I’ve spent the past couple of days rassling various techno-gators in my undrained swamp of a media landscape and that gaudy championship belt remains elusive.
Most of the hitches in the gitalong of the latest Radio Free Dogpatch revival we have already examined, save one: The 2014 MacBook Pro I use as a podcast editor is not only long in the tooth, it’s short in the stomach, which is to say that its 121 GB SSD is about 3 GB short of full.
So over the weekend I sez to myself I sez, “Maybe it’s time I finally installed that 1 TB SSD that’s been gathering dust around here for the better part of quite some time.”
Well, sir, before a fella does that he wants to back that internal sumbitch up to an external drive. Which my backup software decided it didn’t wanna do, it being the Lord’s day and all.
So I emailed tech support, which was Johnny on the spot, especially considering that even the Deity takes Sundays off. And we got that issue resolved and the backup created after a couple of false starts and a promise to download the latest software update “for security reasons,” which “for not-in-the-mood reasons” I postponed until some later date.
Because by then it was time for a bike ride, and then a shower, and finally dinner with a bit of TV, which the day before required a bit of Kentucky windage because some streaming services are getting pissy about shared user accounts, the oinking capitalist swine.
And this morning I decided the MacBook Pro upgrade could wait a while because I wanted to address some other issues, this time with a email/website-hosting outfit (not WordPress) whose company has changed hands and/or names about eleventy-se’m times in the last year or so, and holy hell did that ever turn into an A.I./ESL/Subcontinental clusterfuck of epic proportions.
About which the less said, the better, because I don’t want to stroke out before His Excremency, who from the look of him lately might just oblige us tomorrow by exploding in a pinkish-gray, shrieking shit-mist of curdled Mickey D’s grease, aspartame, and prescription drugs during the State of the Union, one of the many things about which he knows exactly jack shit. I won’t be watching, of course, but someone’s bound to post the video online.
Anyway, when I’m struggling to get all my kazoos, whoopie cushions, and aaaooogah horns to play from the same sheet of music, I think of Beth in “Diner,” as Shrevie is berating her for failing to shelve his records properly.
“It’s too complicated, Shrevie. You see, every time I pull out a record, there’s this whole procedure I have to go through. I just want to hear the music, that’s all.”
For reals. Makes me long for the days of typewritten underground newspapers and CB radio.
Mad Blog Media 
Your writing style reminds me of a kindler, gentler Hunter S. Thompson. If he had adopted your healthier lifestyle, he would still be around to help you tag team today’s villains, elected or not.
Wow. High praise indeed.And thank you. I’ve read a ton of the Good Doktor’s works — I can see nine of his books from my desk — and when he was firing on at least six of his eight cylinders he was worth every penny you could spend on him. “Buy the ticket, take the ride,” as he often said.
But his deep immersion in those pieces blurred the line between writing the story and becoming it. He made Hunter S. Thompson an impossible act to follow, even for himself. His later works weren’t up to the high standards he set for himself, and he knew it.
Ah, dammit, I wish he’d done as you suggest, taken a break from himself to see if he could do The Work without the drink and drugs. I think I lost a step or two by getting sober — a light hand on the substances throttle can take you places you might not otherwise go in your right mind — but that, too, is a fine line, and crossed too often can be the end of you.
If only we had HST, George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Robin Williams, P.J. O’Rourke, John Belushi, and a few others to help us muddle through this long dark night in America.
No pleasant snowstorms in my neck of the woods but lots of typical PNW rain, so any ride has been moved off a few days. But thanks to POB’s posting the other day regarding Mr. Duvall’s passing, I rounded up copy of Phenomenon and watched that last evening. It was a refreshing movie in our troubling times. If only a large portion of the voting constituency would not think that all strange occurrences were due to some conspiracy theory.
It’s good to hear that you are now a TB or so wiser. If only I had the power to click on a similar memory switch or upgrade to a special individual I have around me.
It seems my six year old Macbook Air has hit the software wall. I was running Tahoe, but my Intel chipped Macbook can’t deal with the latest iteration of Tahoe. So back to Sequoia until they quit supporting. Then I will buy a new one.
AI my ass. Uf the AI folks want to impress me, they need to use it to kill all spam e mail.
If Trumple Foreskin blows up the HAZMAT folks will have a hell of a cleanup.
I hear bad things about Tahoe, much of it from John Gruber at Daring Fireball and the gang at Six Colors (see their Apple Commentary collection).
Haven’t gone there yet myself. The M4 MacBook Pro is still rocking Sequoia 15.7.4, while the 2014 Intel MBP lumbers along with Big Sur 11, the max it can handle. All the Apple gear here is pretty much maxed out now, OS-wise, save for the Main Mac.
Anyone taking bets on how dumpster will go right into 25th amendment territory tonight? Can he resist calling the supremes names when they are sitting right in front of him? How will he react to all the empty seats?
Dude has never had an impulse he could resist. Now, if Putin were in the front row, he might abstain from the crowdwork and stick to brass tacks.
My wife wants a laptop. Meanwhile, we just contracted for a new roof. Priorities! But this led me to think, maybe I could get an old MacBook Pro and outfit it with Linux. As it turns out, this is actually a thing. This is still a project in the works as the roof must get fixed. BUT! On my latest desktop computer I decided to dual boot windows and Linux (Mint). Low and behold, I’m finding Linux world, at least of the minty variety, is actually pretty easy to navigate. I’m thinking you, being smart and all, might find it a bit less daunting that what you’re currently dealing with. I can hear you say “hell, no!” right now but I’m at least attempting to put a bug in your ear on that. It’s not nearly as difficult as you might think, living in Linux world.
Funny you should mention it … I’ve considered that, just to see if I could find a fresh way of driving myself crazy.
Years back I had this teensy little Asus netbook that could run its own poorly conceived OS or boot into some flavor of Linux, I forget which. On a whim I tried the Linux and actually liked it quite a bit. More hands-on than the Mac universe for sure, but I didn’t feel completely lost in the wilderness, the way I do when I watch Herself navigate the Windoze monstrosity she uses for work. I’ve never owned or even used one of those things.
I have an old black-plastic 2006 Intel MacBook I could use for such an experiment, and a 2005 G4 PowerBook. Both still work, but they’re obviously well off the back, shelled even by the laughing group.
If I were smart, I’d recycle all this old crap, buy a used M-class iMac for the podcasting, and focus on that. But you know my theme song: “I will never be smart.”
Incidentally, if you’re looking for a bargain used laptop for your wife, check out Other World Computing. I’ve done business with them for years.
Thank you. I will (try to) remember that.
There a many youtube videos of people installing various versions of linux on intel macbook pros and they are even getting good at the “proprietary” more recent macbook pros. I don’t mean just installing of course, as I said, but using it regularly with all the features you’d expect working natively which there used to be issues with, especially on the non-Intel macs.
One interesting thing I found is the “new” version of Micro$oft Skype – that is Teams – never worked on Windows 11 for me. It worked both very easily in Linux Mint via M$’s website.