Last night I watched Pink Floyd At Pompeii and I realized how much I missed that – how much I missed something to complement the very today music I otherwise listen to.

Anyway. In the director's cut of the movie there is *much* talking. And they talk many times about their gear, their frictions, money and fame. Frictions, money and fame are ok for such a famous a rock band. But gear? About who's controlling who – is the artist controlling the tools or the tools end up controlling the artist – and the answer was, of corse, that they still manage to control the tools and they're not corrupted by them. But only because they focus on their music.

And I remember that young designers I knew just a few years ago (myself included) used to talk much about the gear. First about airbrushes (at that time only Russian airbrushes were to be found in Romania, and they were not that great) and then about computers: I have a DX2! oh, I just got a DX4! come check my hot P100! and so on. The same thing was happening in Macintosh world also – is that a Quadra?, I have a 7500!, look at my brand new 8500!, on your knees everybody and be quiet: this is my new non-beige G3!

There is much talk about gear in these days. Maybe platforms (that's fun), new Illustrator releases (not fun) or product design, but not speed and ranking tests. I just edited at the end of 2003 a 1.96 GBytes Photoshop file on my PowerBook G4 while rendering huge 3D files. Think: 2GB PSDs on a laptop!!! Do I need more power? Yeah, would be nice to have a dual G5 17 inch ÜberPowerBook just in case I'll have to come up with some 15x5m 300dpi posters, but I can manage just about everything else on my present laptop hooked to my 21 inch LaCie ElectronBlue. It feels right.

I'm glad we finally got over the who's controlling who gear talk. We did, did we?