DanaPellerin.com » Computers

New Laptop!

Dana — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 15:36:15 +0000

Well, as much as I hate spending money right now, I had to do it. I bought a new laptop. And though I’m excited about getting a new toy tool, I’m also sad because it’s not what I really wanted. I’ve had my eye on a MacBook Pro for a while now…. Oh to feel that cool, smooth aluminum beneath my fingers!!! But the BMW of laptops is expensive; $2500 for the configuration I want need. So I was going to wait until I could afford it, but some things have changed and I needed one now.

Why the rush? I ended up taking some side programming work. I haven’t done any side work in ages and the last job I did was for charity. But this time around I have a pretty intense project, and a time line, and with me traveling this month for my day job, I couldn’t afford to be without a laptop. So I bit the bullet and bought one.

I ended up getting a Dell Studio 15 and it was quite a bargain. $799 at Best Buy got me an Intel Core 2 Duo CPU, 4gigs RAM, 320Gig HD, Windows Vista 64bit and a 15″ wide screen. Pretty impressive specs for what will really be a “throw away” laptop for me, just to get me through these first few projects.

Full review when it shows up later this week!

I Am Windows Free!

Dana — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 02:59:12 +0000

Yes, today I start a new day! A day without Windows in my house! We’re talking about Microsoft Windows of course. It’s gone, kaput, bye-bye, so long, see ya, peace out!

I had one Windows PC left in the house. Our laptop runs Ubuntu and of course we have an iMac. But as far as the PC goes, I bought Cakewalk Sonar years ago and then kept upgrading over the years and I just didn’t want to go through the expense of switching my music computer to Mac and buying all my software over again. However, this week my audio interface took a dump, and then as I was doing some work on my Windows box, my RAID controller farted and I lost my disk array. And that was it. I’d had it. So rather than spend more money to fix my aging PC, I decided to retire it and just go completely Mac.

Of course I still have Windows running in a virtual machine on my Mac. But I only use it to run MS Money, and now to restore and convert my old Sonar files from backup.

I feel better already.

An Interesting Interview With a Founder of Apple

Dana — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 17:08:48 +0000

I ran across this interview today with the lesser known Steve from Apple Computer, Steve Wozniak. I’ve never really payed much attention to “Woz” before. He always seemed like kind of a hippy slacker just just riding on Steve Jobs’ coat tails and popping into the public eye from time to time. This is a good, in depth interview though and he seems like a genuinely nice guy. Take a read if you’re interested in hearing from one of the pioneers of the computer industry.

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=1903