May Contain Nuts

So, evidently you can circulate false information about Democratic voting times in Virginia, claim it was an office prank gone wrong, and not be charged for it, even though it’s patently illegal to do so.

You can also evidently make misleading robo-calls to voters in Ohio telling them the same thing (vote on the 5th if you’re a Democrat)… I wonder if you can get away with that too.  Please tell me someone’s gotten the Caller ID on that robo-call office for local and state authorities to investigate… should we take bets on whether they get charged with voter suppression and disseminating false information?

It would seem that, since the polls are indicating there’s no way for McCain to win this election fairly, certain Republicans (or other McCain supporters) are taking it upon themselves to win by any means necessary, even if they’re immoral, unethical, and outright illegal.  No wonder Obama’s been pushing early voting… you can’t miss election day thanks to Republican-sympathetic undermining efforts when you’ve already voted last week!

Why can’t we all just vote?  I’m all for increasing your own party’s voter turn-out, but if we’re going to call this a democracy (which it really isn’t, it’s a republic, but whatever), we should be encouraging everyone to vote, regardless of the outcome of the election.  I’ve reminded several of the people I work with to send in their ballots (Spokane votes via mail-in ballot), even though I know they support McCain.  The strength of this country is its people’s ability to choose their leaders in an open and fair election process, and while I may not agree with who someone is voting for, in no way would I want to see their ability to cast that vote hindered.

I typically try to keep political discussion to a minimum because of how caustic the subject can be, but I’ve spoken my mind on the subject in the past, and refuse to be a prisoner of political correctness on my own blog, so here we go.

Living in Spokane, Washington, where voting is done entirely via mail-in ballots (I suspect mainly because the county is large enough and generally has a low enough population density that polling stations are less effective and cost-efficient than they would be in Seattle or an eastern state where it seems you’re always 5 minutes from three other cities), my wife and I have actually already voted, so I guess this is more of an explanation and commentary post than a “who am I gonna vote for” post (of course, IMO, being undecided at this point means you’re either not paying attention, are probably not going to vote, or Ron Paul isn’t on your ballot this year).

I have cast my vote for Senator Barack Obama, and it’s not because I’m black (which I’m not), or because I’d feel guilty about not voting for the black guy because of some inverted racism BS.  I voted for him because after 8 years of having a President who is only barely capable of forming complete sentences in front of the American people, it’s incredibly refreshing to see a candidate who is not only well-spoken, but who speaks to his audience like they’re adults, and not stupid children unable to handle complex truths.  I voted for him because after 8 years of “with us or against us”-style governing - something that McCain seems all too eager to perpetuate - Obama readily recognizes that the world is not a Hollywood action film or an episode of 24.  I voted for him because throughout his campaign, he has been able and willing to discuss his plans and policies, while John McCain has been increasingly focused on bad-mouthing his opponent at the expense of putting forth his own ideas.  I don’t think I’ve heard a new policy idea from McCain since before the last Presidential debate, and in an environment of extreme market volatility and evolving economic crisis, that’s not good.  It doesn’t matter now, but over the past few weeks I’ve been looking at McCain and thinking “tell me what you’re going to do as President, sir, don’t waste my time and attention rambling on about Bill Ayers and false assertions that your opponent is a socialist for giving me a tax cut,” and not once has he done anything of the sort.

Obama also strikes me as far more presidential than McCain in terms of personality, mannerisms, and approach.  He is level-headed, objective, and slow to anger (judging by the last debate, though, he does get easily amused at people spewing total bullshit, but that’s fine with me), with a long-term view of this country’s future, and a plan for getting us there.  He’s not afraid to speak his mind if he disagrees with someone, but is respectful in how he handles those disagreements, and generally seems very tolerant of opposing viewpoints, even if he thinks they’re ultimately wrong.  In a stunning change from the norm, he’s also an incredible optimist who sees the best in this country and its people.  McCain on the other hand bounces from attack to attack on a weekly basis, is quick to anger, makes rash decisions (Sarah Palin, Q.E.D.), is very resistant and intolerant of views other than his own (also evident in the last debate, with all the eye-rolling and obnoxious chuckling [and greepy grins] whenever Obama opened his mouth, especially toward the end), and seems to have the same attitude towards the rest of the world that Bush has, and that alone terrifies the hell out of me.  He’s also personally admitted that the economy is not his strong suit, and when we’re in the middle of an economic crisis/meltdown, that’s not a good person to have in charge of the country.  The nail in the coffin is probably that he’s taken to using the same divisive fear-based politics that Bosh has employed over the past 8 years to get people to join his cause because the alternative could be the complete destruction of the entire nation (ZOMFG TERRORISM!  ALERT LEVEL ORANGE!).

