Twenty-six years old and it still starts — if one knows which demons to invoke.
It must be International Try to Start Your Piece of Shit Truck Day.
I needed to haul the Voodoo down to Old Town for transformation into a flat-bar bike with thumbshifter (courtesy of Paul’s Thumbies) so I can get back to riding the road sometime soon (I hope). Toward that end, I was trying to fire up the White Tornado, my neglected and carbureted 1983 Toyota 4WD longbed pickup, ’cause it’s easier to slide a bike into its 6-foot bed one-handed than it is to park one on the Subaru Forester’s roof rack.
The 2005 Subie, on the other hand, is easier to start. Twist the key and off you go. The Toyota … not so much, especially if it’s been nestled up to the curb for a few weeks of wintry weather.
As I was cranking away, stomping rhythmically on the accelerator while mumbling various incantations and imprecations, I heard some other vehicle trying to harmonize with mine. Down the block, with its hood up, sat a Ford 100 Custom Cab of indeterminate age, its owner, like me, betting against the ravages of time, neglect and weather.
I eventually got my beater going, so I guess I win. But his has a better paint job, and collector’s plates, too, so it looks much niftier sitting immobile against the curb.
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.
OK, I’m a week into my disfigurement (disfingerment?) and I can see it’s gonna be a long healing process, just like the time I dislocated the thumb — which, ironically, shares a hand with the splinted middle finger and met its fate a long stone’s throw from where the birdie bit the dust, on a technical bit of trail near Lazy Land in Palmer Park.
My choice of stationary-trainer tunes has come in for some light criticism, so I’m turning to you, my small, deeply disturbed following, for your advice on a soundtrack for an extended Tour de Living Room. I did 70 minutes on the Giant Tempo yesterday and will probably be ramping that up to two hours, so I need a shitload of music and it can’t all be redneck rock, though I have some Charlie Daniels in reserve for emergencies.
Meanwhile, the wizards at VeloNews.com are still stomping bugs at the new digs. Seems IE6 doesn’t like the new site’s calendar and we have a significant number of prehistoric readers who insist on logging on via abacus, smoke signal or log drum. Christ, what’s next? “Optimized for Mosaic?”
Ooo, new iMacs. Shiny objects entrance the lesser primate. Ook ook ook. Opposable thumb and forefinger grasp the credit card in quivering anticipation. Premonition of imminent demise at hands of enraged alpha-female primate postpones joy of immediate gratification via Intertube transaction. Much pointless bounding about and screeching. Chee chee chee!
My mighty Mac: A G4 450 MHz "Sawtooth" Power Mac, circa 1999, with enhancements that include a 1.1GHz processor upgrade, a USB 2.0 card, a DVD burner, 2GB RAM and a second internal HD. I picked it up for the cost of shipping it here from California: $50.
March went and got all lionesque on us here — the temp was down around 11 when I got up this morning, and it still hasn’t cracked the freezing point as of 11 a.m. It’s tough to get excited about taking a bit of vigorous outdoor exercise when even a short run requires wearing everything in the closet. So I’m staying inside and buying shit over the Intertubes, hoping to jump-start the economy.
No, a new Mac is not in the works — not yet, anyway. But I am dropping a bigger hard drive in the old one while I wait for the product line to shake itself out. You can pick up an HD for chump change anymore, and there’s nothing easier to work on than a G4 Power Mac, so I’m going to clone the OS X volume from the old 20GB master drive, drop in the new drive, zap the boot volume to it, and enjoy about 100GB of breathing room. I might even do without the OS 9 partition, since I haven’t booted from that sucker in, well, forever. I use Classic to run Photoshop 4.0 — yes, that’s 4.0 — but there’s an unused copy of Photoshop Elements sitting right here next to the desk, so this may finally mean hasta la vista to OS 9.
Meanwhile, my fellow MacGeeks will appreciate learning that Apple is expected to release some type of netbook in 2009, perhaps as early as summer. No doubt it will pack big style points and an even bigger retail price. Asus must be shitting themselves. Or not. Thanks and a tug on the black turtleneck to MacRumors.com.
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