Saturday, April 01, 2006
Had the day gone as I had planned it, dear friends, you would be reading a few thousand words on the vagaries of New York City weather. A frigid, blizzardy February led to one of the driest Marches on record; the cold snap that blew into town at the top of last week has been replaced with warm breezes, low 70's temperatures, and -- dare I say it? -- humidity. I broke from my Saturday routine by taking the bus into Manhattan, over the Triborough Bridge, across 125th Street, down to Columbia University, where I switched to another bus that deposited me almost directly in front of Zabar's, source of some of the best-priced mason jars in town. By the time I had picked up the mason jars, a few things at Lush to make my bathwater smell of oranges, and my Saturday groceries from the farmer's market (eggs, kale, fresh chorizo sausages, salad greens, hydroponic grape tomatoes, a bottle of homemade Korean barbecue sauce and ten pounds of Pink Lady apples -- did I mention that I'm a little berserk with the farmer's market shopping?), I was more than a little bedraggled, sweaty and ready for lunch. As I rode home on the N, knitting the heel flap on my new socks all the way, I began to hatch plans: I would take the bowl of Meyer lemons, which I had sliced thinly and macerated in sugar last night, and turn them into Shaker Meyer lemon pie. I would take the big bowl of dried California apricots, plumped overnight in water, and turn them into a new batch of jam for Bakerina Kitchens. I would finish the long-overdue letter I owed the Bakerina Kitchens subscribers. I would stop talking about booking my flight arrangements for the Egg Tour, and for my trip to visit Snowball in June, and actually make the damn bookings, already. Best of all, I would write. I would sing the praises of spring in New York City, of trees in blossom, of kids so excited by being outside without jackets that you can almost see the energy bursting from them, of local tulips and paper-white narcissus for sale at the farmer's market, of the crabbed, cramped weekday hostility melting from people's faces as they walk about, enjoying the opportunity to do nothing, even for a few minutes.
My laptop, alas, had other ideas.
For those of you who have heard this interminable complaint from me before, I must beg your indulgence. For new visitors to PTMYB, well, I must beg your indulgence, too. Three years ago, I decided that the time had come for me to go mobile and get myself a laptop. For reasons I can no longer remember, I was entranced by the idea of subnotebooks, the tinier, the better. I was not, however, so entranced that I was about to shell out $2,200 for a Vaio. On a trip to J&R Computer World, I found the answer to a maiden's prayer, a Sharp Actius MM-10, 10" screen, 15 gigs of memory, can be used as a hard drive once you're done using it as a laptop! Sure, it only has two hours' worth of battery power, and it does run on a Crusoe chip, but hey, it's nice and small and it's under 1,600 bucks! Sold!
I will not bore you with tales of the motor cycling on and off, of the sudden freezes, of the kernel stacking errors, of the repeated Blue Screens of Death. I will say that it took me well over an hour to boot up, log on and remain logged on for more than three minutes. An attempt to run the disk defragmenter led to an error message about a corrupted file in my cookies folder. Normally any bad files are caught and fixed during a disk check, but today Mister Softee's disk checker has been getting stuck before it even starts, necessitating a hard shutdown and restart, something I hate to do.
The good news is that a) Lloyd has finished the taxes and we are getting a nice little refund back, and b) he has been finding decent prices for laptops. "You'll have to go up a little in size, but you can get, say, a 14-inch screen, which isn't too big, and you'll still have more power, and more storage..." He says this to me in a soothing tone, and I try to look properly engaged, like an educated consumer, but all I can think is "I don't mind a 14-inch screen. I will take a 20-pound laptop with a 36-inch screen and radio tubes protruding from the back of it, just as long as I don't have to listen to the motor whirr to a halt and the screen freeze in that sickening telltale way for 45 seconds ever again."
As a result, my muse has been feeling a little delicate, and she has gone off to have an aspirin and a lie-down. Maybe after I put up the jam and eat a little Thai food, I will feel like the hostess with the mostest again, and verbosity will reign supreme on PTMYB again. In the meantime, maybe I'll live dangerously and not only try to post this, but also try to download the picture of the Shaker Meyer lemon pie that has just emerged from the oven, making our kitchen smell of toasted butter and sugar and sweet lemons. I have to admit, as a mood elevator, it works like a charm.
Edit: Sure enough, as I was trying to upload the picture, the little bastard died again. But now it's back up, and hopefully will let me play for more than 1/2 hour. In the meantime (fingers crossed), we have pie.
Well, you just let me know when you are ready for a Mac…
why is MY pie 3300 miles away from where I am?
Life is sooooo not fair.