In a way it’s sad, because I might have considered voting for McCain if he were the same person he was in 2000, and was able to convince me that he’d actually clean up his party.  Now, though, he’s become a slave to his party, turning his back on many (if not all) of his former principles in what looks like a desperate effort to win the election at all costs (and if your desperation is that transparent, it’s not a good sign for your chances).  His choice of running mate has only further damaged any positive opinion of him I might have had.  Sarah Palin has only been on the national stage for 2 months, and in that time she’s displayed a gross lack of understanding about the responsibilities of the job she’s seeking to obtain, a complete inability (and even reluctance) to talk to the press, has been caught in numerous bold-faced lies (including her most recent claim that the Trooper-gate investigation cleared her of any ethical wrongdoing, when in fact the report stated just the opposite), has spent over $150,000 on clothes and accessories (which is more than 6 times what I make in a year… so don’t go telling me you’re a “common woman hockey-mom”, ma’am), and it’s been reported that while governor, she flew her kids around Alaska on the taxpayers’ dime to the tune of over $22,000.  This is just in two months!  Hell, her complete lack of understanding about what the Vice President actually does should disqualify her from the position all by itself.  If the VP debate were a job interview, she’d have been kicked to the curb in a heartbeat with all of her winkin’ and not answerin’ the questions she was asked and makin’ fun of the other applicants.  (On a side-note, I want to state for the record how delicious it was when Obama told Joe the Plumber what his fine would be for not providing health care to his fictional employees… “ZERO!?!?!”  Oh the lulz… THAT is how you win debates, by shutting your opponent up and shutting their argument down, literally.)

While I’m on the subject of treating the Presidency like a job and not just an elected office, I continue to be completely baffled by the number of people in this country who seem to be completely terrified of the concept of a smart person being President.  Honestly, in any other job, being smart is an unequivocal bonus (well, aside from minimum wage positions where being smart and highly-educated means you’re a high-risk employee, because odds are you’ll find a better job before your soul is crushed by the fry machine…).  Why, then, would we not want the single most powerful person in the country to be an egg-headed boy-genius?  I actually posed this question to a co-worker who isn’t voting for Obama partly because he’s “an elitist” (and partly because he’s “a socialist”, which I’ll get to…), and his response was that if someone’s too smart or too successful, they have no concept of how the average person thinks or what they want from their country, and end up making all sorts of bad policy decisions that negatively impact everyday working-class Americans.  Honestly I was so baffled by the implication that Barack Obama is more of an elitist than the guy with a multi-million-dollar trophy wife, 7 houses, and 13 cars that I couldn’t come up with a counter-point (in hindsight, this sentence is perhaps the most perfect response I could have given).

Now, as for this whole Joe the Plumber business… John McCain has spun this guy’s story into a completely mythical fabrication.  As McCain tells it, Obama knocked on the man’s front door, was asked a “tough question” about his tax plan from the perspective of a small-business entrepreneur, and his only response was that we should “spread the wealth around”.  Now, Obama is persecuting poor Joe for asking a question and invading his privacy by having news vans parked in front of his house.  The patent falsehood of this entire talkign point is so completely unfathomable I have to wonder if anybody in the McCain campaign even lives on this planet.  In truth, Joe approached Obama at an unscheduled campaign stop in his neighborhood, asked his question, and was told unequivocably by Obama that he would be paying no more taxes than he would have under Clinton’s administration (and would only be paying those higher taxes on income over $250,000… so making $260,000 would mean only $10,000 would be taxed at the higher rate), and that by cutting his taxes on his current wages (which are, in fact, well below the $200,000 bracket for single-filer small business income), he would be helping Joe buy his company sooner.  After that conversation, McCain (not Obama) mentioned him 21 times in the last debate, and has mentioned him at seemingly every opportunity since then.  If anybody’s persecuting the poor guy and keeping him in the spotlight for asking Obama a “tough question” (and honestly, “are you going to raise my taxes if I make over $250,000 a year” is not a “tough question”, that’s fact-checking), it’s John McCain.  McCain brought him up frequently enough that the media wanted to talk to him and find out more about this mystical “Joe the Plumber”, and that has nothing to do with his original question about Obama’s tax policy.  But, McCain can now use this iconic figure as a talking point and rallying cry among his supporters (few people outside of that base seem to be buying his BS) rather than having to spend time talking about the actual issues, so I guess in some twisted way, it’s a win for McCain’s strategy of campaigning.

