Partying like it’s 2009

December 13, 2009November 16, 2010 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 8 Comments

It’s New Technology Weekend here at the DogHaus, what with the installation of a refurbished Sony Blu-ray player to feed the TV and a new iMac to feed the rest of us. How odd to find oneself in the 21st century just like that.

The Blu-ray install involved an acceptable profanity-to-success ratio, since the owner’s manual is surprisingly straightforward and both the Sony and the Toshiba TV have HDMI ports. Our obsolete Sony home-theater setup does not, but it does share optical digital connectivity with the Blu-ray. And hijo, madre, puto, cabron, does the sound output all of a sudden get a whole lot better when you plug that bad boy in. And all this time we thought the salesperson at Ultimate Electronics was bullshitting us. That cable’s been gathering dust around here for months.

The iMac, meanwhile, is getting its trial by fire today and tomorrow during my shift in the VeloBarrel, which presently involves posting stories and photos from cyclo-cross nats in Oregon. One interesting hurdle cropped up this morning — it’s not clear whether my copy of Adobe Photoshop Elements 6, which I use for RGB photo editing, will function properly under Snow Leopard, a.k.a. OS X 10.6.1. Some folks say si, others no.

While Adobe will graciously permit me to upgrade to a full CMYK version of Photoshop CS4 for a mere $599 US, I would rather spend that hard-earned cash on tasty food, strong drink and a proper solstice present for Herself, who after all has had to jog 19 laps around the sun with Your Humble Narrator. This is not exactly a day at the beach.

So if any of you have experience with Snow Leopard and Elements 6, please feel free to chime in. Otherwise I may just buy a $70 copy of Elements 8 for online photo editing and keep using the G4 and P-shop 4 to color those silly-ass cartoons.

Meanwhile, Harry Reid should punt Joe Lieberman to the GOP where he belongs. Let the miserable prick give the Elefinks brain cramps for a change. The cocksucker is as reliable as MacWrite II on a Cray supercomputer.

Cold comfort indeed

December 9, 2009November 16, 2010 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 20 Comments

Turkenstein the Large is all puffed up with noplace to go (because I won't let him out). — Turkenstein the Large is all puffed up with nowhere to go (because I won't release him into the frigid wasteland that is Bibleburg).

Eleven below zero. Jesus H. Christ. I just saw an entire squadron of witches’ tits flying south for the winter with ground support from a battalion of nutless brass monkeys.

Posting has been spotty around here lately ’cause it’s the monthly deadline crunch — cartoon for VeloNews on Friday, double-posting on the old and new VeloNews.com sites on Sunday and Monday, ’toon, column and the Grapevine roundup for Bicycle Retailer due by close of business today. Why, it’s almost like having a real job, except for the lack of health insurance, paid vacation, 401(k), and employer-supplied office, phone, Internet service, computer, software and technical support.

At least I don’t have to drive anywhere, wear a tie, piss away the day in pointless meetings. I’m parked at the keyboard in sweatpants and a Mount Taylor Winter Quadrathlon T-shirt from 1990, when I was young and fit and had hair in places other than my shoulders, ears and nose.

I had a real job then, too. My last one, I hope. Boy, did that ever suck. If I were still doing that bullshit I’d have had to edit something about Caribou Barbie instead of drawing a Mud Stud cartoon.

Have you blackened your Friday?

November 27, 2009November 16, 2010 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 4 Comments

Oh, the tangled web we weave when spending cuts we first perceive.

Not us. Herself is downstairs working and I’m upstairs goofing off, enjoying the fracas from a distance. My idea of a good time is not playing Australian rules football with a bunch of bargain-hunters in a Best Buy at four o’clock in the morning.

Mind you, I like to shop. It’s often more fun and less disappointing than actually buying something. But I usually root around online for quite a while, checking specs and weighing options, before marching down to some local shop to lay hands on the product and finally slap down the plastic. Or not.

Here’s a case in point. I have authorization from Herself to buy a new Mac, but haven’t done so. How come?

Well, it’s that natural contrariness rearing its ugly head again. The Black Turtleneck Mob in Cupertino isn’t selling exactly what I want to buy, which is an affordable, accessible consumer tower model like my old G4 AGP Graphics Power Mac, simple to fix and/or upgrade, but sporting modern hardware and software.

There’s the Mac Pro, but at $2,499 I’d hardly call it affordable, especially since it ships with a measly 3 GB of RAM and no Airport Express card. You want to double the first and add the last, tack on another $200.

