As I write this, my hosting is suspended. This basically means that no one will be able to read this until it's paid again. This has happened because my Debit Card has now expired. Luckily, the bank decided to forget to send me a new one, so I don't have one for now. This means I'm stuck living off cash. It also made paying for my car hard. But I have my car back, it's repaired (new head gasket, cam belt and full service), and it drives beautifully. To test it out, I drove it to Cambridge, to stay with Sarah for a couple of days. I'm bored as hell at home, and while I am here (in Cambridge), I'm getting away from the city smog and hopefully some dirt roads will avail themselves.
Sadly, Sarah's family only has a Mac. An iMac. An old one. Not that old, around 2001-2. So it's about six years old. It's never had its OS upgraded, and has only had simple family use.
The keyboard and mouse are set in beautiful perspex, which looks very nice. Until all the crumbs, finger dirt and hairs slide down underneath the perspex, never to be dislodged and to stay there, glaringly disgusting, for all eternity.
On top of that, the failed version of a task bar, you know, all the icons that grow when you go near them, they're on the side. When you go to click the back button in Firefox, Finder jumps into your aim and you click that instead. Every single time. But not before the enlarging icons make the whole OS stutter as it works out how to make itself look pretty for you.
Most of the CRT has turned a nice shade of blue. It isn't possible to replace the monitor. This also means that the resolution is stuck at a very low setting. Luckily all the icons grow when you go near them so at this resolution they take up a third of the screen.
Right clicking involves using two hands. But you don't care when your mouse is so aesthetically simple. Until it comes to using the computer for actual computer things, then you start to care again. Even as I type the letters take a few seconds to appear on the screen, at a very basic rate (so the last phrase, 'very basic rate' hadn't even begun to appear on the screen by the time I had finished writing that sentence).
You're all screaming now that it's an old computer, it's had its day and now it's just a relic. It looked good in its time and worked in its time, now it should be upgraded. And also that CRTs fail after time. All of this wouldn't bother me so much apart from the fact that the Gateway we bought as a family in 2000, the one that all of us lived off, that I used the hell out of and didn't turn off for five years... it still works, it works well. You can right click, you can type and it appears as you type, nothing stutters (even though we upgraded the OS and not the processor), we gave it an extra drive for more space, and even though it has a severe adware infection, it is still a much better machine than this ever was. Yes, the CRT monitor broke but it was great because we replaced it without replacing the whole machine. It just worked, and it continued to just work for the last seven years. It can still run new 3D games that come out, something this Mac could never do no matter how new it was.
And although this is old, I have used new Macs and they're no different. They're awful, and if you want a better one you need to buy a new one. That is never true of PCs. PCs aren't nearly as cool as Macs, just as a Bristol Blenheim will never be as cool as a Ford StreetKa. I know which I'd drive.
Anyway, that's been building up in me for years, I'm glad I got it out. You'll all get to read this once I've paid for my hosting again.
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