Oh, good. More people playing when they should be driving.
I took my gradually fading cold out for a walk yesterday afternoon, and boy, was it ever a beautiful day. Didn’t need to see that pudgy jogger airing out his man-boobs, but occasionally a fella must take the bitter with the sweet.
We’re looking at another blast of springtime today — 72! — before the rain, snow and wind play a return engagement on Tuesday. So I plan to get out again while the getting out remains good.
Friend of the the DogS(h)ite Weaksides will not be so fortunate, alas. In comments, he advises that he’s enduring in-patient therapy after getting blitzed from behind by a car, and his condition may keep him out of his own damn’ home for a while. So shoot him some good wishes in comments if you have a moment.
Meanwhile, feel free to wax wroth about Apple’s latest brainstorm, CarPlay, a setup intended to make it easier for motorists to jabber on the phone, check their email and not incidentally run us over. Released today as part of iOS 7.1 and soon to be a column coming to a bicycle-industry magazine near you.
So far, so good. Two more OS updates and we’ll have a casual relationship with the 21st century.
One down, two to go. I forgot we also have a Mac Mini in need of an OS upgrade. But the cute li’l Cupertino doorstop only has 2 GB of memory, which is the bare minimum, so I’ve ordered up some mo’.
The MacBook Air install went smooth like butter. The whole process took a shade over two hours, with a long-ass download, a couple-three restarts and six app’ updates. But that’s my newest machine, a mid-2012 model, so it should be open to new experiences; the Mini dates to mid-2010, and the iMac to 2009.
The Air is for lightweight road trips when an iPad won’t cut the mustard. For heavy duty I haul an old black MacBook, ’cause it has software I don’t care to upgrade, like Word and Photoshop and all the other high-falutin’ gewgaws, thingamajigs and comosellamas a fella likes for professional rumormongery of the finest quality. That beast is too long in the tooth to run Mavericks; it’s pegged at Snow Leopard.
The Mini is for watching TV at Chez Dog, and I back up work-related items to it whenever I get The Fear (I also use SuperDuper and Time Machine with an external Firewire drive for regular clones/backups).
And the iMac is The Main Device. It’s how most of the Mad Dog media is generated, save for the cartoons, which get done the hard way — drawn in pencil, then inked, and finally scanned into a superannuated 1999 G4 “Sawtooth” AGP Graphics Power Mac, where I apply color using Classic mode and a full CMYK version of Photoshop (4!) that I got for free with a scanner about a thousand years ago. Hey, it still works.
I thought I might do the iMac today, too, but wimped out. Paranoia strikes deep, as the fella says, and I’d like to fiddle with the Air a bit to make sure it didn’t lose a kidney to Somali pirates or something during the operation.
Good news for those of us who don’t like Uncle Sammy listening to our phone calls just, ’cause, like, you know, freedom an’ shit — a federal district judge ruled Monday that the National Security Agency’s perma-tap is likely an “almost Orwellian” violation of the U.S. Constitution.
According to The New York Times, Judge Richard J. Leon stayed his injunction “in light of the significant national security interests at stake in this case and the novelty of the constitutional issues,” giving the gummint time to appeal, which could take six months or more.
But the judge said as part of a 68-page ruling that the gummint had failed to cite “a single instance in which analysis of the N.S.A.’s bulk metadata collection actually stopped an imminent attack, or otherwise aided the government in achieving any objective that was time-sensitive.”
MoJo’s Kevin Drum notes that “district court judges make lots of rulings that never go anywhere, and this is mostly likely one of them.” But he likes that a judge wants this bullshit to stop, and so do I.
The known terrierist “Banzai” Buddy Boo, captured from my iPhone. (Actually, he’s more of a spanielista.)
C’mon — you don’t think they put a camera in that phone of yours so you could take cutesy pix of puppies and kitties for teh Innertubes, didja? Wave hi to your Uncle Sammy.
I guess I’m with Kevin Drum here. I just assumed that once the surveillance genie was out of its bottle, the ratfink stool-pigeon bastard would never get stuffed back in, no matter which crypto-Mooslim Kenyan socialist tyrant happened to be occupying the Black House. And thus whenever I plot the smashing of the State I make certain that I’m out in the open, safe among The People, far away from that snitching corporate stooge, my iPhone.
I do have one question, though. As a nominal journalist and underemployed rumormonger, I consider myself to be in the entertainment business. And everything I do — from writing columns to drawing cartoons to making prank calls to the Queen warning that the Irish Republican Navy plans to dispatch an armada up the Thames — is part of the Work. Shit, I spend more time and effort editing my emails than some people devote to entire magazines. I’m saying I take my comedy seriously, is what.
So my question is this: By data mining my phone is Uncle Sammy violating my copyright, and if so, can I sic’ the FBI on him? Seems to me I can’t watch a goddamn “Game of Thrones” DVD without enduring a multilingual series of dire threats regarding the high crime of piracy from the Feebs, Interpol, the Sûreté, MI6, the Mossad, SHIELD, the Illuminati and Captain Video.
I think the sonofabitch should at least be picking up part of my AT&T tab.
• Late update: More on this revoltin’ development from The Old Gray Lady.
• Ever later update:More here, praising the leaker, from The Atlantic.
The Kona Rove is a cyclo-cross-slash-whatever bike, with eyelets for racks and fenders and plenty of clearance for tires forbidden by the UCI.
The departure of the flu coincided with a return of springlike weather, so I’ve been spending some time outdoors of late, searching for my lost legs.
It’s been three weeks since the bug laid me low, and my pipes are still not quite up to snuff — I’m gonna have to refill that albuterol prescription one of these days — but nonetheless it’s been pleasant to be out and about, far from the iMac and its penchant for delivering evil tidings.
The bike of choice lately has been the Kona Rove, which as mentioned in an earlier post is on deck in the Adventure Cyclist hit parade. As usual, I can’t say much about it until the paying customers get theirs, but I will note that it’s not a touring bike — the Sutra fills that particular niche for Kona.
I had to put a little Irish on the front fender’s left strut (it’s much better than English) to work around the Hayes disc brake.
Nope, the Rove is one of those whatever bikes, which is to say that whatever you feel like riding it will handle without complaint.
It’s been interesting to watch the industry come up with a fresh take on the kind of machinery I rode when we lived up Weirdcliffe way. I tried to get Brent Steelman to build me a drop-bar mountain bike to tackle the wealth of gravel roads, two-track and single-track we had up there, but as I recall he had doubts about welding up such a weirdo.
So instead I made do with one of his old CC cyclo-cross bikes. Brent billed the CC as “a 700c mountain bike” — in fact, it may have been one of the earliest 29ers — and in its final configuration before I sold it to a friend its Excell frameset wore 700×40 Ritchey rubber, a triple (46/36/24), a seven-speed 105 drivetrain (12-28) and bar-end shifters.
The Rove comes stock with a set of 700×35 Freedom by WTB Ryders, but it likewise can handle 700×40 tires, and with fenders, too. Go without fenders and you can run tractor tires, if that’s your idea of a good time.
The Rove is considerably burlier than my old CC, in part because it uses Hayes CX5 disc brakes for stoppers instead of a pair of Dia-Compe 986 cantis.
Of course, its rider is considerably burlier than was the old ’crosser who used to race that CC, so I’ll hold my fire in that regard, stone-wise.
And besides, that which does not kill you makes you stronger, right? The flu didn’t get me, and I doubt the Rove will, unless I try to pick it up and run with it. That would be just begging for it.
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