The Bangus Ultimatum

A big chunk of the certiorari nights were spent tap tap tapping away at Nayna’s Powerbook G4. The output was beautiful, thanks to the OS X’s Postscript-based rendering system, and damn it felt good to be using a Mac again.

As we were winding down, the discussion veered towards operating systems, the old PCs v. Macs debate, and we very nearly talked H to buying a Macbook Pro. That decision would have to wait for next year, but at least we made him painfully aware of the constraints of his condition.

It made me miss my neglected jurassic macs. You see, after quitting ABS-CBN Interactive years ago, I blew my savings on a) photography stuff and b) a couple of old but refurbished macs. I had a 9500 (with scanner and printer and jaz drive), a color classic, and a 5300 Powerbook. All ridiculously underpowered compared to the big iron servers I used to handle at work, but I’d like to think that after crash-and-burning with programming, I was ready to be more sensible with technology. I bought into the Apple ads that said that it’s not how powerful your computer is, it’s how powerful your computer makes you. At any rate, the plan was to use the macs to write stuff that would make the world a better place (or at least a less bad one). You don’t need overwhelming processing power to run a word processor, I figured. I thought it would just be so damned romantic (and outright Hemingway, dude), typing manifestos, maybe dropping in a scanned photograph of deforestation (or whatever) - on a machine that ran under
200Mhz.

Then, law school. I never had the time to transport the macs to my dorm, and the dear old cranks just gave out. I couldn’t even boot them the last time I dared turn one on. And I’m working on a dual core pentium system to write code (In fairness, I use only Linux/Apache/PHP/Ruby/MySQL). So yeah. What the hell happened?

Tell you what’s going to happen, though. I’m going to bring one of these babies to Manila this Sunday, have it checked. I am going to make amends and do whatever it takes to get it running again. I have hope embedded in the ghosts of these machines, and I’m not about to give up on them.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 1st, 2006 at 11:19 am and is filed under Personal, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.