smacky and bucky

We were out having an early dinner last night, and Laura asked what the date was.

"January 31," I replied.

"You deserve a treat for not smoking for a month," she said.

It had been a month. I hadn't been thinking about smoking very often anymore.

"What do you have in mind?" I asked, raising my eyebrows rakishly.

"You'll see," she responded.




Mind out of the gutter, folks. We went to the Apple store. She decided I needed a new laptop. I've been using her hand-me-down model for years and years, an old Dell PC that didn't have enough memory to hold my iPod music, making it necessary to plug in an external drive to use iTunes. That, plus the fact that it weighed a lot compared to models of today, and the big fact that, even fully charged, the battery only lasted just over an hour, and yeah, I suppose I could use a new laptop. It just seemed like a big ticket purchase I could delay indefinitely though, since the one I had did in fact work, so I never thought about it. But my wife did think about it, and decided she was tired seeing me adapting her outdated hand-me-down to make it do things.

I am now the owner of a sleek little MacBook! It has a zillion features my last laptop lacked. It plays DVDs with more clarity than the older television we own. We watched parts of Kill Bill, part II on it, which turned out to be a great choice to display what the MacBook can do, since the movie starts in vivid B&W and moves to color, with a slow pan of the desert leading to the showdown in the trailer.

The laptop comes with a remote. With the remote, you can play a DVD, scroll though photos, or use iTunes as a jukebox, going to one specific song you want to hear, all the songs by a single artist, or random shuffle of your entire library.

Speaking of library, I transferred my music library from the external drive to the new laptop. It has a ton of memory compared to the old computer, so will easily hold all my music. I had to reformat the iPod, but somehow ended up with three more songs on it than it had before. Strange.

Anyway, I'm freaking spoiled, and though I think I'll have to take one of their free Apple classes to learn everything the computer can do (for example, it has a built in webcam for chatting) I'm looking forward to playing with it. This is the first Mac I've ever owned. A whole new world for me.