decidedlyodd

I’ve had my 15″ G4 Aluminum PowerBook for almost exactly 3 years now, having bought it right when I was moving back from Germany in May 2004. It’s been a great computer, but I’ve hardly used it at all since getting my iMac last summer. The iMac is faster and has a bigger screen, but also is Intel-based as opposed to the PowerBook which is still PowerPC based. For most people this doesn’t make that big of a difference, but for me it means I can’t run Windows (VirtualPC is WAAAY slow) via Bootcamp or VMWare Fusion (or Parallels, but it doesn’t seem to work with my smart card reader). With my employer, I need to be able to run Windows to work from home. I also like having access to Office 2007, which is light years ahead of Mac Office 2004 at this point.

So I went out and bought a new MacBook, the higher-end white one. I considered the MacBook Pro, but these days I don’t really need a desktop replacement type system. I have a nice desktop iMac for that. Mostly, I need a laptop that’s small and light, that gets the job done but that doesn’t break the bank. Because I made the mistake of buying my iMac right before they started putting Core Duo 2 processors in them, my iMac is actually considerably less powerful than this new notebook (2.16GHz Core Duo 2).

All in all, it should be a nice little machine. With summer coming (the current warm weather will turn to shit soon enough for June I’m afraid), the idea of doing work somewhere outside my office is enticing. I wonder if the wireless in my apartment reaches over to the park across the street? There isn’t anything in the way and it’s literaly right across the street from my apartment. Hmmm.

I still haven’t decided on a name for it yet though. Names are important things for computers. Here are the names of my other computers that I can remember and a bit about each:

veroveraar (September 2000, I think) A 650MHz Celeron Toshiba laptop whose model number I can’t even remember anymore. Its name means something like “conqueror” in Dutch. I sold this computer about 3 years ago to my friend Beth’s mom who was looking for a cheap laptop at the time. It probably still lives on.

munja (Feb 2003) The dual processor Athlon (1.66GHz I think) PC desktop I assembled in Saarbrücken myself got its name from the Serbo-Croatian word for “lightning”. I was really impressed with how fast it was once I got it put together and working. At the time, I had just finished up a semester Serbo-Croatian class, of which I remember nothing except “Ja sam Jeff, Amerikanac iz Los Angelesa”. It’s sat in my closet for a good 6 months now, ever since I was able to get Windows running on my iMac. It was/is a great machine, but it’s very noisy, what with all the fans it has to keep those two big processors cool. I should probably do something with it or its parts, but for now it’s just gathering dust. The hard drive has tons of old music and movies I acquired back when I was in college.

rugido (May 2004) The name of my G4 PowerBook means “quiet” in Portuguese. I was so impressed how much quieter this machine was than munja when I got it that I named it as such. Not too long before this, I took a semester of Portugese in Saarbrücken and had a Portuguese-English dictionary lying around at the time.

weisserhai (July 2006) The name of my iMac means “great white shark” in German. It’s big and white, hence the name.