As I had mentioned earlier, I had been having some difficulty with my primary computer, Monolith. It had been very noisy and hot for a while. Back in February, it locked up on the startup screen, but later booted fine the following day. Then, during the development process for Where the Money Goes, it locked up again and would not boot. I took it in for service, and it was ready by the time I returned from Boston. Unfortunately, I’m sad to report that a few days after I retrieved it, it died one last time, and I made the decision to get a new computer, as an early graduation present to myself.
So, mainly due to peer pressure at SI, but also as a desire to have access to programs like OmniGraffle, I got a new MacBook Pro, which I dubbed Neolith. It’s really interesting to get used to both a Mac and Vista, as I haven’t been able to get a copy of XP just yet. So far it’s pretty good, it’s a little harder to use without a mouse than XP is. I’m also disappointed by the poor performance of some of my games – I haven’t gotten Dyson to be playable at all (which may be the fault of Neolith, VMWare Fusion, or Vista), and I’m also somewhat amused that Neolith struggles a bit with games that were designed for a system that’s 25 years old and literally a thousand times slower. But the Mac really is a surprisingly good platform for web development stuff, with MAMP, Flex Builder and Firebug. Dashboard widgets will also help quite a bit. So, we’ll see how things continue here, but no real complaints so far.
Tags: computer