October 14, 2001
Moving computer platforms
The weekend is coming to a close. It was pretty dreary out this weekend. The dreary weather did give me some time to do some more comparisons and to delve more deeply into Apple's offerings.
In the end, I ordered an iMac Special Edition. The one we ordered looks like the one on the Tech Specs page, the color that they call "graphite".
Nice specs: Motorola 700MHz PowerPC G3 processor, 512 MB of RAM, 60 GB drive, ATI RAGE 128 Ultra graphics accelerator with 16MB of SDRAM, 2 USB ports, 2 Firewire ports, and an ethernet connection to go to my cable modem connection. All built in a nice compact package (no extra computer tower) that should help me reclaim some desk space.
The big influence for me, though, was their new operating system, called OS X. OS X (pronounced "ten", not "ex") has unix underneath it's skin. It adds stability to the system in a way the Windows 2000 made Microsoft Windows much more stable compared to Windows 98. I hate seeing a computer lock up. My unix desktop at work used to stay up for hundreds of days at a time without reboot. Witness:
[46@9:30am]vas1:~/ % uptime
9:30am up 100 day(s), 15:22, 1 user, load average: 1.12, 1.06, 1.04
[47@9:30am]vas1:~/ %
On the home front, the boys slept till 7AM this morning. Michelle and I were beside ourselves! 7AM! Given their track record we almost thought something was wrong up there. Shifting the schedule around like that allowed us to go to the 10:30AM family Mass at Infant Jesus and hang around afterwards for some food and "fellowship".
Claire and I watched the animated version of Lord of the Rings this afternoon. I guess the downside was that I assumed the movie had more closure. I know it's part of a Tolkien trilogy but this seemed to just hang in the middle. I'll have to talk to some guys at work who are familiar with this series.
Hard to believe the weekend is almost over... sniff. ;-(