OK, how about those nifty iMacs? Not sure I’d like working full time on a glossy screen. My 13.3-inch MacBook has one, and it can be irksome to see my ugly mug staring back at me as I cook up another bouillabaisse of bullshit for fun and profit. Plus all its ports are in the ass-end of the thing. WTF?

New MacBook? Got an old one, thanks, from 2006 and in a manly black (I dislike pasty white computers). MacBook Pro? No separate audio in/out ports on the new 13-incher, which seems to offer the most bang per buck, and no user-removable batteries on any of ’em. Plus I already have more laptops than Cheney’s closet does skeletons. As daily drivers go, they and the multiplicity of cables to peripherals required eat up a lot of desktop space, which irks the cats, who like to use my desk as a springboard to the window for reasons known only to themselves.

Mini? Another Mac I can’t crack, and it seems underpowered, if nicely priced.

And then there’s that voice, only one of many in my head, but among the most insistent, which keeps whispering, “You work in a subset of journalism, a craft with all the future of a Conestoga repairman in Manhattan.”

So instead of greening up my Black Friday with a new Mac, I’ve gotten myself a tad more computing horsepower by hooking up the MacBook to my 22-inch ViewSonic. The G4 tower now serves mostly as storage space, three drives’ worth, accessible wirelessly through my DSL modem-router combo. But I’ll also use it to scan and color cartoons, since it has an ancient yet serviceable version of Photoshop (another $500 goes unspent).

This probably won’t fly come July, if I’m still helping VeloNews.com push pixels during Le Tour. But it ain’t July.

• Late update: Reading the Gaslight‘s latest coverage of the first official shopping day of the holiday season (suck it, you out-of-Focus fucktards), it’s sad to note that while the G found it worthwhile to report from big boxes on Powers and Academy boulevards, in Woodland Park and in Castle Rock, they didn’t bother to send anyone downtown — which is about a mile away from Gaslight HQ. Maybe they’re afraid of ice falling from the USOC HQ, but I can’t see this lot being scared of a head injury, considering where they keep their brains. And they wonder why both the newspaper and downtown are struggling.

The new VeloNews.com

November 13, 2009 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 9 Comments

Since VeloNews.com editor Steve Frothingham let the cat out of the bag on Twitter, I’ll follow his lead and post a link to the latest iteration of the website, velonews.competitor.com.

The latest redesign is a WordPress model, like my own humble site, only much more complex. And frankly, it’s gonna be something of a pain in the ass to administer until we get comfortable with the additional steps it demands of an editor trying to post a story with pictures. But that was the case with the changeover to the present site, too. We got used to it. Kinda. Sorta.

The new site remains a work in progress, but it’s nearly ready to launch. So if you have any thoughts, please send them to me and I’ll pass ’em along to Steve.

Conference call

November 11, 2009November 16, 2010 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 5 Comments

It was a tad warm — 50-something, and in November — to wear my brand-new VeloNews coat in Winter Park.

Saw a beautiful sunrise yesterday. I’d have taken a picture, but I was northbound at 80 mph surrounded by people who were hellbent on maiming and/or killing me, so I kept my attention focused on the task at hand, which was making it safely to Winter Park for day two of the annual VeloNews retreat.

This required me to get up at 4 a.m., which was not pleasant. Picture the monster arising from Dr. Frankenstein’s table, red murder in his freshly undead eyes. During an unpleasant spell in the early Eighties, when I worked for an afternoon daily in Oregon, I had to be on the job at this miserable hour, and I never got used to it.

But at least there was work to be done. Meetings prevent the doing of work. While you’re sitting there around the big table, giving your tonsils a good airing, the work is waiting patiently for you to get back to it. Unlike you, work has plenty of time. Meetings also provide the illusion of democracy when in fact business is dictatorial. Sooner or later someone in authority will tell everyone to shut the fuck up and get back to work. But never soon enough.

To be sure, the occasional nugget of intelligence glistens in the dungheap: stats on what is selling, what is growing dusty on the shelves and who is buying; hints about where The Company will direct money and resources, and where it will withhold same; the sort of news a guy can get electronically these days, without the need for a six-hour round trip via Subaru.

But one thing a guy can’t get electronically is a free lunch and a nifty official VeloNews jacket from Descente. So I’ve got that going for me.

• Extra-credit reading: VeloNews.com has a sister site devoted to mountain biking, Singletrack.com. It’s relatively new, and doesn’t have a related magazine to drive eyeballs its way, so I’m pitching you this link to get your opinions about the site. Gimme your thoughts on VeloNews.com too. Think of it as a meeting that you won’t get paid for, but don’t have to drive to.