04 Apr 06 A Stick of Bread, a Loaf of Milk, and …

My mind usually is a real racer. I’m a stream-of-consciousness thinker, and usually, as the stream burbles along in my head, little tasks float to the top of my head, and I think, “Oh, we can’t forget to get that and we can’t forget to do this.” Very often, those items come to me when I have no access to pen or paper, and so I will repeat the tasks over and over again in my head until I can reach the paper. “Toilet paper, Kleenex, prescription, soda. Toilet paper, Kleenex, prescription, soda. Toilet paper, prescription, Kleenex, soda. Soda, toilet paper, Kleenex, prescription.” And so on.

What I remembered the other day, though, is that I learned that strategy from Sesame Street. If you’re in my age bracket (born in the ’70s, growing up in the ’80s), do you remember the “a loaf of bread, a container of milk, and a stick of butter” Sesame Street animated short? God, I had forgotten all about that until very recently …

The other thing I wanted to mention is that I purchased a new iMac in the beginning of February — one of the new machines with the Intel chips. The third Mac I’ve owned, although I’m keeping around the iBook for now. Yes, I was an “early adopter,” as they say — but I don’t regret it. Unlike the MacBook Pros (MacBooks Pro?) which nearly all seem to be suffering from a whining noise when the CPU is being underutilized, the iMacs don’t appear to be being plagued by many horrible problems. I’m keeping my fingers crossed, but in the meantime, the speed difference is heaven. Stuff that used to take seconds to open now open nearly instanteously. It’s interesting, though — I think my mind has grown “used” to the speed, because now, if stuff doesn’t open up instanteously, it feels like it’s opening up slowly. An interesting perceptual observation!

The one thing I do regret, though, is that I fell for Apple’s party line about Rosetta ensuring the smoothest of transitions. Don’t you believe it! In the Mac world, there are a lot of programs out there that rely on contextual menu items, preference panes, and so on, and many of them are taking their own sweet time to transition to Universal Binaries. In the meantime, you cannot access those items through Rosetta, so you’re stuck.

A small price to pay, though, in the long run. And I’m enjoying the bigger screen, nice speakers, and all-around sweetness of the unit.