This is the website of Abulsme Noibatno Itramne (also known as Sam Minter).
Posts here are rare these days. For current stuff, follow me on Mastodon
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It took a little longer than I’d thought it would to sell the stock and mutual funds I was using to fund this and move the money around to the right places, but I just ordered the new iMac for Amy.
There was some last minute hesitation on if I was really going to max the thing out, or if I’d go with less memory and/or drive space to save a boatload of cash. In the end though, I decided to stick with my “max it out, by the time three years is up she’ll find a way to use it” philosophy. But Gulp. I could have spent a lot less and gotten something that would have been more than reasonable for her for now… but here we go.
Between the monthly private school bills and this, we’re now pretty much guaranteed to be cash poor for the rest of 2007. She’d better appreciate it and spend every moment for the next year thanking me!
Well… she is 11. So that won’t happen. As Brandy says, some shrieks of glee when it first arrives and gets set up, and then there won’t be another word of thanks ever. But hey, that’s the way it goes.
And we really need this. Continuing to share my iMac with her ever increasing needs for computer time wasn’t working. And Brandy’s cheap temporary laptop she bought in 2006 is literally falling appart. (It is on the agenda to replace in 2008.) So she needed a machine. Did she need THIS machine? Well, probably not.
But damn it, I want to give her the best I can manage, so I did.
Yup, added some Google Ads. Just thought I’d finally give them a shot. Cause I want that $5 every 10 months or whatnot from the random people who stumble on this site by accident and then stumble away again through one of those links.
So far just PSAs. We’ll see if anything else ever shows up and if so what. In part, I’m just curious about what will show up, cause I certainly don’t have enough traffic to make any actual cash. But I’ve been meaning to try this for literally years, so today was the day.
I’ll keep them up awhile. If they start to really annoy me, at some point I may get rid of them again.
For the last 48 hours or so I’ve just felt bleh. I can’t identify it as a specific “sick” sort of thing, I don’t have cold or flu symptoms or anything, but it’s been the low energy, off and on headaches, heavy feeling head, random aches pains and discomfort, and the occasional dizziness or tingly feeling in the face sort of thing. I’ve been functional, but barely, most of the time feeling like I’d rather be lying down.
I don’t know what this is, but I want it to go away.
Oh wow, I’m going to be way off filter now. Yesterday I stayed up until about 13 UTC. Normal bedtime is more like 6 or 7. Then I woke up again about 17. I was up until around 19. Then back asleep again until I finally got up around 1 today.
That’s about 10 hours of sleep total, so I’m not short on sleep or anything. But I finally got up for good, oh, 11 hours after the time I generally need to be getting up on weekdays to get to work when I want to be getting there.
My sleep cycle is just going to be so wonked out.
Jet lag without the actual travel. Should be fun!
Amy is the third little dot from the left in the “shell” in this picture.
This week and last week Amy has been at “crew” camp. She enjoyed it. Yesterday was the big race. Amy’s team lost, but they had fun.
Today is the last day of camp. School will start again very soon.
Yesterday a bunch of us from work went to a baseball game. One of those build team feeling sort of things. It was fun. Seattle lost.
I hate it when at the end of a full busy day, I can’t really remember what the day was full of and what I was busy with. I’m sure it was good stuff though.
Cronus has been a little slow lately, and it hasn’t been a memory or CPU issue. But low and behold, I look and my 500GB hard drive (really 465GB, but that’s the whole thing about how hard drives are labeled and the difference between 1000 and 1024, but whatever…)
Where was I? Oh yeah, the drive was 97.8% full.
I just deleted some stuff I’d downloaded that I could get back any time I wanted if I wanted but at the moment I don’t want, and got it down to 88.6% full. That is a lot better, but still pretty full.
I have some more stuff that I’d feel comfortable burning to DVD or such and then removing from my primary drive, but that I don’t feel comfortable completely deleting. So I think maybe tomorrow I’ll go get a blank DVD or two and see what I can do with that. I’d like to get under 80%. Even lower if possible.
I suspect the fullness of my drive may have something to do with some of the slowdowns I’ve had lately. Maybe not, but it certainly seems like 97.8% was pushing it a little bit.
Anyway, time to go watch a DVD with the family. Tonight is an Amy pick. Oh my.
The sun has come up over northeastern Canada and is about to start heading down the US East Coast. I should really consider sleep soon.
 New iMacs FINALLY came out today. This has long been scheduled as “Amy’s Year” for a new computer. 2006 was my year. 2007 will be Amy’s. 2008 will be Brandy’s. Then lather, rinse, repeat. So this is Amy’s year, we were just waiting for iMac revisions.
All along the plan was to get the maxed out version of the smallest size when the updates hit. There was some discussion between Brandy and I today on the possibility of getting a baseline model instead as “good enough for now” but I’m a big believer in maxing things out so that you won’t be TOO frustrated too quickly as the thing ages. In the end we decided to stick with the original plan of maxing out the smallest size. (We never considered a 24″ for Amy.)
Since they dropped the 17″, that means we’re looking at a maxed out 20″. So the specs for her will be:
- 4GB 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM – 2x2GB
- 750GB Serial ATA Drive
- SuperDrive 8x (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
- Apple Mighty Mouse
- Apple Keyboard (English) + Mac OS X
- Accessory kit
- 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
- ATI Radeon HD 2600 PRO with 256MB memory
- 20-inch glossy widescreen LCD
- AirPort Extreme
- Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR
That will beat the specs on my machine Cronus by a decent bit. It should last her for the three years no problem without me even having to do any mid-cycle upgrades. In the additional one to two years before it will be time for my own next computer though, I will be jealous, since she’ll have the best machine in the house for awhile. But it is her turn… so that is OK.
I just initiated the process I need to do to swap money around between a few different accounts before I actually hit the order button. I’ll probably actually hit that button sometime next week and we’ll have the thing the week after that or so. In time to be all set up and running and happy before school starts in any case.
As I said… Lucky kid.
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