Adding Spice to Life

I've been distracted for the past week, among other reasons, because I got myself a new computer: an Apple PowerBook G4 with a twelve-inch display. Say hello to cinnamon.spicejar.org.

The computer on my desktop, cayenne.spicejar.org, was an old AMD 486-clone running Windows 95. It's 24 megabytes of RAM seemed like a lot when we bought it. As time passed, it seemed more and more clunky , slow, and tempermental.

But there was a large obstacle to getting a new machine: Windows XP. From the time it was released, I was dubious about wanting to own a machine connected to the Internet through our DSL line that ran XP. My doubt solidified into certainty as it became clear that a new security flaw was discovered and announced every week, if not every day.

We had already bought one Intel box and scraped XP off its hard drive, installing FreeBSD in its place. That's spicejar.spicejar.org, the server that provides NAT service for our home network and has enough oomph left over to be a full-service Internet host. I had given some thought to doing the same again for my desktop.

But while that would give me plenty of functionality, it wouldn't give me terribly much compatibility with the outside professional world, which inflexibly demands Microsoft office software, no matter how terribly designed and implemented.

But Macintosh computers now come with a real operating system: OS X, which is really NextStep, a UNIX derivative by way of BSD, in a clever plastic disguise. (I know, strictly speaking, that you aren't supposed to refer to BSD as UNIX, or else the clams from Utah will come after you. Fuck them.) And, Macintosh is well-supported in terms of software compatible with the world of customers and clients.

So when I couldn't take it anymore, my decision was simple: switch to Macintosh. The further decision to get a notebook rather than a desktop machine was motivated by some future plans of mine: I may be away from home for reasonably long periods of time in the not-too-distant future, so I want to be able to take my "office" with me.

I got the new machine, cinnamon, last Friday. Since then I've been transitioning from the old cayenne to the new cinnamon – updating the network, backing up and transferring files, configuring software and the like. And playing with iTunes a lot. Yesterday, I made the big transition, taking cayenne off my desk and setting cinnamon up in its place. Today was my first day of trying to get back to normal, or at least the new normal.