New computer squee
Ten years ago, I started work at The MathWorks. It seemed to me they looked like a good company to work for, as far as I could tell.
I had no idea how good they'd turn out to be, though. I've been very happy to stay at MathWorks for the intervening years, as I'm appreciated and treated well, and the managers are actually interested in their employees growing and staying satisfied.
Now, as a thank you to me for being there for 10 years, they offered me a gift of my choice (up to a maximum cost). After a little deliberation I decided on a new computer, because most of my leisure activities are on the computer and it seemed to make more sense to get something that'd make my existing hobbies faster and more satisfying rather than get something towards one single leisure activity. My old puter has been getting a bit slow and long in the tooth, and several apps and games (especially Starcraft II) took a very long time to load. And I used to dread rebooting and avoid it for weeks or months, because it'd take ages, sometimes 10 or 20 minutes.
So I ordered myself a new computer from PC Specialist, and decided to focus the expenditure on speed: so I got a 120Gb SSD as the primary disk. The puter arrived on Tuesday, and it's basically all now set up and running, blissfully quickly. It reboots in 15 seconds! Starcraft II loads in 10 seconds!
I was also impressed by the way that cloud storage makes upgrades like this much smoother than they used to be. Chrome is my primary browser, and I have it configured to sync with my Gmail account. Which meant that about a minute after I installed it on the new box, it automatically added all my extensions and stored passwords and so on. Between that and Dropbox and Steam, it's been an incredibly easy upgrade; certainly much less painful than previous occasions.
The one point of fiddliness is getting Cygwin set up with Ruby on Rails, for Multiverse development. I expect this to be quite a pain: it certainly was last time.
But overall, I'm very happy with my new zippy computer. I'm not usually given to Squeeing over Shiny Things... or at least, any tendencies I have that way are usually overruled by my having quite a tight rein on my wallet in most cases. But at the moment, using my new computer just makes me happy, even if what I'm doing is mundane, because it's New and Exciting and Quiet and above all Fast!
I had no idea how good they'd turn out to be, though. I've been very happy to stay at MathWorks for the intervening years, as I'm appreciated and treated well, and the managers are actually interested in their employees growing and staying satisfied.
Now, as a thank you to me for being there for 10 years, they offered me a gift of my choice (up to a maximum cost). After a little deliberation I decided on a new computer, because most of my leisure activities are on the computer and it seemed to make more sense to get something that'd make my existing hobbies faster and more satisfying rather than get something towards one single leisure activity. My old puter has been getting a bit slow and long in the tooth, and several apps and games (especially Starcraft II) took a very long time to load. And I used to dread rebooting and avoid it for weeks or months, because it'd take ages, sometimes 10 or 20 minutes.
So I ordered myself a new computer from PC Specialist, and decided to focus the expenditure on speed: so I got a 120Gb SSD as the primary disk. The puter arrived on Tuesday, and it's basically all now set up and running, blissfully quickly. It reboots in 15 seconds! Starcraft II loads in 10 seconds!
I was also impressed by the way that cloud storage makes upgrades like this much smoother than they used to be. Chrome is my primary browser, and I have it configured to sync with my Gmail account. Which meant that about a minute after I installed it on the new box, it automatically added all my extensions and stored passwords and so on. Between that and Dropbox and Steam, it's been an incredibly easy upgrade; certainly much less painful than previous occasions.
The one point of fiddliness is getting Cygwin set up with Ruby on Rails, for Multiverse development. I expect this to be quite a pain: it certainly was last time.
But overall, I'm very happy with my new zippy computer. I'm not usually given to Squeeing over Shiny Things... or at least, any tendencies I have that way are usually overruled by my having quite a tight rein on my wallet in most cases. But at the moment, using my new computer just makes me happy, even if what I'm doing is mundane, because it's New and Exciting and Quiet and above all Fast!