Movin' on up...

Is there any better feeling than knowing there's a box full of shiny new hardware on the way? I can almost smell the outgassing long-chain monomers now. Things have been kinda tight this year financially, but I forgot that I can cash out excess personal/sick time at work at the end of the year, so I converted enough to swing the new computer and to put a deposit on a new engine for Das Bus.

This will actually be my first Mac - At home, I've been a Windows user exclusively (except for playing around with some Linux distros) ever since I packed up the Commodore 64, simply because games were important and commodity hardware is dirt cheap by nature. The Mac Mini changes all that, though. Persistent problems with Windows (nothing unusual, just the same problems everyone has) coupled with ever-more-frequent hardware problems with my 4-year-old box in the past year made me decide to give it a shot. A co-worker assures me I can use my current external USB hard drive & DVD burner, and I haven't played PC games since college - 95% of my computer use nowadays is simple email, web browsing, typing letters and pulling pictures off my digital camera. The only potential sticking point was that I have some high-end software (PhotoShop, Adobe Premiere) that I won't be able to use anymore, but A.) most of the versions I have are already 5 or 6 years old, and B.) I rarely use them for anything more complicated than cropping photos or editing home movies, so I don't think it's anything that the iLife bundle can't handle. (Besides, there's a spankin' new PowerMac G5 gathering dust at work with Final Cut Studio if I want to get fancy. Throw in OpenOffice and the Gimp, (both free), and we're set.

Probably the only way to make this entry remotely interesting is to mention that a former co-worker of mine was in one of the original Apple "Switch" ads. Aaron was the Network Admin at a television station I used to work at, and became very familiar with the Macs used by the editors & art department - he's become quite the Apple devotee.