20 March 1998: Innocent Bystanders

Friday, 20 March 1998:

Innocent Bystanders

So I did indeed go out yesterday and buy a new Macintosh Powerbook. It's a 1400, which basically makes it a mid-range machine. The really nice machines are $4000+, which I wouldn't even pay for a desktop machine, given what I use 'em for. A pretty nice thing anyway, though, with a good color display. It has a funky swappable drive slot, which can hold either a CD-ROM drive or a floppy drive. It comes with both, but I'll probably use the floppy more often. I still need to test it on my network and with my printer, and I want to test hooking it up to my Zip drive and my modem to see if it works with them.

You don't know what "plug and play" means until you've owned a Mac.

I also bought Obsidian, which is a rendered-reality-style puzzle game trying to compete with MYST and Riven.

The graphics renderings are nearly up to Riven's standards, actually, and the animations are better, but the user interface is not as good. In Riven you can look all around you and see your landscape from many different perspectives, and the designers were careful to make sure that if something looks like it can be examined, then it can be examined. In Obsidian you're much more limited in being able to look around, which is a particular shame since there's so much to see from any single vantage point, to be able to orient yourself. And it's not always clear what you can do or where you can go. It really makes you appreciate that it isn't just the Cool Technical Stuff that makes Cyan's games fun.

Oh, and Thomas Dolby's soundtrack is rather limp compared to MYST and Riven's more tuneful backgrounds.

But I'll probably try to solve it anyway. It's a curious enough thing.

I've fallen into an interesting pattern at work the last couple of weeks. I've been getting up earlier, and getting to work a half an hour earlier than usual on Monday and Tuesday, and working like a demon. But then by Thursday afternoon I'm pretty much worn out, and I limp to the end of the week, looking forward to the weekend. I'm not sure I like this cycle. I'm looking forward to bicycling again when it warms up which I think will improve my wakefulness.

When I got home tonight, the cats had knocked a half-loaf of bread off the counter and pulled it across the floor. As I'd been hoping to eat some of it for dinner, I was quite mad at them, and stomped into my bedroom without feeding them and shut the door for an hour or so. They were clearly very disturbed when I finally opened it again. I know I shouldn't take my frustrations out on them, but this really got to me.

Later on I let them out into the building hallway and let them run up and down the halls, which I think they enjoyed a lot. It's funny to watch them gallop. And Newton's sitting on my lap, curled up, as I write this.

I read Douglas Adams' Last Chance to See earlier this week, which is about his trips to see several endangered animal species around the globe. It's humorous at times, but also grim as befits its subject matter. Well-written (as his later stuff tends to be) and sometimes moving. A good read.

And tonight I finished reading C. J. Cherryh's The Pride of Chanur, which is more sophisticated and better-characterized than her other earlier work that I've read (Kesrith and Downbelow Station, both of which are pretty bland in their tone and characterization). I'll probably read the rest of the series - when I have time.

My friend Tracy at work lent me Dorothy Sayers' mystery novel Murder Must Advertise, which I hope to read soon, also. I enjoy some mysteries, but don't read many of them.

Michael Rawdon (Contact)