hardware; flop
Tired. Augh. AUGH. I was on the 6:45am train from Newark this morning. I got about two things done today, not including ogling personal tech upgrades. Tomorrow's another day.
Occurs to me that maybe there are multiple causes for the exhaustion, not JUST a melatonin haze, and that the sudden and unprecedented craving for land meat might also have something to do with it. Someday I will buy groceries. NTS: you remember how gut-crushingly horrible it was going back to work the day after Wicked Womyn '07? Try to PLAN FOR THAT when contemplating attending Wicked Womyn '09 and bookending it with travel days to boot. They call it decompression for a reason, and I do not have the fortitude to accomplish that in a coach seat.
I went to Tekserve to see about an external backup drive, since my laptop battery is gone. They sold out of the one I want (5-year warranty, crucial for those of us running five-year-old hardware with no great desire to retire it) in the time it took me to get there. Next week, says Sales Guy. I shouldn't screw them out of a sale by ordering online after picking their brains for advice, I guess. I tried out the current Apple offerings (and a Cintiq, which I'll get to.)
Macbook Air: kind of like that enormous coffee table that's 1mm thick. Not upgradeable. I am not their target demographic.
Macbook cockaigne: Aluminum one seems solid; polycarbonate one, not so much, but this polycarbonate laptop has mostly held up to several years of life in a backpack. Lack of Firewire port making me go a bit crosseyed at the prospect of buying a backup drive explicitly because it speaks Firewire. Sales Guy opined that this is Apple's idea of market segmentation. If so, it's a truly baffling item to treat as a differentiator, but not enough to tip me over the edge to an MBP by itself.
Macbook Pro: uh, okay, the new 0-button touchpad is weird. I have one of these at work, preceding the 0-button thing. It's really, really sexy. I don't know if it's $2,000 worth of sexy, even amortized over the next, say, five years, even considering that I want it to be a professional machine by all means. I don't do video editing, but I do very much want to do 3D modeling work. It sounds, per dymaxion, like that area may not be a point in favor of Macs, so I think I need to start asking actual designers about their working preferences.
Wacom Cintiq, and all the above: would be more amazing with greater resolution. Even at a maxed-out resolution according to system prefs, it's still ugly and chunky. I mean, we now have ginormous, full-color, pressure-sensitive displays you can just balance on your knees and draw on, so maybe I should be whining at the lack of 2.5D holographic projection rendering (see also: flying car), but I am surprised that the display resolution is invariably so poor relative to screen size.
Windows boxes: Not completely off the table. Dell and HP hardware are both permanently blacklisted. Dual-booting on Apple hardware is a thought. Fujitsu Lifebooks keep popping up as cute and useful alternatives. Would like Microsoft driver authors to read the book on moving from one wireless network to another without having to reboot every time.
----
I should really sleep, desperately, yes. I got one piece of mail that is making me ecstatically grinny, on top of so much else that colored the last couple of days.
Also, I finally got my shower fixed.
Occurs to me that maybe there are multiple causes for the exhaustion, not JUST a melatonin haze, and that the sudden and unprecedented craving for land meat might also have something to do with it. Someday I will buy groceries. NTS: you remember how gut-crushingly horrible it was going back to work the day after Wicked Womyn '07? Try to PLAN FOR THAT when contemplating attending Wicked Womyn '09 and bookending it with travel days to boot. They call it decompression for a reason, and I do not have the fortitude to accomplish that in a coach seat.
I went to Tekserve to see about an external backup drive, since my laptop battery is gone. They sold out of the one I want (5-year warranty, crucial for those of us running five-year-old hardware with no great desire to retire it) in the time it took me to get there. Next week, says Sales Guy. I shouldn't screw them out of a sale by ordering online after picking their brains for advice, I guess. I tried out the current Apple offerings (and a Cintiq, which I'll get to.)
Macbook Air: kind of like that enormous coffee table that's 1mm thick. Not upgradeable. I am not their target demographic.
Macbook cockaigne: Aluminum one seems solid; polycarbonate one, not so much, but this polycarbonate laptop has mostly held up to several years of life in a backpack. Lack of Firewire port making me go a bit crosseyed at the prospect of buying a backup drive explicitly because it speaks Firewire. Sales Guy opined that this is Apple's idea of market segmentation. If so, it's a truly baffling item to treat as a differentiator, but not enough to tip me over the edge to an MBP by itself.
Macbook Pro: uh, okay, the new 0-button touchpad is weird. I have one of these at work, preceding the 0-button thing. It's really, really sexy. I don't know if it's $2,000 worth of sexy, even amortized over the next, say, five years, even considering that I want it to be a professional machine by all means. I don't do video editing, but I do very much want to do 3D modeling work. It sounds, per dymaxion, like that area may not be a point in favor of Macs, so I think I need to start asking actual designers about their working preferences.
Wacom Cintiq, and all the above: would be more amazing with greater resolution. Even at a maxed-out resolution according to system prefs, it's still ugly and chunky. I mean, we now have ginormous, full-color, pressure-sensitive displays you can just balance on your knees and draw on, so maybe I should be whining at the lack of 2.5D holographic projection rendering (see also: flying car), but I am surprised that the display resolution is invariably so poor relative to screen size.
Windows boxes: Not completely off the table. Dell and HP hardware are both permanently blacklisted. Dual-booting on Apple hardware is a thought. Fujitsu Lifebooks keep popping up as cute and useful alternatives. Would like Microsoft driver authors to read the book on moving from one wireless network to another without having to reboot every time.
----
I should really sleep, desperately, yes. I got one piece of mail that is making me ecstatically grinny, on top of so much else that colored the last couple of days.
Also, I finally got my shower fixed.