Finally, I’ve noticed a lot of talk about Obama having significant ground games and even significant ad buys in very red states like Texas, North Dakota, and Georgia, as well as long-shot battlegrounds like West Virginia (and to a degree, Indiana, though that one seems closer to flipping now).  Mostly, people are confused about why he’s wasting money and effort in those states instead of just concentrating on the ones he knows (or thinks) he can win to pass to 270-mark in the electoral college.  Honestly, I think this is a concerted effort on his behalf to spur voter participation and drive up the popular vote, so that even if the electoral college is close, his win percentage in the popular vote is significant because of participation in all 50 states.  This is how you be a uniter, not a divider, ladies and gentlemen.  The more of a mandate he can claim to have because of electoral college and especially popular vote success, the easier it will be for him to do his job as President… and if a 51% popular vote win was enough for Bush to have a “mandate” in his second term, well more than 51% should be beyond sufficient to claim the same thing (and actually have those who didn’t vote for you believe it).  Plus, when you raise $150 million in a single month, you gotta spend it somewhere, so why not?

Obama/Biden ‘08!

There’s a rumor going around that Apple is set to announce a subscription-based music service for iTunes at their “Rock On” Super Awesome Event of Super Awesomeness next week.  It’s probably not true, but I figured I’d toss my hat into the ring of commentators on the idea.

As the sole way of acquiring music from an online distributor, subscription services suck.  They just do.  As soon as you stop paying, all of the stuff you’ve paid for suddenly goes away, and That’s Badâ„¢.  However, such services do have the advantage of allowing you to be incredibly liberal in sampling music, because you’re more likely to spend $5/month, download 10 albums, and maybe like/keep 2 of them than you are to pay $9.99 for each of those same albums, and suddenly find yourself out $80 because you only liked 2 of them enough to keep around.  From the perspective of someone who likes to hear more than the 30-second clips on iTunes before buying a track or full album (which often aren’t very representative of the full track), a subscription service would be likely to expose me to more music that I’d be willing to pay for.

The rumored iTunes Unlimited service, while just a tad on the pricey side, would ultimately be the best of both worlds, because as I understand it, you can “rent” anything in the music store with your subscription, and then buy it outright if you really like it and want to keep it.  Theoretically if your Unlimited subscription were ever canceled, you’d still own all of the music you coughed up the extra cash for, and That’s Goodâ„¢.

Honestly, I’m not sure I’d really be able to get my money’s worth out of a subscription though, so I don’t know if I’d swing for it, but of all the subscription services available, Apple’s seems like it would actually make the most sense (plus it would work with Macs and iPods, so there’s another plus…).

What I’d really like to see, though, is a Netflix-like subscription service for the video section of the store that runs on the same principle.  You pay $X each month, and get to rent whatever you want from the video store - TV shows and movies, but not music videos - to watch once.  If you really like a certain video, you can go ahead and buy it at the full or nearly-full price and own it outright.  I could easily see a tiered service being put in place with either per-month limits, limits on how many items you can have rented at a time (watching something will allow you to rent something else) with no time limits, or both (which would be the most restrictive and really suck).  Still, I’d probably end up frequenting the iTunes video store a lot more if I could pay, say, $5 or even $10 a month and be able to rent as many movies/shows as I wanted (or n movies/shows with a tiered service) for a flat fee.  Anything I’ve rented, seen once (as would be the limitation), and want to keep, I can purchase and watch an unlimited number of times with the same FairPlay restrictions as other videos from the store currently have.  With something like this, who would need cable (well, except for NBC/Universal shows, because they’re whiny little bastards)?

