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01/15/2005 Entry: "Spam & Apples--Yum!"

Man, I've gotten some really strange spam the last week. I had one come in from a Kristin York. I went to school with Kristin all 12 years, plus kindergarten. But it wasn't really from her. Then today I got one from Renee Sydner. Renee was a year or two ahead of me in school. She played clarinet, and if I recall, dated my cousin Jason for a while. The house I live in was at one point owned by her family. But it wasn't her. It was spam. Actually, upon further inspection, I saw the sender was Renee Snyder, not Sydner.

For the past few years, I've used a Mac as my main computing machine at work. Apple's OS-X is the best looking, most user friendly, viable, regular person OS I've ever used. The only problem has been the hardware. A Mac was $1000, give or take a couple hundred. After three years, you threw it away. Meaningful hardware upgrades to Macs are really nonexistent. If you buy a PC, you can buy a new motherboard, processor, and memory for a few hundred bucks, and have a state of the art machine again. Not so with Macs. So I bought a PC for home use, not wanting to drop a grand every three years or so.

But now Apple has introduced the Mac Mini. All the basics for $500. Just plug in your own monitor, mouse, and keyboard, and you're ready to roll. For someone who already has a computer, and wants to go Mac, it's the perfect situation. I am seriously thinking about getting one. I just need to put the snare buying on hold for a month or three, and I can come up with the scratch. The mini is small enough to fit right on my desk. I can hook it up to the monitor I already have, or perhaps buy a switch that will allow me to control two computers through one montior/mouse/keyboard. I can use my preferred OS, and use it to preview websites I build on the Mac platform with Mac browsers. I'm really diggin' it!