It all started with an iPod...

Well, it seems like it's finally happened. After all these years of managing to successfully avoid it, I now appear to be succumbing to the Dark Side. It all began in November, when I used my "holiday bonus" at work (20% off one item instead of 10%! Aren't faceless megacorporaconglomerates wonderful?) to buy myself a video iPod. It was fine at first, but then I suddenly found myself being overwhelmed by this inexplicable, uncontrollable urge. I didn't know what to make of it at first. As the urge escalated, I found myself doing things that I have never done before. I begain checking Apple rumor sites almost daily. Steve Jobs' MacWorld keynote? Watched the whole thing. All the while, the urge was getting worse and worse. Finally, last week, after a blurry few days of which I remember little besides the eBay logo and lots of cursing at snipers, I awoke to find this sharing a desk with my Linux box:

Just the thing I need. How nice.

So, yeah, as you can see there peeking out from behind the monitor and under the architecturally-dubious Leaning Tower of Kiseki™ (a Moosic landmark since 2005!), I am now the proud owner of an aging Mac.

Actually, I'm pretty much using this as sort of a training exercise. Now that Apple's switching to Intel (and thus opening the door for things like VMware and WINE, for when I acutally need a Windows program), I'm considering making the switch when my Windows box gets too old to be useable. Seeing how I like to run these things into the ground (I had a 486 Linux box running 24/7 until just last year, for chrissakes), this probably won't be happening for at least a few years. In the meantime, I grabbed myself this G4, seemingly plucked straight out of the hallowed halls of a forgotten University computer lab, judging by the number of labels that were stuck to it at some point or another. It also posesses the strangest CD loading mechanism that I have ever seen:

I'm your mighty, CD-gripping Jaws of Love, baby!

It's actually a DVD-RAM drive, where the recordable discs would come in their own cartridges. Do we remember DVD-RAM, kids? No? Neither do I. So anyway, there's what I'm going to spend the next few months playing with when I should be doing something productive. Like making timely updates to this blog. With that in mind, here's one last look at Christmas Mokona before I pack the lights up for another year:

En fuego!

Goodnight, everybody.