Cougar WebWorks 
Further
Adventures of a Rogue Journalist
Computer Times
11 August 1999
Upgrade for Speed Because Time is Running Out?
It takes half a minute to load this "gargantuan" program, and I gaze into space while it does so, contemplating my $2000 outlay for a new engine to cut that speed to ten, or maybe even nine seconds.
Does this sound like you?
Wait--the purchase is only half done at this point: I make the call tomorrow. Is a solar eclipse an auspicious time to upgrade? Ask Nostradamus Industries, maker of the heralded Comet chipset...
Is it the end of the world--or do we have to wait another thirteen years before the speed of loading and processing reaches the nil point, and all events past present and future coalesce into one throbbing unity...
Gotta get that vehicle up to speed. No more stewing over a measly 44 dollars here, a hundred and eight there. Get into the overclocking generation, and cruise at the speed of thought into the night with your clean machine: doesn't this sound like home, the purring 327 in the cherry-cola Chevy, the 440 rubber-laying Plymouth?
Us guys gotta get around. No jewels for the lady, this time. A ninety-dollar used fourteen inch, and a rent-a-guitar for the kid: cheap games on the 486. At the correspondence school gym where I picked up my daughter's refurbished iMac, the floor was covered in a sea of 286's and 386's, plastic wrapped like so many drones from "Invasion of the Body Snatchers." On the round table a ring of bright blue Macs shine light knights about to rescue the youth of today--or consoles from the Enterprise, with its captains wearing enigmatic smiles.
Where is this heading? No, it doesn't matter about my two grand: my father made it in oil. He's dead now so who's complaining. We ride the millenium out in style, n'est-ce pas?
Otherwise there's only work and music. This digitizer knows a voice all its own, calling through the nights and days like the long ribbon of highway between this forest and the town. Either way I gotta commute so better compute. Half the budget for Toyota and Celeron? Well, they're part of the family now.
Gotta run, gang's back from town...
© Nowick Gray
Retail Therapy: Decision Making in the Computer Age
Retail Therapy 2: Random Brief Downtimes
Learn djembe and dundun rhythms the easy way