Finally I write a post about something other than Richie's health...

Ever since Wednesday night I've basically been living through a nightmare...my husband Richie is in the hospital and nobody exactly knows what's going on. They are testing and testing and so far nothing conclusive.

However, you try to find the good whenever and wherever you can. And this is good.

I finally have the MacBook where I want it. 2GB of RAM. It does make a difference. 1GB is great, but 2GB is better. Way better. Richie was able to get some nap time in as I took the boxed Micron RAM to the Apple Store in Northridge to get it put in. Yeah, I know I could have done this myself...but what if I screwed it up? It's considered a "DIY" fix, but still...Apple gets kind of funky when home-done repairs go wrong.

Anyway, maxing the RAM on a MacBook makes it...MIGHTY. Things tend to move fast, even when Rosetta is involved. w00t.

I want to experiment with Parallels now. However, I have more important priorities to think about, so those experiments will probably be tabled for a while. Richie's health, and the next semester at school, have to take priority, in that order. Geeking around must be third on the list at best.

Update time...

1.) My DSL linespeed is finally up to where I'm happy with it. I was getting something like 500-650 down, but since I'm paying for 768/128 I really, really wanted a scoch more bandwidth. Now I apparently have it. Yay! My upstream speed has always been hovering around a little above 128.

2.) Life with the new lappie has been just lovely. It's way faster than anything I have owned, ever. And when Leopard comes out either in Q1 or Q2 2007 it should be absolutely SSSMOKIN'. And I'm not talking about the heat factor either. The Core 2 Duo is a 64-bit chip. Once more of the system becomes 64-bit native, and there wasn't 64-bit native code up until Tiger, things will only get faster. The big hangup is with the two apps that have to run PPC-to-Intel translated through Rosetta: Office 2004 and Photoshop Elements 4. Everything that's native Universal Binary code tears along happily. As far as heat goes, again, if it has to go through the Rosetta emulator things get warm quickly. If it doesn't, it's surprisingly cool considering the reports about Core Duo (Yonah) in the past. Merom (Core 2 Duo) uses less current draw than the original recipe Core Duo does.

3.) School has been absolutely nucking futz these past few days and it'll only get worse. It's going to be a bumpy ride for the next few days, and Tom Reed's visit down here is not likely to provide a respite.

4.) I will be taking a breather on Saturday for a few items: Apple Store for some helpful podcast hints, Jo-Ann's for $1 Simplicity Patterns (limit 10). Next Saturday it will be patterns from McCall's and Butterick that will be on sale: $2/pattern (limits unknown). That will also be when Tom will be down so who knows when we'll get to those. However, I will need to keep plugging away up until then and after. The first big priority is the Excel spreadsheet for Stats 1. I will be at school all day tonight, so I'm bringing the Happy Lappie with me to finish the job. Maybe I'll even input the 48 cases I need to input on my personal project. Wouldn't that rock?

I will likely observe Internet silence during this crazy period. See you later.

Totally delighted with my new (to me) Mac...

I now have a fairly capable Mac to work with. An iMac is not usually what you would consider a "power user's" computer, but there you go. It's got a 500MHz IBM PPC G3 proc and now has 768MB of RAM now that the DIMM arrived.

There are some definite quirks about this machine. The specs are actually consistent with an iMac released in Europe, although it came with a plain-Jane slot loading CD-ROM as opposed to a CD-RW like the original spec says. Apple makes educational-only machines from time to time, and they are usually bare-bones affairs.

Now that the upgrades have been done, however, it is a more capable machine. It will get external storage upgrades which will make it even more capable: a DVD-/+RW/RAM drive and an external 120GB hard drive.

This should hold me until I get a MacIntel. I'm hoping to get one as a grad gift in 2007.

Update: here's my desktop. I don't know why I get such perverse pleasure in decorating my desktop but I do.