Wait wait wait. You complaining about the price of an iMac when you just bought like 8 cameras back to back?

Yeah yeah. But I'm talking the total cost-value proposition here.

Here's my situation: I have my two year-old MacBook, (which is working much better now that I'm no longer slamming it in a notebook and dragging it off to classes anymore by the way), which I have installed at my desk alongside a 17" Samsung, and my aged decrepit Vista PC that I have connected to my TV, for Hulu, Netflix, and por-the Internet.

The PC is crap. Sometimes it won't initialize the TV via HDMI, sometimes the keyboard and mouse don't register, and once in a while, it starts looking at me funny; I'm not happy with it.

Meanwhile, the MacBook has only about 2 gigs of drive left. This storage gets filled up quickly by caches generated by Photoshop and browsers. I'm talking huge caches. iLife programs like to have everything on the main drive too, so I can't expand my iTunes library, easily import photos (notice there hasn't been anything new for a while?) or even sketch for more than a few minutes.

Long story short, what I've decided to do over the weekend was order a big, fast notebook drive: a 7200 RPM, 320 GB Western Digital, a little more than 2.5 x the current size and a bump up from the current 5400 which I expect will make tasks like processing RAW photos a little less painful, and even letting me install a stable copy of Windows to install some OS-specific tablet software.

I'm also picking up a cheap Intel motherboard to replace my ostensibly free ECS. I figure if anyone is capable of making a MB that isn't total crap, it's Intel. It'll remain an entertainment machine though. (Although I have heard reports of people running OS X on this particular MB).

This should at least tide me over until the Macs are refreshed, and then we'll see if a move is still warranted.

Went to Benihana's this afternoon and had a teriyaki steak prepared by our table chef, Antonio. What a crazy job... can't help but wonder how often a performing chef loses hold of a shaker they're juggling behind their back and smacks someone in the eye. The food is alright, if a bit bland, but face it: the real reason to go to a place like (and pay about double what you normally would for good Japanese food) is the show - and in that realm I can't say they disappoint.

Then I came home and tried to diagnosis my PC in anticipation of the Team Fortress 2 beta opening this week. The problem was running Half Life 2 Deathmatch (using the same Source engine) would consistently after about 3-5 minutes of play. I managed to successfully isolate the first problem (involving the VB JIT debugger), and then work my way to updating my BIOS, video card drivers, DirectX, sound card drivers, reinstalling the game, testing my RAM, then going out and buying new RAM... the result being that although the new RAM passes MemTest with flying colors, I'm $50 poorer and I can't even start Half Life without getting "Platform error: Module failed to initialize" followed by a 'memory could not be read' error. Awesome!

Naturally, I'm on the MacBook again. I'd really love to play Team Fortress though...

( And some stuff about iPhone... )

Oh, by the way kids, my number has changed: if you need to get a hold of me (and you still haven't figured out I'm almost always easier to reach through AIM), you can text my phone right here and we'll work it out.