Upgraded!
The new iMac arrived yesterday. It’s sweet, it has a 24″ screen, 4GB of RAM, and a whopping 1TB (that’s one terabyte) of drive space. My first Mac was a Quadra, it had a 268MB drive, and people kept telling me,”Oh, you’ll NEVER need all that space!” What I learned from that is, no matter how big drives get, software developers will always find a way to bog down applications to the point that you actually do need all that space. So rest assured, I’ll end up using it eventually.
The keyboard is as conversely tiny as the screen is huge. It’s like it was made for a netbook, they don’t make ‘em much smaller than this. I fully expected to hate it, but, oddly, I kinda like it. Okay, I’ll like it when I get used to it and quit missingthespacebarbecauseitssosmall. It might take a while to get used to the screen. It’s like staring up into the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Maybe I should secure it to the wall, if it were to fall over on me I’d be trapped underneath it.
The biggest hardware improvement is the mouse. The Mighty Mouse can be set up as a one- or a two-button mouse, and the scroll ball is awesome. The only downside is now I’m going to be spoiled and miss it whenever I go back to a computer that doesn’t have it.
Other Upgrades
We also finally went from standard to digital cable. So – why is this supposed to be so great? I guess it’s nice to have the rewind feature as long as YOU have the remote, but if someone else keeps doing it over and over it’ll make you want to grab the remote and beat them with it. The guide is okay, but the online guide at TVguide.com is at least as good, if not better (what, don’t you have a laptop next to every TV in your house, too?). And again, if you use the online guide it’ll spare you from having to grab the remote away from someone and render them senseless with it in order to stop the continual guide-searching. Fortunately, my husband hasn’t actually wrestled the remote away from me yet, but it’s probably just a matter of time.
The real reason we upgraded was so we could watch the UT game on Versus (not included in the standard cable package). Maybe I’ll eventually get to love the meager extra features so much I won’t want to live without them. But overall, I give digital cable a grade of – Meh.
THIS was the one I was going to comment on – I was going to say that right up until the last line, I was assuming you meant that *you* couldn’t get the remote away from your *husband,* not the other way around, because jeez, men and their remotes, amirite, and then I had a “Hey, am I being sexist? Hmm, I think I am, I shall ponder before posting” moment and wandered off. So sort of a combination of “saying something stupid” and “getting distracted.”
But I really did LOL IRL when I realized it was YOU with the remote, not him.
I was sneaky and hung on to the remote while he was setting up the box. Mwa ha ha ha! So I got to surf first. Me: “Hey, you can do this, and here’s the guide, ooo, picture-in-picture!” Him: [fidget fidget]
There is something a little maddening about someone else surfing with the guide, I think having a computer handy to check the TV guide could potentially save marriages.