34. Technology Report

My life has been changing quite a bit lately. Not in the physical world but in the virtual one. It snuck up on me and took me weeks to iron out, but here I am running a list of new toys/tools in my room..

LaCie Hardrive
At the end of last year I picked up a tiny cute 500 GB LaCie Hardrive to accompany the new time machine program that came on the new Mac OS X. This is nice and upside is no major squealing as the ones Dave brought home from the studio had.

LaCie Lightscribe
At the same time I got a Lacie LightScribe CD/DVD burner. This is mine. Not for sharing, as the last one we had was used for bulk itunes loading. My borg friends all burn every cd they own to TeraByte drives for fun and the group-owned one bit it due to this project being done at home on the old Lightscribe Drive. Those LaCie drives will etch artwork into your cd for you so I was hoping not to break it. Hmmph. So the new one is mine.

Macbook Air
Then the terrible thump happened where I pounded during invoicing and it happened to be on my Powerbook G4. It still works but sometimes sound and cdrom drive disappear unexpectedly leading Dave to believe the motherboard is cracked. I was very sad because I did not care for ANY of the Macbook things Apple offered. Also I hate the name Macbook. Sounds like 1st grade. But the Macbook Air came out and I ordered it first day. Somehow adding the word Air softens the name into something acceptable. To me. Macbook Air. I no longer have a cd-rom drive (I can use the LaCie) and I went down in hardrive space. There is only a speaker on one side and only 1 USB jack, a headphone jack and a place to put a monitor adaptor. That is IT! It made me very nervous. But by being meticulous and bringing everything over piece by piece I am fine for space. I have my whole itunes library even. It's not as fast as Macbook Pro but the tiny-ness I totally love… And it has forced me to clean up the giant squealing back-up mess of old harddrives that we had going on due to huge lazy confused procrastination. You also get a full size keyboard and screen and you can run Windows on it if you want..

iPhone
The real catalyst for moving forward though was the new iphones. Our contract was up on my birthday in March. And we had JUST gotten ATT in town in November. I wasn't really yearning for iphone but Dave sure was. I was mad though at the idea that we would have to move to get one. So when ATT took over Cellular One I was very happy just because that concept pissed me off. I don't need to live near museums and ethnic restaurants. I can travel to them, but to be shut off from being allowed to own an iphone was a really annoying idea to me.. Some sort of small town line was drawn there… And that was over it.

So we got the iphones. Oh the trauma. I hated it at first. I went from a 2 keyboard LG the V to this no-keyboard phone. You can't type right on it. You can't! But it has bizarre good fixing technology in the software so that pretty much doesn't matter once you get used to it.. And no pix messaging.. I learned that these were data machines like blackberries. I didn't know none of them could pix message. I think the treos still could but as my friends switched over to iphones and blackberries, I had no idea that my dumb little pixes weren't getting to them. I just thought all my friends hated me. It was a bad year anyway regarding humans so that fit right in. But on these you can just pop on to your email quite easily and send pics this way. That is the work around. Not really as fun and you can't get it out of your email except on your computer but it is ok. Once the panic of buying a 500 dollar phone you hate is over…

To get over it, I pulled all the pictures off my old photophones and put them on my new one. That was tedious dumb work but makes me happy now. You never could see the pictures on the old phones and I had baby pictures and things I wanted.

I had to go in and fix the horrible database mac address book. You can put subgroups in so I made one based on my old phone and fixed all the information. This is then synced throughout all our computers and iphones now. So, much more up to date and organized. I still use entourage as my email client and although I updated to Office 2008, the syncing is pretty bad with that so I will continue procrastinating on having my email addresses in the main database. But everything else makes so much sense.

Iphone is online so you can go on the internet. You can see websites and it is the best way to watch youtube videos. There is a nice but crappy dictionary. (I looked up really but could only get re-ally???) So that's weird but cool when it works right. You can look at your facebooks and myspaces etc..They probably have more useful options too. But really I just need a phone.

Oh yeah, it's an ipod too..Takes cool wacky pictures as well. Which you can email.

Time Capsule
Finally to round it all off.. Macbook Air having only 1 USB port is somewhat annoying unless you pick up the new Time Capsule. This works like a charm through time machine. You can just back up your crap in system X.5 without even knowing you are. It doesn't slow down your machine. You don't have to plug anything in. It just does it. When we had the squealy drives with Retrospect going, I never did it. And when I did it always had error messages. We went back and forth. Dave saying I got it, me asking did you? And him realizing no he still hadn't gotten it right. So we just ignored it.

I think the point of all this is that for some reason now it feels like technology has kind of gotten where it was trying to go eight years ago. I can go back to the time we bought the Handspring Visor and thought it would sync us up and be so great. But when it didn't work, we gave up and just coasted with a giant computer mess until now. I think they have finally got it. Seriously.

3/31/08