O, Enthusiasts: beauty is real. It is brushed aluminum and a warm, purplish underglow; the UPS carries with him beauty and all you have to do is sign for it. (There’s also around $800 involved, but don’t blame the UPS man for that.) Beauty beeps and dings, but discreetly, like a butler that’s been beaten the correct amount. It is sleek and fast, beauty, and it has at least two ports I have no idea what to do with.
The MacBook Air© has a 13.3″ screen and a 1.6 GHz Intel Core i5. Now, did I just copy-and-paste one of those facts, not knowing what it means? Sure, but who cares? We all get the gist: this computer is computery as hell, and I am not overstating it to say that I feel like a new TotD. The past six months have been frustrating, digitally speaking.
The old machine was an Apple, as well, and we had some good times. Started the blog on that computer, so that means I met all of you on it. Forget the blog: I learned how to write on that computer. Don’t believe me? Go to the archives and look at the early stuff. Trust me: I stunk.
But I am rough on technology, clumsy and unthinking, and I click “Remind Me Later” on updates far too often. The innards got jammed with shady torrents, and also cookie crumbs. Someone–I think it was Italics Guy–smoked around it. Sometimes things get knocked over, and you know I enjoy working late at night, so ofttimes things get knocked over.
Last winter, it started to slow; any page other than text would load slowly, or not at all. And then came the stuttering: the works would freeze for a quarter-second, then work, another quarter-second, then work, and then a half-second, and then the computer would get on with it; this would have been less of a problem had the stuttering not revealed itself primarily through the music player.
And then the wheel.
It appeared constantly. If I dared to switch pages, wheel. One program to the next? Wheel. Type more than five or six words in succession? You better believe that’s a wheel. I worked around it: looking for images on Google absolutely infuriated my computer, so I did it on my phone and e-mailed the pictures to myself. In the past month, the cure has been worse than the disease: Gmail became far too much for the old soldier. A hard reboot would give me about an hour of slow–but wheel-free–working time before the computer remembered it was dying and started in with the spinning and freezing again.
But now I have lightning at my fingertips, and thunder in my bowels. (The thunder is not related in any way to the topic at hand: I need to accept the fact that I am lactose-intolerant and stop it with the bowls of cereal.) The speed of the 1.6 GHz Intel Core i5 is astonishing, and I know what I’m talking about, and did not just copy-and-paste that gibberish again. It also has 4 GB 1600 MHz DDR3. That’s something, huh? Four gigs is, like, four Dead shows. Plus, a Grateful Dead might call one of his shows a “gig,” so it all rolls into one.
But, TotD: you are a Leet Haxxor! Shouldn’t you have built a PC out of four Raspberry Pis wired together and running a Linux-based OS?
Yes, I should be. I am–as you mentioned–a Leet Haxxor. My coding is unparalleled, and people gasp when they see my Python. I have also started a charity to teach coding, as I think it’s the most important thing in the entire world and can change the face of humanity, but unlike other poseurs that work with children, or the homeless, my charity really believes in coding. We break into old folk’s homes in the middle of the night and teach them to code against their will. THAT’S disruption.
But here’s the thing: within seconds, and I am not exaggerating, of removing the new computer from its (tasteful) packaging, it had located my phone and become friends with it. I did not ask my phone and computer to meld, but when BotD texted me this evening, it appeared on my desktop. I reiterate: I had nothing to do with it. I didn’t click a box; I didn’t go into Preferences. I configured precisely jackshit. The devices intuited what I wanted, and did it for me. This makes me unbearably happy.
Now I am going to stop writing because I deserve just a bit of happiness and pleasure, and if I stop and think about what just happened, and the lack of input necessary from the human in the equation, I might realize how godawful creepy it was.
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