Around Lake Wingra

So I've been keeping this thing for a month now. I certainly feel a lot less apprehensive than I did at the beginning. I think I now qualify for the Often Webring, so maybe this week I'll "apply for membership", as it were.

Map from Yahoo Maps

I started out at the red cross (in case it isn't obvious, I live around there) and biked along Regent St. (the heavy, horizontal gray line near the top) and Monroe St. to the vicinity of Edgewood College. There I stopped at Michael's Frozen Custard for lunch, which probably nullified any weight-loss effect the trip had on me (although hopefully a little weight got converted from fat into muscle!). Monroe St. has a whopping big hill on it, which is always challenging to scale.

After stopping at Michael's, I biked south and got on Arboretum Drive from the southwest end. I stopped midway through (roughly where the 'e' in 'Arboretum Dr' is on the map above) to sit and read Contact for an hour or so. Then I continued biking northeastward, hugging the lake, left the arboretum and biked over to Park St., north along Monona Bay, and back home. If the scale on the map is to be believed, then it's about a 5-mile circuit.

I think Apple's current anti-clone attitude (apparently spearheaded by Steve Jobs, who is in nominal control of Apple these days) is incredibly foolish. I think licensing other companies to make Macs would pay off big in the long run (5-10 years down the road); it's hard to imagine that anyone believed the clones would pay off sooner than that. I think that their current actions have essentially been a raising of the white flag: Apple is either unwilling, or is finally admitting to being unable to compete in any real sense. If the clones were driving Apple into bankruptcy, I think that's about the same thing as being unable to compete.

Of course, I've read quotes by Steve Jobs (a co-founder of Apple, in case you didn't know) from 1996 saying that the PC wars are over, and that Microsoft won. This is the man who reportedly sold all but one share of his Apple stock that he acquired when NeXT was bought by Apple, and who was reputedly very upset when he was ousted from Apple a decade ago. It does not nohow seem to be wise to let this man have any significant say in Apple's direction.

I'd like to think that there's some plan here - a forward-looking plan and not yet another retrenching; something we haven't seen or heard of. But I'm not optimistic. I think there's a very good chance that within 5 years our only PC options will be Microsloth Windex machines. Thus proving once again that the scum also rises.

Michael Rawdon (Contact)