“wait til june,” i’ve been telling myself, as all the stuff that lies in wait for me this summer kept attempting to snatch my attention from the work at hand.

“focus on your capstone. everything else in its time.”

and it was a good mantra.
i believe it served me well.

now, however, the floodgates have been opened, and while i did plan to start knocking things off the list, i must admit that i didn’t Quite expect to be telling you, on this lovely june the 1st afternoon, that i will soon be the proud owner of a 12″ ibook g4.
not that i really Mind making the announcement…
i’m just sayin’ – i kinda thought there’d be a bit bigger buffer, ya know?
;)

but no.

the story goes like this:
the computer that i currently use most heavily is a dell laptop that isn’t really mine. it belongs to the university, and they have been kind enough to let me use it for these past few years.
soon, however, their kindness will end, and the computer will join a sad, sad pile of various and sundry computer equipment that no one really uses anymore but they’ll be Damned if they don’t stockpile it for archaeologial purposes.
there’s oneathese on the window in my office right now.
i shit you not.

anyway, all this put new computer rather high on my list once i was free to start thinking about it. i mean, i have a lot of work to do here in the office this month compiling the financial report, i have to do quite a bit of work on my car to prepare it for our upcoming travels, i have to sort and sell and pack and stow, and i have to figure out what i’m actually Doing come july, but c’mon… i’m gonna want to blog about all that, right? :)

so yesterday, with a half-hour or so left at work and no half-hour projects to begin, i began poking around the apple store and ebay. i had already decided that i was going back to mac this time, and had also already decided on the bitty little 12″, because all of my past reservations with such a small screen were just plain misguided.
the thing weighs less than five pounds.
’nuff said.

well, matt-e and craig have both recently subscribed to the macbook and macbook pro revolutions, respectively. matt-e got a black one, and craig got the biggie upsell, and both of them are purty.
they were converted because they are able to dual boot and run windows, thanks to the new apple/intel peace pipe that’s going around.
this is interesting to me, but not crucial, and since my thoughts on this purchase were basically: you are going to lug this thing around the country and perhaps the world; you want it to be fast enough to not piss you off; you want it to hold up; you want to not worry about it too much…
it didn’t necessarily seem like the best time to be an early adopter for fun’s sake.
it could, however, be a great time to buy the just-barely-used late-model g4s off of the early adopters who are now moving on to the next big thing.
ka-ching.

that said, a few people had pointed out that one could get a starter model 12″ macbook new from the apple store for $1000 with the education discount, so i checked it out, and it’s roughly true, but it would probably be one of those cases where i was like “yeah, but for $.50 more i can get a little bobble-head that looks like steve jobs,” and then before i know it i’ve spent $500 dollars.
so first i started comparison shopping on ebay.

ebay’s general strategy is to tempt me right off the bat with something that Seems like a good deal but that ends in 45 seconds, so i don’t have the time to exercise rational thought on the matter.
i have made it a rule not to succumb to such temptations, and to be sure and check completed listings and stuff to see what i can really expect. with that in mind, i wasn’t surprised to find a few exciting leads right off the bat, one of which was pretty much the ideal computer minus some hard drive and plus some ram (which is a pretty good trade, seeing as how it would just encourage me to back up more often, and the rest of the time i could listen to music, write code, edit movies, chat with friends, and look for recipes for soufflé all at the same time), 3 months old, with the remainder of a 3-year warranty still intact, ending in an hour, sitting at $750.

i steeled my resolve, refused to get excited, asked erik what he thought, and continued to explore. as time ticked by, however, it seemed more and more like it really was a stunningly good deal. the same computer, new from the apple website, weighed in at $1400, and while i didn’t think the odds of getting it for the current bid were very good, the computers that Were ending for that price were not as nice, and had much shorter warranties, if they had any at all. so it would be worth it even for a fair bit more.

it seemed worth a try, but i had to go to a BOTMDG board meeting before the auction ended, meaning that i couldn’t hover over it at the last minute, so i decided to just put in a maximum bid that i would be happy with, walk away, and leave it to fate.

i didn’t have access to a computer again until 1 am, at which point, tired and tipsy, i just went to bed, forgetting about the matter entirely. i woke up at 7:30 to pee, and was like “holy crap! i might have bought a computer!”
and sure enough…
the truly shocking thing was that NO ONE bid in the last half hour at ALL.
i got the damn thing with one bid – $765.01
shaking head in disbelief

i mean, i Did twiddle my fingers in front of the screen when i signed off, saying “this is not the computer you are looking for… move along.”

but i guess i didn’t really expect such results…

this HCI Master business is awesome
;)

so be warned, emperor gates, the rebel forces grow stronger.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 1st, 2006 at 5:36 pm and is filed under stuff i got, things i do. 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.