Computers, life, and stuff...

So, the big desktop gaming rig had sat lifeless on the corner of my desk for...well, several years now, I'm ashamed to say. The hard drive had shat the bed and I kept meaning to replace it, while using my laptop as a substitute machine.

First it was my cheap 17" HP Pavilion, before going through a couple of more potent, game-capable 15" machines. The irony of the latter is that when doing anything that works the GPU hard, you generally want to keep the lid open for maximum cooling, and so here I'd be, playing games on a 15" screen with a dormant 25" monitor behind it.

I'd been kicking around the idea of a Mac Mini for a while, especially now that I'm using an iPhone and iPad. Being able to get stuff seamlessly back and forth between tablet and phone and working computer would be mighty handy.

I mentioned this in a discussion on Facebook and Marko PM'ed me to say he had a Mini that wasn't being used for anything right now. Further discussion developed that he had a MacBook Air that was also surplus to requirements at the moment. He made me a good price on the pair and so now I'm doing all the stuff involved in setting up a new desktop for work.

Except this one isn't going to have games on it. It's strictly for work stuff during the day. At 6PM I can rack the keyboard and hang up the mouse and lift the lid on the gaming laptop, pull out my Razer Naga, and get my WASD on until bedtime.

The MacBook Air is because, after dragging this six pound beast of a computer and its ginormous power brick around SHOT in my laptop bag, I'll be damned if I'm doing that for NRAAM. Or SHOT next year, for that matter. It doesn't take a lot of machine to do word processing and some simple Lightroom work, or blog updates.

I hadn't used a Mac as my primary machine since...what? OS X Snow Leopard on a G4 eMac? So there's some learning curve going on here as I get back into the groove with the shortcuts and menus and the whole driving on the left side of the road thing.

The Mac Mini desktop had another, unexpected benefit. Moving that huge tower case out and replacing it with the tiny mini-pizza box of the new computer caused me to start excavating the hideous mess on the back of my desk. I'm about halfway to a clean desk and starting to eyeball other notorious clutter areas. If I can quit smoking cold turkey, then turn around and lose some seventy-plus pounds, who knows what other things I can find the willpower to do?