This brings me to my next point, which is AppleTV and Hulu.  I’m still very seriously wanting to get an AppleTV, if only because the Dell currently attached to the TV doesn’t have enough horsepower to do very smooth h.264 video playback (full-screen or windowed), and half of the stuff I own is in h.264 (this problem is especially noticable in iTunes for some reason).  The other reason, which will factor into my comments on Hulu momentarily, is that watching stuff on TV is a lot nicer than watching stuff on a computer, and while I have a computer attached to the TV, it’s not exactly a convenient experience, what with the keyboard and mouse requirements.

Now, having an AppleTV would be great, and I could (for the most part) ditch the Dell as a result, but AppleTV doesn’t support Hulu, and for as much as I swore up and down that I wasn’t going to frequent the service, it’s damned tolerable (the occasionally shoddy commercial breakpoints and tendency to run the same ad 6 times during a 1-hour show can be grating).  As I understand it, Hulu’s video is also in h.264 (since Flash supports it now), so it’s not like the AppleTV would need to break down its ivory codec tower to support it.  Of course, it would probably require Apple to make a deal with NBC/Universal, which seems unlikely to happen given the blame game they played when NBC left iTunes.  Still, I think if you’re going to have streaming web video content on your device, Hulu is a far better place to get it from than YouTube (know how many times I’ve used the YouTube app on my iPod in the past 9 months?  Probably 5, and all of them were to look up Jonathan Coulton videos).  What I’m getting at is that I would absolutely love to see a Hulu app on the AppleTV, ideally provided by Apple so I don’t have to figure out how to hack it (though I would probably be willing to pay for one that was high-quality even if it did require hacking my device).

I had - with many thanks to Oscy for getting it together for me - a sizeable portion of fruit for breakfast today at around 7:00.  As it is now 11:00 and I’ve been hungry for almost an hour, I have this to say about fruit as one’s sole breakfast food:

Tastes great!  Less filling!

It’s time for another one of my stream-of-consciousness “here’s what’s on my mind while I’m at work” posts.  Feel free to insert your own “and now, for something completely different”s between paragraphs.  The people responsible for sacking those responsible for these subtitles have been sacked.

Costco is a cool place to get movie tickets, apparently.  $15 for 2 adult tickets at Regal, which is better than even the matinee ticket prices… and like $5 cheaper than the evening prices.  There will be serious Prince Caspianage today, followed by even more serious Indiana Jonesing next week.  On that note, we also got the new box set of the Indiana Jones trilogy Wednesday.  Willie?  Still twice as annoying as I remember her being (Osc was ready to shoot her during the first scene at the Obi Wan bar [which amused her to no end] in Shang Hai).

It’s gonna be the future soon.

Apple is apparently expanding on their original patent application for location-based content delivery.  I think I mentioned back when they signed that deal with Starbucks that being able to get on-demand location-aware content delivered to you in places outside the coffee shop would be seriously awesome… ordering movie tickets without waiting in line, buying a soundtrack from a theater’s “now showing” custom wi-fi music store, getting maps of malls or airports… the list goes on.  The iPhone, iPod Touch, and other mobile internet devices are quickly approaching and even surpassing the absolute utility of concepts like Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.  Seriously, Star Trek’s got nothing on this stuff.  Meanwhile, Microsoft’s taking the map angle in a different, more public direction (I think the smart whiteboard application is more useful then 4×6-foot interactive maps, personally).  Did I mention it’s gonna be the future soon?

By the way, I have serious respect for anyone who can sing and play an instrument at the same time with any degree of capability, because I simply fail at being coordinated enough to manage that.

Recently I gave up on the money management app I got in the MacHeist bundle, Cha-Ching, and ported the last month or so’s worth of financial stuff into another app called MoneyWell.  It’s a very different application from Cha-Ching, but it seems to have much better support, is a lot more stable, and makes it possible to really granularly control our spending, which is a really good thing.  It’s amazing what you discover when you actually sit down and plan out all of your finances in a really serious way, and with all of that information in mind, we can make better decisions about how to spend the money we make in the future.

Jonathan Coulton makes any work day better.  I blame linking to “Future Soon” for getting me started listening to him today.

I’m very seriously considering getting a refurbished AirPort Extreme so that we can get the Wii and our Touches hooked back up to the internet at home, because we’ve run out of unlocked networks elsewhere in the apartment complex to piggy-back off of, and I have a very serious need to play LostWinds.  I need to play it very seriously, in fact.

