From Occupy Wall Street to Occupy Apple Store. I’m not quite certain we’ve achieved the IWW ideal of One Big Union yet. Ooo, look, there’s some bread, and there’s a circus!
You can’t spell ‘OMG’ without ‘GM’
A tip of the salt-stained Mad Dog Campy cap goes out to the League of American Bicyclists for taking note of GM’s latest ad aimed at luring college kids even deeper into debt by adding “discount” new-car payments to their student-loan tabs.
“Stop pedaling … start driving.” Really? Jesus. I know the corporate ideal is to keep us fat, stupid and up to the hubs in debt, but could we try being a little less obvious about it, GM? I’m surprised your ad agency didn’t slap a big set of tits on that car. They’re implied, of course, by the sneering bimbo in the passenger seat, which is about as subtle as slapping a giant schlong on the grill of an Escalade. F-minus.
Just what every undergrad needs, right? Instead of a fashionable fixie and backpack — retail cost, oh, what, next to nothing? — s/he can take advantage of a “college discount” on a pick-’em-up truck that sells for $22,000 to $48,000, depending upon options, and gets 12-15 mpg city and 18-22 highway.
Sounds like just the thing. Upon graduation, our young GM owner can live in the truck, staying one step ahead of the repo man, until s/he runs out of gas. Then it’s either Mom and Dad’s basement or a Sally Ann tent under the bridge with the rest of the liberal-arts BAs.
• Late update: GM caves to velo-outrage, pulls ad.
It’s nobody’s business but the Turk’s
Field Marshal Turkish von Turkenstein is always critical of my weather-management skills on that first really cold, damp day of fall.
Denied access to the great outdoors, he stalks around the house making pointed observations and issuing orders. There is no food in this dish! I will have a drink in the sink! Scratch my ears at once! (And don’t be surprised if I scratch something of yours in return.)
Finally, he naps fitfully on my drawing board, trying to catch whatever feeble rays of sunshine filter through the clouds. Truly, a winter of discontent.
Ice, ice, baby
Thirty-seven degrees this morning. Snow on Pikes Peak. Wearing pants — in the house! I can feel my tan lines fading already.
Now commences the annual ritual of hunting down winter cycling kit. Long-fingered gloves, tuque, long-sleeved jerseys, arm, knee and leg warmers, tights, jacket, all that good shit. It’s around here somewhere, but I’ve been trying mighty hard not to think of it, reasoning that to imagine winter is to bring it on.
Today’s high is expected to reach only the 50s, and the NWS expects rain and snow tonight. Down with the pergola cover, out with the snow shovel, unplug and coil the garden hoses. Good thing I whipped up a big pot of vegetable beef soup last night. There’s a chuck roast in the ’fridge, free-range pork in the freezer and bottles of warming red wine nestled in the rack.
The U.S. Gran Prix of Cyclocross is coming to Fort Collins, but I won’t be there. I’ll be right here, chained to the desk, pushing pixels for The Man. At least I’ll be warm, well fed and wined to the eyeballs.
Apple to the core
Steve Jobs made my life a whole lot easier.
Back in the day, when I was still full-time at The New Mexican and free-lancing cartoons and the occasional race report to VeloNews, it was all about hard copy. I’d FedEx the ’toons and fax the stories.
It was an imperfect system. VN was supposed to return my original art, but often did not, and a whole bunch of original work got lost during an office cleanup that shall forever live in infamy.
Then I got a Mac SE, a Hayes 1200-baud modem and accounts with AOL and CompuServe. Holy Mary, Mother of God — que milagro!
Suddenly we stringers could upload copy directly to the VeloNews BBS. ’Toons and photos still had to take the long way to press, but that would change, too, with the advent of more powerful Macs, faster modems and digital scanners. That little old country lane called the Internet suddenly was the Infobahn, and shipping a 1MB ’toon was no more difficult than sending an e-mail. Steve Jobs didn’t invent the World Wide Web, but he sure made it easy to navigate.
Two decades later I can look around my home office and see multiple examples of Steve Jobs’ vision come to life. I’m posting this on a 21.5-inch 3.06 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo iMac. On my drawing board sits an iPhone 3GS, charging. Next to the board squats a hot-rodded G4 AGP Graphics Power Mac that I use to digitize ’toons and store stuff. Behind me is a venerable G3 500 MHz “Pismo” Powerbook, one of my all-time favorite laptops.
In the living room you’ll find a 2.66 GHz Mini delivering streaming video to our TV, along with a 12-inch G4 1.5 GHz Powerbook and two MacBooks — my black 2006 Intel Core Duo and Herself’s white 2007 Intel Core Duo 2. My iPad 2 is in there, too. Herself’s is downstairs. Our iPod Touches are in the bedroom.
Last but not least, somewhere around here is a 12-inch G3 800 MHz iBook — it was my kitchen computer for a while until Herself spirited it away (she despises clutter).
And you know what? They all work, every last one of them. Burglars could clean me out of everything save the Pismo and I could still earn my little bit of living with that elderly laptop. Hell, the second Mac I ever owned, a Quadra 650, still worked when I finally caved to the anti-clutter lobby and sent it off for recycling last year.
“But Patrick,” you say, “you could have done your business on Windows machines just as easily.” Maybe so, but I doubt it.
Macs were made for people like me, non-geeks who wanted to think about the work, not the tool. The Apple GUI has always been simple and intuitive, and the hardware reliable and fairly simple to work on if you decided that you just had to peek under the hood.
Plus I always found Apple’s industrial design more pleasing to the eye. Windows machines looked cheap, mass-produced and blocky, like Soviet-era apartment buildings. Apple’s devices had graceful, swooping lines, odd color schemes and that cheery “Happy Mac” that once appeared at bootup but preceded its creator in death a while back.
Maybe that’s why I have such a hard time parting with them.
But I notice there are about 15 bikes in the garage and a half-dozen Canon cameras lying around the house, and it wasn’t all that long ago that there were four Toyota trucks parked in my driveway. So maybe I’m just a hoarder.
