Technical Difficulties

I’m not sure where I first heard the term “Horse Latitudes,” but I believe it was probably courtesy of The Doors. If I understand it correctly, it's shorthand for seas that are so cripplingly calm that in order to make any progress, the heaviest cargo –- invariably the horses -- had to be thrown overboard to lighten the load. Ol’ Jim Morrison wrote a poem about the horror those unfortunate animals must have felt as their ponderous bulk plunged into the merciless deep. But in order to advance, sacrifices had to be made.

I’ve been having to do a bit of same here at the homestead (although it's significantly less dramatic than I'd imagine). After about six years of service, my long-suffering iMac is struggling. Even after clearing caches, emptying the trash and offloading heaps of heavy files to an external drive, my startup disc on my laughably outdated machine (OS X 10.5 or so) keeps filling up and wheezing like an asthmatic. It’s hugely frustrating.

Until I get this problem resolved -– either via some magic solution you, dear reader, might provide, or from shedding the bread to facilitate a proper upgrade to a new machine –- there might be a significant slowdown in activity here.