ronboakes_87114 | New Computers (Reply)

One of the good sides of canceling our plans for Australia this summer was that it freed up some of the funds we'd been saving for a couple of years to go (obviously funds that were not enough given housing and related expenses). So, yesterday

robot_grrl and I spent some of these funds on much needed replacement (for Tara's 9-year-old tiBook) and semi-replacement (for my 5-year-old Windoze box).

In addition to the funds being available, the near death of Tara's computer, and the fact that my Windoze box suddenly required that I move my keyboard and mouse connections from PS/2 to USB, pushed us over the edge.

I ordered, online since I was unsure about my employee discount at the stores, a mac mini with maxed out memory, faster proc and 0.5tbyte drive. Then we went to the store in Carlsbad to see if we could get Tara a new macBook -- and let her do one final comparison between the macBook, the various macBook pro models and the macBook air. She finally settled on a macBook, but is having them max out the memory. The store cannot put in the larger hard drive, but I think she'll be fine with 320gbytes which is more than she has now total by a long shot.

But new computers means new names. Currently the computers I've been naming for the last nine or ten years (after giving up on trying to figure out different types of Oak trees) have been named after spaceships: Moya, Talyon (sp?) Serenity, Defiant, and PuddleJumper -- my long retired circa 2000 Gateway tower, Tara's tiBook, my current Windoze box, my Linux server and my laptop respectively. So, it was natural to consider additional spaceships, or at least SF related names.

After debating over Discovery, RedDwarf (which should really belong to a big lumbering box of some sort), Destiny, and the names of some actual spaceships: Appllo, Columbia, Challenger, etc., and after a brief talk with Tara, I settled on "Heart of Gold" (or more likely HeartOfGold). Tara ended up breaking with tradition slightly and has chosen EVA, since a macBook does resemble EVA from WALL-E.

On the other hand, neither of us have our computers yet. Tara's will hopefully be available today and she may be able to pick it up after church (which is in that direction anyway). Mine won't ship until sometime tomorrow and I have no idea where it will ship from.

The iPod replacement I also ordered (mine, which I use almost daily, has taken to pausing randomly when not sitting still -- like when on the train or being slipped back into a pocket) and the video adaptor for my new computer were "ready to ship" as of last night, however.