Office upgrade.
Thursday, October 23rd, 2003
No, I’m not talking about any product to come out of Microsoft, I’m talking about the convergence of hardware and software that will, UPS and FedEx willing, transform my workspace in the next 24 hours.
And yet, in some ways, it won’t transform things at all.
There is a new Mac G5 (yes, dual processors, 2 ghz) headed this way, along with some additional RAM and a stylish new Sony 17 inch LCD display to join the old reliable Apple 17 inch display in desk harmony. When it comes in the door tomorrow I will once again be able to render frames of television at outlandish speeds, to make design decisions in a blur, to check my email so fast that I won’t even realize it’s happened.
(Well, wait, I can render frames of fine tv pretty darn fast now, but…)
And in order to make way for this honkin’ new machine, I cleaned up, well, half of my office today. The other half, the north side, is a sad collection of stacks and piles that is headed for the trash and the storage shed and various containers and nooks and crannies. It’s really amazing what detritus is accumulated when I’m not looking—and I spose that’s most of the time.
Do I really need Adobe manuals from the mid-nineties? How about that Lisa manual? (Well, that’s just a souvenir.) How about that Duet, or that Dekocast? (Don’t ask.) It’s hard for me to throw stuff out, but it gives me a good feeling afterwards, for sure.
But it’s not just a hardware transition we’re talking about here. It’s entirely possible that the new machine will come with the much-vaunted new version of the Mac operating system—10.3—a.k.a. ‘Panther.’ And if it doesn’t, I know some folks who will be camping out at the Apple store for their big software release event thingie, and la Pantera will thus be installed on all our machines soon enough. So windows will be scurrying and users will be switching and, ah, I hear there’s a performance boost, too.
The nice thing out this transition is if it works as advertised, I’ll be able to just copy over a couple of key directories from the old machine and within a few minutes, boot into a familiar world that will be way, way faster.
And quieter too, I think.
Is this the last entry from El Mercurio? Could be. At least it’ll probably be under that name. Brother James gets this machine, drive wiped and personality eliminated. Then it’s up to him to use a dual processor 800 mhz machine for good, not evil.
But as for me, gCinco arrives tomorrow.
