2004-07-11

emPowerBooked

Testing, testing. 1, 2, 3. This is the first think I've written on this computer. Welcome to my hipster home computing experience.

It's Sunday morning and I'm sitting here typing on my new PowerBook G4 in the living room. Chris is polishing our dress shoes so we looking stunning at the Art for AIDS benefit on Friday. I've just had the computer read what I've written so far. Such a fancy feature on this lean, mean word processor. Or is it just a simple text editor? I need to go visit Sean to load Word and Excel onto this machine. But I could probably just get buy with this. I'm not really sure what I'm going to do with this aluminum pet rock.

$2500 or so charged to a credit card last Sunday evening and this arrived on Friday. During the four day between, a whirlwind cross-country trip due to my grandmother's death. United Airlines fly me through the friendly skies to NYC and the joint Greyhound-Peter Pan-Trailways conglomerate drove me to Worcester, MA. As the sojourn required hours of sitting on my ass, I was typing away into my work laptop. I started writing about my family, inspired by Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex.

For my Melbourne trip, I toted around the skinny hand-me-down Vaio, with its pitiful less-than-three-hour battery life, split between three batteries. A great weight for traveling, it's better suited for home writing while plugged into an outlet. It's waif-like proportions imply a quickness that it doesn't possess. Windows 98 and a lack of a CD-ROM make it my equivalent of a personal diary with minimal online accessibility.

For the past five years, I've prided myself as a computer have-not, both a financially savvy and lifestyle-balancing choice. I figured I spent enough hours staring into a monitor, especially since I began working in the online medium. I'd use my work hours to take care of any writing, shopping, surfing, or modern-life management needs. Computers aren't a status symbol or a desired accessory. Heck, I was lucky enough to grow up with at least one around since 1980 when Texas Instruments offered a whopping 16K capacity and programs were loaded via cassette tape. TRS-80s provided text-based Infocom games; the original Mac brought Tetris into my life, and the Apple II-C captured and dot-matrix printed the innermost thoughts of my 5th grade language arts journal.

In college, I opted for a word processing machine, keyboard and printer housed in a typewriter-shaped unit and an external monitor masquerading as if it had other capabilities. The Internet was just coming into vogue (I declared Mosaic and the WWW as something that would never catch on) and terminals at the library provided email access. When I finally did get a computer during my junior year, it was never new, just my father's latest cast-off. Sometime after moving to the West Coast, I decided to by an already outdated (to save money, of course), pre-Pentium 386 PC, my first and only new computer. It wasn't ready for the future and often would freeze, thanks to the cookie-laden porn pages visited by a house guest. It never really recovered (this was 1998) and I began to develop my anti- attitude of personal ownership and decided to avail myself to the wealth of IT while at work.

This latest addition to my worldly possessions represents a change of heart, a new spending philosophy and a hope for a more creative future. The change of heart is courtesy of my miniDV camera gift--the prime motivation entering into the orchard of Apple. How else could I edit my oeuvre? (Speaking of which, I still need to install Final Cut Express 2.) I bought big, almost as modern as I could afford (the 512mb chip in lieu of the 1GB was my only nod to moderation). Superdrive DVD/CD-RW, 80G hard drive, and the intention to get at least a 160GB external storage are my birthright according the newly moneyed me. All this to inspire my aspirations of making something: a book, a movie, an expression of my alleged creative talents (and heritage).

The fact that this is a notebook and not a desktop is evidence that I am a sucker for sexy. Yes, I was seduced by the built-in wireless Internet capability (which would only distract me from my work). I want to be cafe cool and envied as a care-free college student or writer or digi-telligentsia. However, allow me one more line to draw in the sand (to be crossed in the future):

I will not get an iPod. That's just plain excessive. My Rio Nitrus works fine. Shitty battery-life that would barely last across the country. There's no need to carry around every song I've ever listened to. And, besides, soon everyone will have an iPod.

This sexy slab will set me apart just a little bit further from the masses. Who says you can't buy cool?

earlier - later