Exponential Growth

My MacBook is chock full of crap. My hard drive is jammed to the gills; I'm playing with mere megs of elbow room these days as I figure out which of my 3,452 songs I can delete, or finally go through all my photos and clean them up and archive them.

Or get rid of all my "files" on Scotticus.

I was talking with my Dad and of course he had an extra external hard drive lying around collecting dust, so he gave it to me. Score!

He mentioned that he recently bought a 500GB drive for $89 or thereabouts; back when he got our first computer, an Apple IIGS (which was an amazing, superior machine in its day), he eventually bought a 45MB - that's megs, not gigs - external hard drive for about $389, plus another $100 for a SCSI card for the thing - that's almost 500 clams for a mere extra 45MB. At the time, that was a lot of memory.

That's 11,111% more memory for less than 1/5th the price. Of course this was back about 1989 or so, so it was 20 years ago. Still, pretty amazing when you think about it.

Or is the real amazing thing that that was 20 years ago?!? Criminy.

Finding Meaning in the Suffering

The good thing about losing one's hard drive is that it acts as a catalyst to finish some tasks that have been on the back burner for a while:

1. Clean up my laptop. This is now a fait accompli, as the entirety of my data is now floating around in some internets tube.
2. Import my CD collection to iTunes. I had done this for a few of my CDs, but now I'm sitting here watching the Sox and feeding my old CDs into my new laptop (for all intents and purposes). This is kind of a process of discovery, because I'm coming across some awesome stuff I had forgotten about: Siamese Dream. Supernatural. Crosby, Stills & Nash. Throwing Copper. Sand in the Vaseline. Doggystyle. Right Here, Right Now. (That list should give you a good idea of my eclectic musical taste.) I'm psyched to just kick back and check out some relatively old tunes. I'm gradually building my digital music collection in respectable fashion.
   

Out da Game

My lovely MacBook decided to commit seppuku on Saturday. After a lengthy phone conversation with tech support, the woman with whom I spoke said I'd have to send in the little guy for repairs. So I have lacked the internets at my apartment since Sat, and lemme tell you whut, it has been a difficult trial for me thus far. This leads me to the conclusion that I am more or less always online when I am awake - not necessarily a bad thing, but when 8:00 at night rolls around and I get jittery because I can't check my Gmail, I can't help but think I might have a slight problem.

I received one of those boxes to mail it to the repair center, and the address they had for me made me laugh:

Michael Rhéaume
A-Side University
259 North St.
Apt. #3
Boston, MA 02113

I forgot I amused myself when setting up my new account and put in A-Side University as the organization. (We are not accredited, btw).

So I'll be in and out of the online scene for the next week plus, depending on the celerity with which the Appleites can repair my fried hard drive.

The bright spot in all this is that I am fully covered under my extended Apple Care plan, which my parents got for me as a gift over Xmas. At the time, I was decidedly unenthused about it. Yay, extended support! But it turns out that it was both a prescient and extremely valuable gift.

Parallels

Parallels is a pretty sweet piece of software. It allows you to run Windows XP while concurrently running OS X. I'm working on a new iMac with the 1.83 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor and 1.25 GB of memory. Parallels boots up XP quickly and I can run it in a window or maximize the screen - switching between operating systems is a keystroke, with a typical Apple snazzy visual transition. Working in it has been very smooth thus far, although I'm basically just using ACT on there. Generally if I have FireFox and Entourage running in OS X at the same time, there's no slowdown; if I start opening up other apps it tends to lag a bit. Parallels is certainly a memory hog, but it's a fairly elegant program.

Of course, one might ask, why would you want to run Windows software if you own a Mac? Good question.

Jobs Would Be Proud

I work for a small marketing firm. All of our graphic design work is done on Macs, which until recently were a combination of G4s and G5s. As of a week or so ago, my boss upgraded our only permanent designer to a Mac Pro with a huge display. Really a lovely piece of machinery. I, with my MacBook at home and my Dell Dimension POS at work, was insanely jealous.

However, my boss also wanted to upgrade the three of us using the old Dells. At first he was going to go with new Dells, but some 11th hour consultation with our part-time IT guy and some decidedly biased consultation on my part resulted in his pulling the trigger on three brand spanking new iMacs.



Now, as the proud owner of one of the original iMacs - those heavy, oddly shaped yet quaintly colored behemoths - it was really a fantastic experience to pull that monitor/CPU out of the box, set it next to the electronic dinosaur currently taking up space on my desk, power that baby up and listen to the soothing sounds of an Apple machine coming to life.

Also, considering our situation and various apps we've been using (read: trapped in since 1999-era Windows BS), we installed Windows XP and Parallels on the new iMacs. This software allows you to run Windows and OS X concurrently, without having to reboot (as is the native state of the new dual-core Intel processors by way of the BootCamp app). Very, very cool, although insanely memory-heavy (my boss decided to skimp on the relatively cheap RAM on a $1000 computer, as is his wont, but our IT guy is running an end-around to add some more so I can at least open Text Editor while Parallels is running).

One of my coworkers had never even used a Mac before; it was great to see her face light up with pure delight at every bell and whistle on the new iMac. And the new tiny-nippled mice are really sweet as well. And 3/5 of the office can now video conference from our desks. Saves us a five foot walk to the conference room!

Also, now I can bring my MacBook to work like some sort of corporate hipster and transfer my pirated mp3s legally purchased music onto my new iMac. Pure bliss, people.

Today was spent setting up these new beauties of computers, rearranging and cleaning a lot of the office, securing some new business, and having a couple cocktails as Patricia came in to vacuum and empty the trash.

Really, a fantastic Friday.

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