of various vintages, and a 2013 MBP, to Mavericks. The entire process was slow, but pleasantly drama-free. The new version of the Mail app is still a piece of crap, though.
January 15, 2014 at 1:03 pm |
Harry, I used to use Eudora back in the good old days, and I gather it can still be had as an open-source edition. Mozilla’s Thunderbird used to work nicely, too. I may look into the latter.
January 15, 2014 at 8:44 pm |
I’m still using Eudora at home. Seems to work fine, except I got a virus infested email recently and it caused my entire Inbox to be sequestered by Norton.
January 15, 2014 at 10:42 am |
Patrick, I upgraded my iMac to Mavericks about three weeks after it was released. Have had no problems with it so far (and at this point, don’t expect to). You should probably allow yourself about two hours start to finish (your mileage may vary, etc.). If you’re using TimeMachine for backups, you shouldn’t have any problems at all.
January 15, 2014 at 1:06 pm |
That’s about how long it took Herself to bring her Pro up to date. I’m not worried about my Air, as I don’t use it for much; I do have both Time Machine and SuperDuper backups of the iMac (belt and suspenders).
January 15, 2014 at 10:50 am |
I did a clean install of Mavericks on my 2011 iMac and that worked fine. Our 2008 MacBook Pro was upgraded from Mountain Lion without incident. By the way, the Kona Sutra looks pretty sweet.
January 15, 2014 at 1:09 pm |
Excellent, Craig. The iMac dates to 2009, if memory serves. And yeah, that Sutra doesn’t look too shabby, eh? Especially at that price point.
January 15, 2014 at 11:01 am |
Tradition!!
January 15, 2014 at 11:27 am |
Can usually spot your Waits references. Took me a bit longer for Fiddler on the Roof to come to me.
January 15, 2014 at 1:10 pm |
Me too … it was the picture that triggered the memory. I was stuck for a headline and boom! There it was.
January 15, 2014 at 8:29 pm |
Can’t show this to the wife or she’ll start singing the whole show.
No problem upgrading a 2013 MacBook Pro to mavericks and no problems in the weeks since. I like the cleaner design of the calendar and address book. The only ongoing negative is the spinning beach ball when down loading new email is gone. I kinda liked the visual reminder I might be getting something interesting to read.
Looking forward to the Hobo review. From the press release it looks real close to a Bianchi Volpe. Your comments may encourage me to upgrade that workhorse.
Happy first full moon of the new year.
January 15, 2014 at 11:28 am |
Absolutely zero problems with Mavericks. iOS 7, on the other hand …
January 15, 2014 at 11:37 am |
Scott Forstall supervised numerous iterations of bombproof software, which some found aesthetically hideous. For that, he was fired.
But Craig Federighi has brought us a disaster of an operating system, but one which matches Jony Ive’s presentation tastes, and for that he’s a rock star.
Six major Versions of iOS, and not once did I ever have Safari crash on me. That’s, what, five years of use, tens of thousands of page views, however many hundreds of hours of use? And not one crash, ever. Now it crashes on me at least once a week.
I can accept it when a third-party app doesn’t work perfectly, but Apple products should work flawlessly and seamlessly within the Apple universe.
January 15, 2014 at 1:11 pm |
I’ve not been overwhelmed by iOS 7. I think it’s butt-ugly for starters. And the iPads both seem to run more slowly with it than with iOS 6.
January 15, 2014 at 12:11 pm |
I installed Mavericks within days of the release on our 2012 Imac. My experience was a little rockier. My wife and I have it set up with 3 user profiles- her, me, and a guest option.The problem I had almost immediately was with logging out or changing users.Instead of rotating around to the login screenit would just sort of lock up. I went to Apple help forums for help, but the final step (that wound up seeming necessary) was too much for me- a total wipe and reload of the OS. So I dealt with it for a while and now- just in the last week or two- it seems to work rather well. Go figure…
January 15, 2014 at 1:12 pm |
The little sonsabitches have minds of their own, don’t they? I’m the only user on both ‘puters, so I should be able to dodge that pothole. But I’m gonna start with the laptop before I tackle the big feller.
January 15, 2014 at 3:30 pm |
Don’t know (or care) squat about Macs but on the ‘cross subject – from VeloSnooze:
“Without Olympic status, cyclocross suffers a funding problem at the national federation level, and most of the national team must pay its own way to the world championships each year”
WTF is USA Cycling doing with all that loot they rake in each year? I quit buying a license when they jacked ’em up to something like $90 and wanted to force me to buy an official’s license along with one for a mechanic – all so I could VOLUNTEER to help them? And they can’t afford to help the ‘cross folks go to World’s? Shame on them.
January 15, 2014 at 3:43 pm |
Yeah, Larry, it’s the same old song from back when a few of us malcontents were running the American Cyclo-cross Foundation. The feds would only fund a couple athletes each year, so we raised money to help the rest.
We pulled the plug on the ACF 10 years ago, and it looks like nothing’s changed. There’s some talk about reviving it, but there’s also an argument being made that the feds or individual sponsors should step up.
January 16, 2014 at 6:59 am |
I still have a couple of those t-shirts! But I thought when the era of big money arrived with that punk from Texas, they started spreading the wealth around a bit more? I guess not, cheap bastards.
January 16, 2014 at 7:11 am |
So little of that money filters down below the suit level. I stopped paying for my licenses for the exact same reason. At the ’94 Worlds we had support staff we were hiding from the hotel, they would sleep in a different mechanics room on the couch or floor each night and to get to Germany he was required to take the “official” US Team flight which costs five times as much as a regular flight that would get him to Hamburg at the same time (Thanks United). USA Cycling does not help the sport very much.
January 16, 2014 at 12:57 pm |
I think you’re right. We made plenty of noise about getting rid of The Mad Hatter over at UCI, but it seems some housecleaning needs to be done at USA Cycling too? I’d guess there was plenty of looking-the-other-way while BigTex helped ’em rake in the cash. And looking-the-other-way was probably the least of the chicanery.
January 15, 2014 at 5:05 pm |
I enjoyed the Co-Motion Divide Rohloff review. Looking forward to the Cinelli review. Your review of the SOMA Saga was a big influence on my purchase. Damn that thing is comfortable to ride.
January 15, 2014 at 6:20 pm |
Zero issues with the Mavericks upgrade – though really slow for me, but that is almost certainly due to my connection. I use Calender, and have had for years, and I like the new version a lot. You can scroll up and down through the weeks/months now for much easier visibility. The Reminders and Notes apps have come in handy too.