A Myford Super 7 lathe and an Arboga U2508 vertical milling machine with all their attendant bits and pieces. These machine tools are from the 1970s and are in my possession and are used for reasons we can go into at a later date.
As the 1970s moved into the decade of big hair and shoulder pads my technical bent turned to computers. I had a Sinclair ZX80, a Radio Shack TRS80 numerous IBM clones and was a slave to Bill Gates for most of the eighties and nineties. I knew no better. My younger daughter wanted computer for school about a decade ago and very specifically said she wanted a Mac 'cos they are good for photography'. I certainly knew better than to argue with a teenage daughter and a G4 iBook was produced. I thought no more of it as I did what I wanted to do in a bit and byte sort of a way on my Dell thinking that Windows XP was the business. Needed to go overseas (this was before I was good at this overseas business) and commandeered the iBook for the trip. I was absolutely amazed to discover that it was bloody good. It did all I wanted which for that trip was just too have the ability to edit some presentation slides. I gave it back to its owner on my return. But the damage was done.
Fast forward a couple of years and a couple of days before Xmas and the Dell threw up its fifth blue screen of death in an hour courtesy of the garbage software from Redmond and I had had enough. In the car, down to Magnum Mac (no Apple Stores in the Land of the Long White Techno Backwater) and I walk out with a 20" G5 iMac. When was that? Eight or nine years ago I should think and I haven't had a major computer hang in all that time.
I have totally sold my soul to Steve. He's got me and I don't mind admitting it. I am so smitten that my favourite part of Obald Acres, my office, this evening looks like this.
Silly? Probably but who cares. We have from Uncle Steve a Core 2 Duo 24" iMac (this just runs Tweetdeck and Skype - how gloriously and unnecessarily extravagant is that?), a Core i5 (Sandy Bridge) 27" iMac - the main machine - and a Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro. A couple of keyboards, two Magic Meeces and a Magic Touchpad. Oh and there's the iPhone 4 charging quietly between the two iMacs. A set of Altec Lansing computer speakers, sub woofer under the desk (highly recommended add on to get a decent speaker system for one's computer), a 1Tb Lacie hard drive to run Time Machine, an AirPort Extreme to run the houses's wifi and that's about it. I also have a lump of software (Teleport) installed on all three Macs so that I can run the cursor across all three screens from the trackpad and drag files around willy nilly. Marvellous. The original (for me) G5 iMac is still going strong and running Tiger in Mrs O's office downstairs - which I can access over the home network.
The more observant will see I'm lying. There is a fourth (well fifth really as the iPhone is a computer) computer on the desk, a Lenovo ThinkPad. It is there under sufferance. It is not mine but belongs to the New Zealand taxpayer. It is a Ministry laptop and I have to have it in order to VPN into the ministerial servers. I offered to install Parallels on the MacBook and do it from a Windows partition and was looked at as if I had farted in church. All it is good for is downloading email; and then only some of it. It is a fairly good bit of hardware but it has the software from hell on it. Windows XP, this was released in 2003 remember, and we have been recently upgraded to MS Office 2004. Give me a break. But all that pales into insignificance when you realise that you have to use Lotus Notes. At least we have a reasonably recent version of this but it is still Lotus Notes. But it gets worse. This laptop has been configured so that it will not under any circumstances connect to the internet. If I get an email, even from a jolly important ministerial type wallah, and it contains a weblink I can not open the link. Barking.
Very secure but it completely destoys the whole point of all this techno nonsense which, to my mind, is to make ones life easier. And fun. And that is what surrounding myself with more Mac kit in my office than I need is. It is great fun. I could probably do all I need to do with one machine with considerably less specs than any of them, but where's the fun in that?
Am I an Apple Fanboy? Well it is not the sort of thing you would admit to in public is it, but I probably am. And I don't care. I reckon Apple makes good kit, it works effortlessly, doesn't fall over, looks great and I like the way the company thinks.
Oh, I hear very strong rumours that I will be getting an iPad 2 for my birthday in a couple of months. Do I need one? Probably not. Do I want one? Hell yes.
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