Many things demanded my attention today, but it was 70-something outdoors and so I showed them all a clean pair of heels. I went for a longish run-hike in Palmer Park, took the cats outdoors for an airing and in general wasted the day in creative loafing. Judge not lest ye be judged. You’re lucky I didn’t con you into whitewashing the fence.
If the economy perks up it’s because I bought some light groceries from Vitamin Cottage-Natural Grocers, not because I raced out to grab one of the updated iMacs or Mac Minis announced today. It’s just like the Black Turtleneck Mob to tempt me with shiny baubles after a week of herding dented and stained G4 and G3 relics from the digital tar pits. Get thee behind me, Apple.
It would be the height of stupidity for me to buy a new computer in these troubled times, working as I do in the publications industry, a career path with all the stability and longevity of a gig delivering nitroglycerin via pogo stick. So, naturally, I’ll probably do it. What the hell, it’s only money. Take out a loan, everybody does it. Dude, where’s my bailout? Surely I’m too big to fail. Just ask anyone who’s seen me in Lycra lately.
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.
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.
I know, I know, print is dead. But it’s one thing to say it, and another to see the actual corpse. The Rocky Mountain Newsdied today, just a couple months shy of its 150th birthday, and even those of us who are more pixel-pushers than ink-stained wretches should pause to pay our respects.
The first daily I ever worked for, the Colorado Springs Sun, died under similar circumstances, the weaker of two publications in what had become a one-newspaper town. The Gazette murdered the Sun, then burned the body and scattered the ashes. And today, no Bibleburger under a certain age knows that the Sun ever lived at all.
My thoughts are with the men and women of the Rocky as they take those first hesitant steps on an even rockier road, the one that leads to the unemployment office.
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 Newson 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.
