After years of buying shitty computers, old computers, hand me down computers, etcetera, I finally got a real computer. One of the Santa Rosa MacBooks, to be precise, with a 160GB hard drive, 2GB RAM, Intel Dual-Core processor… It was like I had gone from my old, hundred dollar Ford Econoline to a Porsche. Okay, maybe not a Porsche. Not like the MacBook has a video card to write home about. Not going to be running the latest games on it or anything. But something well built and sensible nonetheless. Jetta?

I also got AppleCare, which keeps the thing covered for three years. If anything goes kaput, I can walk a couple of blocks to the Mac Store, or hop on a bus and go to the Apple Store at University Village. Not that there’s been anything wrong with it. It’s worked great form day one, unless I did something to it that made it not want to start up. Which is why I’m picking up a cheapie little laptop from the ancient pile at a used PC place to play with some Linux. Because I like to play. But I don’t feel like messing up my nice shiny computer to play.

I’ve even bought an Apple brand keyboard to go with. I also have a first generation iPhone. But I’m not Mr. Apple yet, since I’m still using the same computer speakers I’ve had for the last ten years. I’m gonna ditch them eventually, but they’ll go to a good home whenever I get my hands on something nicer. They’re warriors, those speakers.

Also, I couldn’t see myself spending $300-400 on an external monitor from Apple. Bought a cheap no name with a hardware protection plan. It works fine, as does my Belkin USB hub.

So I don’t want you to think I’m some sort of secretly paid Apple shill who goes around pushing their products. I’m not one more sale away from that toaster oven or the shiny gold star Steve Jobs gives to the undercover agents who generate the most sales. There are things with Apple I don’t like. The DRM I can do without, and even though it is pretty easy to get around using it (don’t buy anything that has it), it still feels a little icky, especially that new display port on the new MacBooks. I don’t really like the way the App Store for the iPhone is being run, and it’s bizarre double standards.

BUT the one thing I don’t doubt is the quality of the hardware. Even though I feel like a schmuck for not going without a computer for six months until the new, all metal MacBooks came out this fall (I guess not having a computer would have really sucked, and not being a psychic made it hard to predict). But even the plastic (excuse me, polycarbonate) MacBook is still a better machine than a lot of PCs. My Mom’s old Toshiba laptop died because it flexed too much in the middle, and it broke a wire. Although I have lusted over Panasonic’s Toughbook more than once, but I’m not a miner or firefighter, so it’d probably be over kill. Probably. I am a bit clumsy.

And having had a used iBook for about two months, and having the bastard thing DIE ON ME, there have been times when Apple have produced substandard work. Granted, though, I have heard of people who are still using their iBooks, and mine was just beat to shit.

BUT ALL THAT SAID: I recently acquired an original iMac, one of the bondi-blue all-in-one computers from the late nineties that I first encountered in the one office job I ever worked. It’s ten years old, or close to it, and I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what the hell to do with it. I have a laptop of similar age and specifications that I installed Linux on, and every time I even tried to listen to music or god forbid, browse the web, it would choke and die, and I would have to give it mouth to mouth, which is an embarrassing thing to have to do to a computer in public.

What I finally did was try to install Apple’s slightly older version of OS X, 10.4 Tiger. I have 10.5 Leopard installed on my MacBook, and I thought that maybe Tiger had a better chance, since it was made with slightly older machines in mind.

Not that I could just install it, mind you. No, I had to trick it, because officially Apple doesn’t support the old iMacs anymore. So using a program called XPostfacto, I pointed at something shiny that distracted the installation CD and pushed it into the hole, and waited to see if it would be able to crawl out.

And goddamn, it did.

Don’t get me wrong. I open one program at a time. Maybe two really lightweight ones. It will play audio, but it just chokes on video. But I can check my email and browse the web, write a text document, and listen to the music from the computer in the living room in my bedroom. Because I have two rooms, and dammit, they should both have computers. Is that so wrong?

But I’m absolutely mind-boggled that the iMac is running at all. And although I don’t plan on using the same hardware ten years from now, it pleases me to no end that I probably could keep using it, provided I take care of it. At the very least, when AppleCare runs out in two and a half years, I should still get a decent re-sale value for my by then old laptop.

Maybe then I’ll get one of those fancy aluminum Macbooks… Dammit, I still wish I was psychic…

New Hampshire is canceling jury trials for a four week period to save money on per diem money for juries.

At least 19 other states, including California, have slashed court budgets and other government services as their economies have tanked, said Daniel Hall, vice president of the National Center for State Courts, a nonprofit in Williamsburg, Va. [From Economic Crisis Hits State Court Systems]

An interesting but novel way to curb civil liberties, eh? Not that I’m suggesting that’s what’s going on here. This is definitely a budget crunch thing. Just sort of a possibility I’d never considered for a dystopian future. Civil liberties cost money, and we’re just short of cash, sorry. Please get in this unmarked van, it’s a police van, but we couldn’t afford to get it painted. Really.

Washed it down with the King of Beers…