Another die-hard Mac user here too...and if you were to make the changeover, G could then service it for you when needed, since he’s a certified Apple technician. I was on the West side yesterday too—actually I was in Zabar’s, buying nothing so virtuous as Mason jars, but rather Eli’s cookies and pistachio-praline dark chocolate…
Yep, I’m with Bill Stevenson - my last laptop (I too wanted teeny tiny and light, as I was working as a note-taker for students on campus at the time, and thus hefting 8lb of computer seemed a little dispiriting) was a Toshiba Portege, which was OK, but ended up with similar issues to yours. Then I bought an iBook, and lo! I was converted. And I don’t know if it’s the same in the US, but here, educational discount from Apple online actually made it the cheapest option for the size I wanted (12” screen, 40Gb HDD etc etc).
In the meantime, good luck...!
Bill is right, of course. You’ve heard this lecture before, so I won’t belabor the point. Just get a Mac, dearest.
Oh, that pie is lovely. I can nearly smell it, two days later. Why are you still living so far away that I can’t come and raid your kitchen? You need to be one of my neighbors.
What pie IS that? Shaker Lemon? with a top crust? Oh, I’m so intrigued…
Having made (and enjoyed!) this selfsame pie several times, I can only say that it should help mitigate the suffering you are experiencing thanks to your Moribund Laptop.
Pie! Pie! Pie!
Yup. You really might want to think about a mac. I’ve got a mac at home and other stuff at work. You couldn’t prise the mac from my grip.
PS. Any lemon pie or tart is a friend of mine. I do not know this kind, but I’ll bet I want to.
I refuse to let the mac folks be the only voice around here. My Compaq Presario is a little heavy, sure. But I went the other direction. I wanted a 15-inch screen and I demanded meaningful battery life. With the optional extra battery that came with my machine (it goes in the blank-for lighter-weight/floppy/cdrw slot), I got 5 hours of life when the batteries were new.
Happiness is 5 hours on batteries. Oh, and twice the performance for half the price. That too.
Bill knows what he’s talking about. He works as a programmer for Apple and even met Steve Jobs once in the company restroom. I’m sure he could hook you up.
your misbegotten machine, it wouldn’t be sporting a transmeta cpu? would it? oh, foul and fickle fate, you put your money on the wrong horse. stillborn silicon, why must it plague the very best of us? the naive, the trusting, the bamboozled and the gullible: why do not the angels protect them as they do fools, drunks and children?
let’s see if i can make a partial list of your other possessions…
* a great big betamax with all the bells and whistles
* a sanyo eight-track player
* an ionic breeze air freshener
* a mantis mini-rototiller
* a slimy film of dead sea-monkeys
* a gazelle cardio trainer
* a craftsman 20” chainsaw
* an american car
* lifetime supply of hercules male enhancement pills
well, strike that last one: lloyd’s the culprit there.
I’ll be another voice for an Intel platform, which probably means Windows, but might mean *nix before too long. But it really depends on what you want to do with it. If you go with a Mac, you’ll get better graphics manipulation and a bit of a sense of smugness (sorry, couldn’t resist) at the expense of a semi-closed system (not as many upgrades/applications) and the limitations that come with it.
Before you make any decsions, talk to LuthorCorp’s HR and/or IT departments. I’ve got a sweet wide-screen notebook that I bought through a family member’s employer; apparently a number of the big hardware vendors are encouraging sales to staff. If your HR dept. doesn’t know of such a benefit, you might want to drop a note to someone in IT and see if such a deal is unofficially available anyway. I’ve got three systems (why yes, I am a geek...why do you ask?) that I got this way and they all cost a little under the price listed at the vendor’s site but with a few business upgrades (CD writers were one) the best (i.e., longterm with overnight service...and spendy) warranty/service deal included free.
I need to know how it tasted!!! I’ve never had a Meyer lemon before but I HAVE tried to make a Shaker pie, with horrifyingly disasterous results. It ended up inedible, only I valiantly tried to eat it and it was a noxious assault on my teeth enamel and my adventurous spirit. And other than that, it reminded me of those nasty supermarket turnover pies that ppl like my dad used to take to work in his lunchbox. ewwww.
And what is this 2x performance half price jibber jabber? Apple’s new machines ship with Intel processors and can run Windows. And the laptops have always been competitively priced.
In the end, I just tell people to get what feels right to them. Personal happiness is paramount, eh?
BootCamp looks pretty impressive, so much so that I’m now 90% certain my next computer will be a mac. (Previously I was 70% sure.)
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Well, you just let me know when you are ready for a Mac…