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9/21/03: Estas coisas

I've sold my wonderful old G4 whose keys and components and browsers and scripts and cookies and passwords and cheap little
mostly non-MS programmes fit together so swimmingly I could practically think anything I want into its
digital existence. I've now substituted a year-old Dell laptop picked up from a friend for a little bit of money and
dinner and I think it's the most miserable little piece of shit in so many ways. I shouldn't complain - I'm lucky to have
something, I'd probably have much bigger compatibility handicaps with an Apple in Brazil, and it'll help hold the lesson
plans and CVs, but my god - what a design travesty this Windows XP stuff is! It has twice the processing power
of my old G4 and runs twice as slow. Some script error on this very page caused not only the browser to
close itself, the operating system then proceeded to log itself off then shut itself down without asking me my opinion of this
drastic overcomenpsation. Another time some background program, insisting it also be properly exited while the computer
shut down caused the machine to freeze about 90% of the way through the process, far enough have already closed down
all of its apparently myriad recovery functions. Without a reset button, I had to wait for the battery to die before
starting up and pretending to fix it.

Yeah, I guess my reluctance to really learn how to use this
thing is the real problem, but I bet I could've gone for years longer on my Apple, the old operating system and the copy of
Photoshop 6 that I always wished was Photoshop 5.5 'cuz apparently I'm the last person on earth that actually made good
use of the paintbucket tool. Still, this is frustrating - I have an unusal love the objects I use everyday and I've a
great knack with absorbing their imperfections. Try to improve 'em, and you throw it all out of wack. I love hearing stories about little cults of vintage computer-philes who've figured out
how to get their old Commodore 64s and mid-80s Atari computers to keep up with everything Microsoft and Adobe and Apple
crank out every month. I commute on a frankenbike made out of an old, old Raleigh frame, reborn as a track bike stripped down to just a front brake that gets
loose enough so that it's pretty much only slows the bike enough to where I can aim where I'm going to crash. But I can
dodge and maneuver it through the thick Chicago traffic as if I were on my own feet. I have to give that up this week as well.

I guess what I'm leading up to is that since my new computer is now half as fast,
my posting will be twice as infrequent this week, or something like that - at least 'til I get this stupid thing figured
out.

In better news, I've a job waiting for me in Sao Paulo. My interview was over the phone and began as soon as the call snapped me out of a sound sleep at quarter to six in the morning. The interviewer forgot about the time difference. I still can't remember what I said but it apparently worked.

Not that you would, but if you rifled through the trashcans in the alley behind my building, going through big piles
of stuff I've thrown out while packing, you'd be the proud new owner of 200 tiny black and white photographs of Chicago's Kingsbury
street, a mirror ball, 500 party flyers from between 1996 and 1998, photographs of every sign on every buiulding between 1822 and 2021 North Milwauke Avenue, about 270 sheets of expired unexposed photo paper
in about 268 seperate boxes, and the compete text of Debord's Society of the Spectacle printed and bound
entirely in pilfered office supplies.

Outras coisas