Fast Hardware

Monday, 12 May 1997

Yeah, I know, it's been almost a month since my last Natter. It's been a busy month. I've finally started using the new computer I bought over a year ago. It's a Power Mac 7200/75, and sure I know it's obsolete, it was obsolete when I bought it, that's why it was only US$1,000, but any computer you can use isn't totally obsolete, and this is my first Power Mac, so I'm pretty happy. I took so long to start using it because I've been spending so much time at work this past year that I just use my work computer for most stuff, but then we started having that trouble with the news server. The news server trouble seems to be a problem with Microsoft Exchange 5.0, which shouldn't surprise anyone familiar with Microsoft products, with the net effect that the server dies whenever I try to read news using a Mac. Using tin started getting pretty tedious, so I decided to try reading news from home, the way I used to when I first got my Interport account. Well, NewsWatcher kept crashing my old IIvx. I'm not sure why, since it used to work fine, but I suspect that the system files on my old machine had gotten corrupted somehow, and needed reinstalling. If I was going to be fiddling around fixing up a computer, I figured I might as well expend the effort on the newer machine, so I picked up some RAM at J&R Computer World, and plugged it in, and upgraded to MacOS 7.6 while I was at it. Now I'm humming along with a healthy 32 megs of RAM, which is almost enough to feel comfortable with. I still need to buy a new external hard drive to copy over all of my files from the old machine, as well as some more video RAM, but what I've got now suffices for zine writing and net surfing.

The streets were nearly car-free when I left work this evening. That's rare for midtown Manhattan. I've seen more traffic there at 3 A.M. than I saw today at 7:45 P.M. Some of the streets were being blocked off, and there was a lot of lighting equipment around, so I suspect that someone was shooting a movie. I had heard earlier in the day that some footage for the new American Godzilla movie was being shot in New York; perhaps that was it. Movie makers aside, there seemed to be an unusual, pleasant, relaxed air to the neighborhood. Pedestrians were free to stroll casually through the streets, and could talk without having to raise their voices over the sound of traffic. It's easy to forget just how much misery automobiles add to our lives; I'm glad for the reminder.