Sun - July 31, 2005

40 Gigs just won't cut it anymore 


I remember the day when my hands first touched a personal computer. A year before macintosh, a decade before windows; my family got an Apple IIe. Most people today probably haven't heard of floppy discs. There was no internal hard drive. I think it only had 32k or 128k of memory. And the screen was green. We were all over it like it was the best thing since sliced bread. The thing was running the whole day and we were playing all sorts of games. It wasn't the first time we saw a videogame (we all grew up in the Atari generation). But it was the first time we saw a computer do different things. My cousins were able to print something off it but somehow I wasn't able to. Oh well. Every application fit into these 5 1/2 inch floppy discs and there were things you had to consider if the data you had needed a double density disk (you can write on both sides of the disk) and how many you needed. I mean let's face it, 128k doesn't hold a lot of stuff.

My dad got an IBM in the office and I learned how to fiddle with DOS as well. Every time I was in the office, I'd spend all the time in the computer room if no one was doing anything important in there and loaded different kinds of games. I mean let's face it, I was barely ten years old.

In 1993, the moment I stepped into college, my father got me my first mac. We had been fiddling with his powerbook a few months before and he decided to get us a desktop so we would leave his portable alone. The Centris 660AV had 200 MB of hard drive space and I think 8MB of RAM. But hell, it ran Myst and Photoshop 1.0 on it. It was sweet! First time I heard a CD play through it's speakers and play movies through it.

Three years ago I bought my very first computer and it came with a 40GB HD and 256 MB of RAM which wasn't nearly enough and I eventually upgraded to 640 MB. I never had a computer for myself like this and I loaded it with my iTunes, pictures, documents and so on.

Today I need a bigger hard drive. I need a 100GB HD with 1GB of RAM. I found this out after all I got from my mac this week was "your hard drive is almost full". I can't believe these operating systems eat so much space. There's always a lot of cache so it seems to move faster. The applications are now more RAM hungry than ever before. All pointing the consumer to buy a newer, faster, bigger computer. Thus driving the consumer cycle. I feel like Stewie Griffin in one episode of the Family Guy. , "Please sir, please, no more. I can't fit anymore in there". My 4 GB of pictures and over 10GB of music won't fit anymore in 40GB with all the applications and the Tiger operating system I'm running now.

I guess I'll just have to buy a new computer and unload it there. Of course I still need to backup that external HD I have.
 

Posted at 07:08 PM    

Tue - July 5, 2005

Podcasting 


I'm seriously thinking of putting up a podcast with a few friends. Probably something like 15 to 30 minutes about anything and everything that we see on the road. Pretty much back seat drivers.

The whole technology is just sooo cool right now. Makes everyone's opinion accessible to a large audience without expensive hardware and commercials. Which you must admit that it is the coolest thing. I don't need commercials right now.

Now I wish that dot mac would incorporate it into their services. They might as well. I'm paying a $100 for this and they should incorporate it into their next update. 

Posted at 11:23 PM    

Sun - July 3, 2005

Another blog 


My powerbook had to go into the shop for repairs and they changed the logic board and the hard drive. Plus my battery has been recalled. Initially I brought in my powerbook for repairs after a loud buzzing sound was coming from my powerbook. At first I thought it was the fan. The fan was defective or something. The repair guys at first didn't hear it so I took it home and it started up again. I brought it back and this time they did. They figured it was the logic board so they ordered the parts and replaced it. Fired up my powerbook but the noise was still there. The only thing they haven't replaced was the hard drive so they ordered parts for that too. And finally that was it. So I have a powerbook with brand new internal parts. So practically the whole day yesterday I had to reinstall everything back in and update everything. While installing my screenplay software, I ran into serializing problems since I did not de-authorize my previous hard drive. I had to wait till tech support was awake in the US and give them a call about it. A very friendly support service helped me. It didn't take more than 10 minutes and I got it up an running again (Thank you Final Draft!).

It seems I need to bring it in again. When charging, the powerlight of the power adapter goes off. Sometimes it's still charging, sometimes it's not. So it means another trip to my friendly Authorized Apple Service Center. Since the logic board was changed I can no longer access through the "about this mac" menu the serial number. I have to look around for it now. At least it's running much much quietly now. Well here we go again with blog, hopefully the last time. 

Posted at 12:36 AM    


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