Attended the festival this weekend. Ended up going both Saturday and Sunday, since I really had nothing better to do. The scallop shucking and net mending contests were fun, but nothing compared to seeing my “company” thanked in the in-kind sponsors list. Heh heh.
I’m sure Laura’s glad it’s over, as it’s one less thing she has to plan for/around.
The trigger has almost been pulled on this thing. Laura and I are going to consider it our early Christmas gifts (as it probably won’t ship till November anyways). These are some scary, unexplored waters I’m diving into here.
Right now, Laura has a iMac DV G3, running OS X 10.2 at 400mHz on a gig of RAM. I bought it off of eBay (of all places) a few years back. It’s been good to her, but like all things, their time comes.
She just got the Adobe Creative Suite with all new versions of Photoshop and InDesign (etc.) that she uses at work. This is where the little green box tends to lag behind. It’s better than waiting for Classic mode to start in order to run the old versions, but it’s not great. Don’t even ask about MP3 ripping speed in iTunes. It’s dreadful. I expect to see a nice ol’ performance jump with the new machine, but it sure isn’t going to be cheap.
First of all, they only load 256M of RAM in there by default. So that’s $75 more to make a half gig. I figure that’ll be good for now, leaving a DIMM slot open for future upgrading plans. (If it’s not, expect future ranting.)
If we’re gonna do it, I want to adopt it into the primary machine in the house. This will leaving my WinXP laptop around solely for VPNing into work. If that’s the case, all of our MP3s plus her photo projects plus this plus that are going to take up some room. So let’s throw in the 160G HD. That’s another $100 upgrade.
The final choice to be made is screen size. Right now, I’m leaning heavily towards just leaving it at 17″. The $300 push for the 20″ seems a bit excessive to me, although the problem is that the display is one of the few things that can’t be upgraded down the line. Still, with the 17″ and my upgrades, I’m sitting at $1,674, which I think is a heck of a lot of money for a friggin’ computer. Getting any closer to the $2K mark isn’t putting a smile on my face.
So there you go. Or there I go. Either way, something’s going. Gonna wait for the next billing cycle on the CC before I do anything, and then a month after that (why ship so slowly, Apple?), I’ll let you in on the rest.
In the meantime, I’m going to have to find decent HTML/CSS/PHP editing software for the Mac, as well as a good FTP client (preferably bound to the former). I’d really like something that can preview PHP and SSI in the editor, instead of making me open a browser window and configure a webserver. The Adobe package came with Go Live, but the initial WYSIWYG shock of it turned me right off. Might give it another shot on the new machine tho, but I can always fall back on TextPad and a browser, I suppose.
If anyone has any suggestions, please let me know.