Category: Just mumbling along

Tell me why I don’t like Mondays

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 8 Comments

Mondays always remind me of work, a recurring affliction that gives me a painful rash on the frontal lobes. And today was no exception.

First, I had to give up on trying to make a cheap USB 2.0 wireless adapter work with this elderly MacBox, which has been limping along for years with a Bronze Age 802.11b internal Airport card. But the adapter wouldn’t let the old bastard sleep, and at its advanced age, the MacBox needs all the Z’s it can get. This perverse product would let the monitor sleep, but wouldn’t let it wake up. It also crashed me a half-dozen times, just ’cause. So off it went, exchanged for a more upscale PCI adapter that should finally let me crank the wireless connectivity in these parts up to 802.11g. Look out. Nothing can stop me now.

Then Lance Armstrong went and crashed himself out of the Vuelta a Castilla y León, collecting his first broken collarbone in the process (I’ve done ’em both, and yes, it hurts), and nobody had any oh-the-humanity crash pix we could run over at VeloNews.com, where the merest mention of LA draws more eyeballs than Pamela Anderson attending a frat party wearing only Jäger goggles, kneepads and a smile.

And finally, spring and its 70-degree temps waved bye-bye. As we speak, it’s 40 and raining, with a chance of snow. If we’re lucky, we might be back into the 60s by next Monday.

I want to shoot the whole day down.

Low-end mac

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 7 Comments
The 800 MHz G3 iBook feels like a Nash Metropolitan next to the Maserati that is the MacBook. Unlike the Maserati, however, the Metro' still runs.
The 800 MHz G3 iBook feels like a Nash Metropolitan next to the Maserati that is the MacBook. Unlike the Maserati, however, the Metro' still runs.

I visit Low End Mac frequently, because I have so many — a Quadra 650, a Power Computing PowerBase 200, a G3 250 MHz “Wall Street” PowerBook, a PowerBook Duo 2300c, a G3 500MHz “Pismo” ‘PowerBook, a G3 800 iBook, a G4 450MHz “Sawtooth” Power Mac (upgraded in all directions save a better video card), and the black 2.0 GHz Intel Dual Core MacBook that blew up on me last week in mid-edit. The high-end Mac, just shy of 3 years old.

Anyone with this much old crap cluttering up the vicinity needs backup, and plenty of it. I have enough ancient machinery to start up a newspaper, if I were interested in filing Chapter 11 by St. Patrick’s Day. And it’s nice to have multiple redundancy systems in case something gets sideways come deadline time. I recall a story, perhaps a bit of writerly folklore, that the famously prolific Isaac Asimov kept three IBM Selectrics on hand because he feared one croaking on him in mid-novel.

I’m clearly no Asimov for a variety of reasons, most of them literary and scientific, but especially because my backups are not identical. When the high end crumbles, I start sliding down a slippery technological slope. It’s like a bad “Star Trek” episode: “Engage auxiliary power … switch to manual override … fuck it, where are the oars?”

As we speak I’m working on the dual-boot G3 iBook, which I upgraded to OS X 10.4.11 as soon as the MacBook croaked so I could use Flash 10 and a webcam and a whole mess of other nonsense that has little or nothing to do with writing columns or drawing cartoons.

The thing has that adhesive stink much discussed in Apple forums, its LCD display is non-awesome and the keyboard sucks — maybe one of the worst Apple has ever inflicted on its long-suffering fanboys — and Twitter drags on it like a three-legged dog with a butt full of buckshot. I’d switch to the Pismo, which has an excellent keyboard, but it’s three years farther behind the technological curve, even more video-challenged and sports an LCD that is starting to look like an art-class watercolor of a laptop screen as painted by a glaucoma patient with a head full of medicinal ditch weed.

If I were a good American I’d dash right on over to the Apple store, buy me a brand-new MacBook and use the old one for backup, when and if it returns from the Apple depot. I confess to having lust in my heart.

But I have no bucks in my bank account, and an early-riser of a wife who knows where the guns are, so I’ll forgo showing Steve Jobs my stimulus package in hopes that it will remain attached to my body.

