2x Computer
This post was first made on July 18th, 2007, on Facebook.
I'm living a double life right now - a life of clunky, slow PCness, and also a life of freewheeling, bohemian Mactacularity. When I graduated from 8th grade, my dad got me a Dell laptop as a sort of graduation gift to replace my seriously old desktop PC. That laptop (which was the stickiest of the icky in 2003) weathered all four years of high school. It served me well, but now it is old and beaten, not to mention packed to the very gunwales with goat porn. My father, being awesome (and not just because he reads this blog) bought me a brand new Macbook a few weeks ago, and I've been having a wonderful time getting to know it. I can't help but wonder if an Apple will do better after four years of college than PC would...
My Mac has built in wireless capacity so that I can get Internet anywhere in the house, a built in webcam, it's much lighter than the PC, it has more hard drive space, it moves faster, it looks cooler, I look cooler when I use it, and frankly, this thing is so damn convenient that if it started shooting coffee out the CD drive I wouldn't be all that shocked. As I write this, I'm lying on the couch in my living room, listening to a CD as I rip it onto my hard drive, and enjoying the pleasant sensation of having something warm in my lap. My heavy PC is in my room, tethered to the desk by multiple wires and cables that Steve Jobs has somehow done away with entirely in his design. If I wanted to surf the Internet on the patio with my PC, I'd have to unplug all the wires, shut the lid on the computer, wait for it to power down, then grab the AC power cord and hurry out to the patio before the malfunction-prone batteries died. Then, I'd have to hastily plug everything in, then ask Dad for the wireless card, then plug it in, then have the computer give me some sort of error, then ask Dad for help, then get a very spotty, slow version of the Internet, about which time it starts to rain. While my PC was a laptop, it felt like more of a desktop because the desktop was where it always was. Understandably, I'm having a ball with my light, convenient, easy-to-use Mac that I can take anywhere.
We still have my old PC, though, which is sort of making me uncomfortable. Every day when I go back to my room to go to bed, my PC is there, virtually untouched all day, watching me from the desk. "Oh, well look who decided to come home." It's saying. "Did that new little slut of yours get tired of couch time? I guess because you can't take pictures with me or take me with you everywhere I'm not even worth using, is that it?"
The thing is, I still do need the PC, not because I enjoy it, but because all of my music is still on it, and because at the moment I'm too lazy to redownload all the Firefox extensions for a browser based RPG that I play. So sometimes I'll be lying in bed with my Mac while listening to music being played with my PC, which is the technological equivalent of Julia Roberts fooling around with her current husband while making Lyle Lovett watch and play 'Cowboy Man'.
I come by this honestly - my Dad owns seven computers, three of them Macs - but it still feels bizarre to be able to alternate between computers while one is loading a page, or to take a picture of yourself with the built in webcam on one computer and have your old computer be in the background. Sometimes, I put the Mac next to the PC and recreate those "I'm a Mac" "I'm a PC" Apple ads (although if my PC were John Hodgman I wouldn't neglect it the way I am). Eventually, once we get the music transferred, we're going to get rid of the PC and I'll have to try to cope with having only one computer in the house, which, after a few weeks of this, is going to be a bit of a change. Most of the time now I leave my Mac plugged in on the endtable in the living room, so if I get the sudden urge to Google something (or, y'know, hit the goat porn) all I have to do is decide whether I'm closer to my room (at one end of the house) or the living room (at the other) and go toward the nearest computer. After this sort of convenience (that, once again, the Mac is responsible for) it'll be hard to go back to walking.
Oh, and Congress had a slumber party. Yeah, wonder if that fixed the country...
I'm living a double life right now - a life of clunky, slow PCness, and also a life of freewheeling, bohemian Mactacularity. When I graduated from 8th grade, my dad got me a Dell laptop as a sort of graduation gift to replace my seriously old desktop PC. That laptop (which was the stickiest of the icky in 2003) weathered all four years of high school. It served me well, but now it is old and beaten, not to mention packed to the very gunwales with goat porn. My father, being awesome (and not just because he reads this blog) bought me a brand new Macbook a few weeks ago, and I've been having a wonderful time getting to know it. I can't help but wonder if an Apple will do better after four years of college than PC would...
My Mac has built in wireless capacity so that I can get Internet anywhere in the house, a built in webcam, it's much lighter than the PC, it has more hard drive space, it moves faster, it looks cooler, I look cooler when I use it, and frankly, this thing is so damn convenient that if it started shooting coffee out the CD drive I wouldn't be all that shocked. As I write this, I'm lying on the couch in my living room, listening to a CD as I rip it onto my hard drive, and enjoying the pleasant sensation of having something warm in my lap. My heavy PC is in my room, tethered to the desk by multiple wires and cables that Steve Jobs has somehow done away with entirely in his design. If I wanted to surf the Internet on the patio with my PC, I'd have to unplug all the wires, shut the lid on the computer, wait for it to power down, then grab the AC power cord and hurry out to the patio before the malfunction-prone batteries died. Then, I'd have to hastily plug everything in, then ask Dad for the wireless card, then plug it in, then have the computer give me some sort of error, then ask Dad for help, then get a very spotty, slow version of the Internet, about which time it starts to rain. While my PC was a laptop, it felt like more of a desktop because the desktop was where it always was. Understandably, I'm having a ball with my light, convenient, easy-to-use Mac that I can take anywhere.
We still have my old PC, though, which is sort of making me uncomfortable. Every day when I go back to my room to go to bed, my PC is there, virtually untouched all day, watching me from the desk. "Oh, well look who decided to come home." It's saying. "Did that new little slut of yours get tired of couch time? I guess because you can't take pictures with me or take me with you everywhere I'm not even worth using, is that it?"
The thing is, I still do need the PC, not because I enjoy it, but because all of my music is still on it, and because at the moment I'm too lazy to redownload all the Firefox extensions for a browser based RPG that I play. So sometimes I'll be lying in bed with my Mac while listening to music being played with my PC, which is the technological equivalent of Julia Roberts fooling around with her current husband while making Lyle Lovett watch and play 'Cowboy Man'.
I come by this honestly - my Dad owns seven computers, three of them Macs - but it still feels bizarre to be able to alternate between computers while one is loading a page, or to take a picture of yourself with the built in webcam on one computer and have your old computer be in the background. Sometimes, I put the Mac next to the PC and recreate those "I'm a Mac" "I'm a PC" Apple ads (although if my PC were John Hodgman I wouldn't neglect it the way I am). Eventually, once we get the music transferred, we're going to get rid of the PC and I'll have to try to cope with having only one computer in the house, which, after a few weeks of this, is going to be a bit of a change. Most of the time now I leave my Mac plugged in on the endtable in the living room, so if I get the sudden urge to Google something (or, y'know, hit the goat porn) all I have to do is decide whether I'm closer to my room (at one end of the house) or the living room (at the other) and go toward the nearest computer. After this sort of convenience (that, once again, the Mac is responsible for) it'll be hard to go back to walking.
Oh, and Congress had a slumber party. Yeah, wonder if that fixed the country...