I Got A Bike

My sister the editor was cleaning out her garage, when she found a ten-speed bicycle in the back. She asked me whether I wanted the bike. It has been years and years since I rode a bicycle: I lived in places where a bicycle would be impractical: Work is too far away to use one, and the places where I shop are either close enough to walk, or also too far to bike. Yet, I decided it was time to start biking again, so I said yes.

This evening she came over with the bicycle. It was an orange ten-speed, suffused with the smell of 10W40. The gears and brakes are still good. The seat was unusually soft. It was a bit shaky when I tried it the first time, but I could still keep it standing and moving.

I will give the bike more of a workout this weekend. If it suits, I may take it Kirk's in Muncie for maintenance, since the bike has not been used in years. I am told it belonged to an old friend of my sister the ex-teacher, when she was in college, because Vickie got it. That means it is more than thirty years old.

It has been awhile since I wrote about work. Last month a set of new iMacs came in. They are long, wide and thin devices with no optical (CD/DVD) drives and what I had thought at first to be solid-state hard disks. Nope, they are mechanical, but they work a lot faster than older drives. These went in our Reference area (we call it that even though reference books take up a small area now); the iMacs they replaced went to the alcove of the third floor. I have a plan to make kiosks out of the replaced iMacs out of the third floor, for they are not good for much else now.

We also got three new Mac Pros with up-to-date hardware and Mac OS X Mountain Lion. The previous set of three Mac Pros were bought when we still had plastic iMacs, back in 2007, and are now hopelessly antique. Now we can run the latest software on the new Mac Pros.

What is no longer on any of the iMacs or Mac Pros is Final Cut. Apple's changes to the Final Cut Pro software is objectionable to the vast majority of video houses and graphics designers, I have read; it certainly is objectionable to those university departments, including T-Com, that make heavy use of our Macs. For that reason, Final Cut was dropped in favor of Adobe Premier.