On a related note, I listed my G5 on Craigslist last night.  Hopefully I’ll be able to sell it in short order, but if not, I may need to look into alternatives (still thinking that the local reseller, Mac Odyssey, wouldn’t be a bad way to go if not for the 30% they take for finding a buyer and managing the sale).  I’m hoping to get enough for the G5 and the display combined to cover the cost of a refurbished iMac at $1599, with maybe a little left over for the AirPort Extreme.

Are shiny.  Comments/questions/opinions/praise/hate-speech?

So, as the rumors predicted, Apple has revved the iMac with some marginal processor, FSB, and RAM  speed improvements.  As a result, the brand new system I was looking at now comes with 2 GB of RAM standard, and has the option of being upgraded to a GeForce 8800 GS video card with 512 MB of RAM.  Total cost: $1949 + tax (with upgraded card… vanilla is still the same $1799 it was yesterday).

At the same time, these spec bumps have triggered a price drop on the now-last-gen iMacs that I was also eyeing.  The refurbished top-of-the-line 24″ system I was looking at last week has dropped from $1799 to $1599, with the added benefit of having a quad core processor over the newer one’s dual-core of the same speed (dunno how useful that is, but it sounds cool), a larger hard drive (500GB vs. 320GB), and the same 2GB of RAM standard.  It’s also got the same Radeon 2600 Pro card as the newer model’s base configuration.

Initially, I was torn over which system to get… new hotness is always better, but such is always the case, and if you wait for what you want to be cheap enough to buy, it’s not the new hotness anymore.  Given that I’m moving from a dual 2.3 GHz PowerPC G5 system with a gig of RAM, as opposed to fretting over a minor spec bump from an older Intel-based iMac, the improvements to performance will be considerable regardless of which system I buy, and the older one is still just as awesome as it was last week, only now it’s $200 cheaper.  So, I’ve officially decided to get a refurbished 24″ 2.8 Core 2 Extreme iMac.  Hooray!

Now, paying for it is the tricky part.  Obviously, I don’t have the means to go throwing what is effectively a month and a half’s pay at a new system.  However, I am looking into selling the G5 as a means to paying for the new system.  Based on estimates I got a few months ago from a local reseller (Mac Odyssey), I could expect to get as much as $1799 for the G5.  That’s completely insane!  $1799 for a 3-year-old system that’s been deprecated by Apple moving to a new processor architecture!  And these suckers are apparently in huge demand!  The mind boggles.  Anyway, I’ve also decided to sell my trusty, somewhat dusty, high-tech electronic light pen input device 23″ Cinema Display, since I don’t have room on my desk for two monitors (awesome as that would be), and since it’ll still fetch a pretty decent price (I’ve seen people asking as much as $650 for them on Craigslist) that I can put toward making sure I can cover taxes on the new machine.

Despite Mac Odyssey wanting to take a 30% cut of the sale for actually finding a buyer and handling the transaction, I’m still inclined to try and sell my G5 through them.  Putting my primary system and monitor out for purchase on Craigslist for a combined cost of over $2000 kind of makes me nervous.  I know the chances of getting screwed are relatively low if I handle things right, but I don’t want to risk someone managing to get my G5 without actually paying me for it first, because then I’d be effing screwed.  With Mac Odyssey offering to handle not only the financial end, but also finding a buyer in the first place, I could probably expect to have a much faster turn-around time on the sale, and have my new computer in-hand within days, rather than weeks, of getting started with the proceedings.

I had mentioned last week that I wanted to go visit the local branch of Mac Odyssey and discuss options and what I would be expected to do prior to giving them my G5 for sale, but I discovered that the location closest to me was closed recently.  I may make a trek tonight over to the Coeur d’Alene location and chat with them about what they can do for me.  I want to make this happen relatively soon, because the refurbished last-gen iMacs are only going to be available for a limited period of time, and the G5’s resale value is only going to get worse.  I’m just somewhat hesitant to get rid of my G5.  It’s been a trustworthy machine (heh, almost said “little machine”) for the past 3 years, and it’s almost like ditching a friend or giving away a pet, stupid as that sounds.  It’s also fairly mind-boggling that I can actually sell my older computer for more than it costs to buy a new one.  Granted, it’s a more high-end system than the iMac was, and Apple systems retain their resale value for stupid lengths of time, but still, having a $2500 system retain about 67% of its resale value over 3 years is just completely nuts, and I keep expecting to have this end up being some eleborate prank that leaves me without a computer.  Mainly, I’m so amazed by this because my family has a tendency to use computers until they can’t even be given away anymore.  My dad is still rockin’ the P2 400 that we bought to replace the family’s old 486 DX2 system about a decade ago for crying out loud.