The basement tapes

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 10 Comments

Herself and I picked out vinyl, tile and carpet yesterday — now all we have to do is wait for the flooring dude to clear our choices with the property-restoration folks, who no doubt must consult the turd-herders. Then we’ll be in business, maybe, assuming that the contractor who handles the installation will not be buried in some other nightmare project.

Lots of other projects in greater cosmopolitan Bibleburg are playing red light-green light lately. A massive development project on North Nevada past Garden of the Gods has been dialed down to a Costco for the moment, while a similarly ambitious project on South Nevada has been placed on hold altogether.

One suburban-renewal project is continuing apace, however. Jimmy Dobson has stepped down as chairman of Focus on the Family. Dobson plans to spend his twilight years instructing his grandchildren in the dark arts of Republicanism, homophobia and hypocrisy while struggling to master a Biblical magic trick — stuffing a camel through the eye of a needle.

Of websites and worksites

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 8 Comments
The resurrection of the basement is under way.
The resurrection of the basement is under way.

I remember when there used to be something called “the off-season.” No longer. Websites don’t like downtime, and so there’s always something needs doing over at VeloNews.com.

My days in the barrel as online editor at large are Monday and Wednesday. Come important events, like the Amgen Tour of California or any of the grand tours, it’s all hands on deck for the duration of the cruise.

It’s not physically demanding work; there’s no heavy lifting to strain the back, though calluses on the brain are a common occupational injury. But it can be wearisome, especially amid distraction and when combined with other tasks.

The resurrection of the basement has begun with a vengeance, and work crews have been scuttling in and out of there like roaches, dismantling the futon and carting it away to storage, replacing drywall and sealing concrete. This both disturbs and fascinates the cats, who as a consequence have been spending far too much time confined to my office. Turkish loathes and despises all characters of the two-legged persuasion, while Mia just wants to gallop downstairs and leap into the middle of it all.

So yesterday I had a basement full of drywallers and an office full of cats while I pushed pixels around the website in consultation with various colleagues, banged out two columns and a cartoon for Bicycle Retailer and Industry News and tried to diagnose a couple fresh computer issues that popped up like virtual Whack-a-Moles (O, the joys of working on 10-year-old equipment). No healthy, restorative exercise was to be had, but there were a couple bottles of wine in the kitchen and so recreation of a sort was available.

Today it’s more drywallers, and perhaps carpet and vinyl selection. But that’s not until the afternoon. And so with all deadlines met and no pixel-pushing until Monday, I think I’ll get outdoors for a couple hours and run a little fresh air through my headgear.

Late update: Damn, leave the office for an hour and look what happens: E.W. Scripps Co. throws the Rocky Mountain News on the scrapheap. I know at least one journo’ there — Chas Chamberlin, a former VeloNews art director — and I sure hope he can land on his feet. It’s an evil job market out there for us ink-stained wretches. But it looks like The Denver Post is picking up a few lucky sorts.

Meanwhile, Google is sticking a toe in the local-news market with Patch, a new online venture that aims to provide local reportage in backwaters ignored by cash-strapped newspapers. Public service or another step on Google’s march to global domination? We report, you decide. Thanks and a tip of the green eyeshade to Indiedoc on Twitter.

Bonjour, mon sewer

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 3 Comments

Tales from the Shitworks, Part II: We’re on our third vinyl-floor-removal dude. He took a shot at the title with what looked like a spade, then gave up and left to fetch what he called “a ripper stripper,” some class of power chisel that scared the piss out of the cats but did the job on the laundry-room floor.

Now we have to get the futon out of there somehow so the crew can take up the rest of the carpet. I never liked the giant sonofabitch anyway, and I like it less now that I have to find a way of getting it up our narrow stairwell and out the back door. It was assembled downstairs when we bought it, and thus disassembly is indicated. With an ax.

Late update: The Intertubes are all atwitter with word that Lance Armstrong will not be attending Don Catlin’s Anti-Doping Science Institute. Frankly, I don’t know what all the fuss is about. I understand Lance has a note from his mom.