last 2 days
My daughter Ariann had her first day of school today. She loved it! There were so many kids to play with, and things to do ... it's wonderful for Gina and I to have a little time to ourselves, too, without really paying for it, per se. We took advantage of it today: Going to a kolache shop that turned out to be rather mediocre (and overpriced), going to Goodwill and laughing a lot at the silly things we found, continuing the Great Computer Search by going up north to the Goodwill computer store and not really finding anything there. The we went to a place called Discount Electronics, where we found a Dell Optiplex GX280.
It's a sweet machine. It's a high-end business class box that's been tricked out to the top-of-the-line specs, at least for that model when it was available from Hell. And whereas it really feels to me like I'm selling my soul to the Devil, if there is such a being, I can not, alas, afford to have very much in the way of principles. Sure, I want a Macintosh, but a Mac equivalent to what I got today would be about $3000 at least, and I didn't have that much to play with. And sure, if I have to break ranks to nose in to the PC camp, then I'd rather do with with AMD processor chips, the 'underdog' beneath the massive bootheel of Intel behemoth. Or at least build my own box. But as I said, we're not rich enough to be principled; we have to get things where we can, and the cheapest things are provided by the largest companies. Doing it this way saved us some money.
The service was great, anyway.
I've been cleaning my desk today, in preparation to put the beast on it. I'll be running my old Mac and the new machine together for a while, to transfer data and such -- if anyone knows how to make an OS 9 Mac and a Windows XP Pro box network through Firewire, I'd love to hear. And as soon as I can, I'll be getting stickers and such to deface the Dell logo on the machine: I want them to say things like "Corporate America Sucks" and whatnot. Having worked in it for some time, and now being a pawn of it, I can say that's true, at least from my perspective.
It's a sweet machine. It's a high-end business class box that's been tricked out to the top-of-the-line specs, at least for that model when it was available from Hell. And whereas it really feels to me like I'm selling my soul to the Devil, if there is such a being, I can not, alas, afford to have very much in the way of principles. Sure, I want a Macintosh, but a Mac equivalent to what I got today would be about $3000 at least, and I didn't have that much to play with. And sure, if I have to break ranks to nose in to the PC camp, then I'd rather do with with AMD processor chips, the 'underdog' beneath the massive bootheel of Intel behemoth. Or at least build my own box. But as I said, we're not rich enough to be principled; we have to get things where we can, and the cheapest things are provided by the largest companies. Doing it this way saved us some money.
The service was great, anyway.
I've been cleaning my desk today, in preparation to put the beast on it. I'll be running my old Mac and the new machine together for a while, to transfer data and such -- if anyone knows how to make an OS 9 Mac and a Windows XP Pro box network through Firewire, I'd love to hear. And as soon as I can, I'll be getting stickers and such to deface the Dell logo on the machine: I want them to say things like "Corporate America Sucks" and whatnot. Having worked in it for some time, and now being a pawn of it, I can say that's true, at least from my perspective.