Blood, sweat, and tears…
…is about what me and my 12″ G4 powerbook have been through together for the last four years. It was my dream computer. I know better than to have a dream computer or a dream vee-hickle or whatever but that machine and I were buddies. At the time I got it, I had been sharing an aging strawberry iMac with two other people, one of them a teenager. It was just about the end of the days of shameless music downloading and sometimes I’d get up at my usual time of 0-dark-thirty and there’d be so much stuff on that thing that I couldn’t run applications like Appleworks, which, at the time, I was using to make graphics for the YAG website. Yes, I really was using Appleworks.
Anywho, it was getting hard to run my life, not to mention a busy non-profit organization, on a computer that I had to share with two other people. Then one day, I opened up the latest New Yorker and THERE IT WAS!!! The 12″ G4 powerbook! It was BEAUTIFUL!! I HAD to have it! One tiny little problem. Canya guess? (Hint: Kalamazoo College.) I plotted and I planned and after a month or so, I managed somehow to finagle a way to obtain one of those cute little beasties. I didn’t tell the GG and managed somehow — even though he was home when it was delivered — to get the thing unpacked, up and running before he knew anything about it. Finally, he came out to the front living room to pick up another cute little beastie, the one we used to call Guinea Pig among other things (he died in December 2003). I think the GG jumped about three feet when he saw me with my new powerbook.
That powerbook has had a hard life. For four years it went *everywhere* with me. Up and down the I75 SUV Speedway. All over The Planet Ann Arbor. War driving. For almost the whole first year, I didn’t even turn on the waaaarless network card. We didn’t have waaaarless at home yet and I was clueless. The first time I got online via waaaarless was outside the makeup room backstage at the Lydia Mendelssohn Theatre. I turned on my card and the uProd network showed up and email started coming in. I squealed, “I’m on the Internet!” and my friend Paula (who died in December 2004, sigh) came running out of the makeup room to help me celebrate. After that, I began discovering waaaarless networks just about everywhere I went and it got to be a frustration when YAG was doing a play somewhere there *wasn’t* a waaaarless network.
2.something gigabytes… Hmm… I needed to install Flash. There was no way. So yes, I have one o’ them thar Macbooks now, as a few of you knew and a *very* few of you guessed. This time it was the GG’s *idea*! (And, no, it was *not* in the budget. Same reason, different kid.) It wasn’t my dream computer and I was planning to try to keep my 12″ G4 powerbook going at least a bit longer. I loved it. It was a dream computer. Sigh. Life goes on. This one is a little bit wider but it’s thinner and I think it might be a bit lighter weight. I am having *no* problem getting used to the faster processor and comparatively huge amount of free disk space. A few years from now, I’m sure I’ll be cramped again. That’s the way it goes.
I can’t say sayonara to my old friend quite yet though. Its destiny is to serve as an accomplice to the GG’s new GPS unit. With any luck, it’ll have a few more good years.