toosigma

I’m making some progress towards a few of my goals. I placed an order on Amazon for a couple books on self-edification, including an A+ study guide, a personal copy of 7 Habits, and a few books on Taoism. Now I just have to hope the UPS guy actually delivers them, instead of making repeated visits to mention that he dropped by.

Also polished off a couple of website to-do’s, at least partially. The new menu system has been implemented on at least some of the pages, and should be on the rest before too long. I also fixed the problem with my mod-date javascript so that it should work on all browsers. Unfortunately, making the change meant that every page got an update, so it’s not all that useful at the moment. I’m really looking forward to a time when my database system will actually slice&dice relevant dates, but we’ll see.

On to the random ranting/raving. I’ve been doing a lot of design and editing work for my friend’s website, and I’ve discovered that having the appropriate resources to vision test webpages in alternate browsers is a good idea. This led to the idea that maybe I should get a Mac. So I hopped onto the web, and checked out apple.com in hopes of getting a relatively simple computer for testing purposes. I was absolutely appalled at what I found. I was looking at the low-end iBook, mainly because I’d like to get a laptop that I can use as a portable movie player for my collection. Unfortunately, even the cheapest iBook they had available was only marginally better than my 1.5 year old laptop, and was significantly slower AND more expensive than a comparable model available on Dell. So my frugal soul takes me to eBay to see if I can find a decent used or refurbished model. Sadly, the absolute cheapest model I could find that fulfilled my requirements (at least 500MHz processor, and the ability to run OSX) were at least $700.

I suppose in my geekdom, I’ve grown somewhat spoiled in the computer purchase department. I can basically build any basic x86-compatible machine for half the price the big dealers offer it. My new baby, Vader, only cost about $600, and it would have cost around $2k to get a comparable model from Dell/Gateway. So I suppose that my monetary standards are a little out of whack, but I can’t imagine how Apple can manage even its small market share when they charge and additional $100-$300 for computers that aren’t as fast.

My second rant, Why People Should Learn to Drive will have to wait until next time, as I need to leave work before I go insane.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 13th, 2003 at 1:36 pm and is filed under books, gadgets, projects. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.