I'm not the only Vegan in Invercargill! PHOTO

There have been two instances in my life when I would have crashed a car, had I been driving.  The first was while visiting Wellington, going past "Magnum Mac", and seeing a Power Mac G5, complete with 30 inch Apple Cinema Display...

Gazing longingly through the shop window

 I'd always just KNOWN I preferred Apple Computers... from growing up with green on black classics, to actually finding Mac OS ... err...6, 7, 8?  more interesting on the ancient primary school computers, rather than the "newer" beige boxes running Windows 95.

But they were very rare in Invercargill!  True, during the early 90's, we had an Apple store here, selling, I dunno, Performas or some crap?  Until Sculley, Spindler, Amelio and co drove the company facedown into the ground.  That's before The Second Coming of Steve of course. 

High end Macs were rare.  I thought I'd never see a G5, they were like Lamborghini's, and I certainly didn't live in LA.

I was excited when my primary school got iMac G3's...the principal got an iMac DV for himself, with black casing...and...coming with an Optical Pro Mouse... the first mouse I'd ever seen without those awful "balls", it was glossy black, and it lit up.  I was in love!

I mean, the computers I used daily had mice with serial ports for crying out loud! They SCREWED IN to the big beige box!

So of course I was infatuated with this, you didn't have no crappy "mousepad", you had a BURNOUT pad! 



Sure, the red glowing "eye" reminded you of HAL 9000, it made you feel like we really WERE living in the future! Exciting times :-)

So imagine how excited I was to see an actual Power Mac G5, in the aluminium, with dual 64 bit Central Processing Units... I thought I'd died and gone to lonely loser heaven!

Check out the price tag for the screen by itself...

The 30 inch screen ALONE cost $6539 NZD....  Thats barely under 5K USD in todays money, I'm sure things have changed since the heady days of 2005, pre iPhone for crying out loud!

I later bought a secondhand Power Mac G5 of my own, with dual 2.3Ghz CPU's, and, fittingly, a 23 inch ACD.  It was marvellous, and to this day, it may be big, it was loud, it got very hot, it may be utterly outperformed by my i7 iMac... but THATS what a workstation SHOULD look like.  Like how broadcasters use the same million year old metal grille microphones, or how shoes like the Chuck Taylor have remained almost unchanged over the decades, thats what REAL computers look like.

I've got my G5 hidden in its original box in my attic.

What other MIRACLE could have me equally excited, as if a lightning bolt had struck?  Why, seeing a car bumper sticker, thats what!

I'm not the only Vegan living here!

And spotted on the SAME street I live on too!

To show what a loser I am, I went and said hello, and gave a couple of my Invercargill Vegan Society cards, along with one from the Auckland Abolitionist Vegan Association 

Vegans were as rare as Power Mac G5's in Invercargill, now I've met another one living here :-)   See, we're not all so lucky as to live in Auckland, where you can prance about handing out Vegan cupcakes with all your Vegan friends before going to a Vegan Restaurant :-)  We dont leave Facebook messages like (well, certainly not "we" when there was only one of you...) "oh, I'm so full from eating Vegan cupcakes!...", no, we cry ourselves to sleep each night, with only The Bottle to console our hurt.

Another Vegan in Invercargill, I hope we can stay in touch!  Maybe the "Invercargill Vegan Society" will soon have a second member?  Or perhaps hearing of how I loved exotic computers, and USB mice will have made me un-friendable?  Hopefully we'll soon see :-)