I can’t do anything just yet, because I’ve got some stuff to take care of for the Mysterium committee that would best be kept safe from the upheaval of computer trade-ins, but once that’s out of the way (hopefully this week),  I should be free and clear to sell my old system.  Now I just need to come up with a name for the new iMac… (this may explain why I have attachment problems… I name my electronics.)

Well, tonight I finished the new design for the WordPress 2.5-based version of May Contain Nuts.  I’m still getting the hang of the whole elegant degradation part of web design, and being without a copy of IE6 to test with, I can’t vouch for it not barfing all over the place, but it’s been tested in IE7, Firefox, and Safari to no ill effect, so I’m going to run with it and just advise people with older browsers that it’s high time they get a new one :P.  IE6 is only 7 years old now, after all.

Hopefully I can get Revision 1 re-themed tomorrow, and then I can get started backing everything up and uploading the new files.  Saturday may be something of a wash, what with Oscy and I taking Caliope’s daughter out for some fun while her mom’s at work, so I may not have a new blog design up until Monday or Tuesday, but this is the most productive I’ve been in quite a while, and I don’t want to lose it, so I may go a little crazy and have everything updated Friday night.  Just depends on how quickly I can crank out a new deisgn for Revision 1.

So I’ve been thinking, which is never really a good thing, because it tends to result in novel-length blog posts for you to have to wade through…

Anyway, I’ve been pondering an upgrade to my PowerMac G5 for some time now.  Now, while I could easily shove a couple more gigs of RAM into the G5 and get at least another year out of it, I feel like the more effective upgrade would be to box the old girl and trade it in for some new hotness, given the increasing atmosphere of Intel-targeted development in the Mac community (and the no doubt impending EOL-ing of OS X’s support for the PowerPC line).  Most of the productivity software devs are still releasing UniBi apps, but the gaming scene is definitely moving to Intel on the quick-fast.  So, trade-ins it is then.

Initially, I was drooling over the new Mac Pros and their utterly absurd base specs.  I even priced one out versus an Alienware box, and with the exact same specs, the Mac Pro came out cheaper.  However, I think it can easily be argued that a Mac Pro has more power behind it than I’ll likely ever need, and the upgradability isn’t really a huge deal for me, because frankly, I’ve never upgraded the G5 beyond cramming an extra 512 megs of RAM into the thing the day I bought it almost 3 years ago (cruising on a gig of RAM is cool, but quickly becoming inadequate).  The deciding factor against just going out and throwing my G5 up on eBay, Craigslist, or the local Mac reseller’s trade-in program for a new Mac Pro has been price.  Even discounting the percentage cut that the reseller would take for handling the transaction and finding a buyer for me, I’d still only be walking away with $1700 or $1800 by using Craigslist or eBay, which is considerably short of a new Mac Pro at $2299.  If I took it to the reseller, I’d see even less of that.

Recently, I’ve started looking at getting an iMac instead.  I don’t really deal with the sort of projects that require a behemoth of a machine like the Mac Pro… mostly I deal with Pages, iPhoto, and some light design / touch-up work in Photoshop.  Plus, it gives me the opportunity to sell my 23″ Cinema Display along with the G5 for some bonus cash to put towards the new system.  Seeing as how they still sell them new for $900 (refurbs are $500), I imagine I could get at least $300 out of selling it on top of the asking price for the G5.  The only consideration for me at this point is one of desktop worthiness, since the desk I have may not be ideally suited for an all-in-one machine (such are the perils of buying furniture that fits your needs at the time, I know…).  I really don’t see many downsides to getting an iMac over a Mac Pro though… it’s a simple matter of fact and technology that anything I buy is going to be leagues better than the G5, even if it is a dual 2.3 GHz machine.  Plus, a 24″ iMac recoups the loss of my Cinema Display plus some, and still obviously bests the crappy-ass Dell boxes we bought last year.  Finally, as I said, I just don’t need 4-8 cores worth of Xeon muscle for what I do with my computer.

Running on the assumption that I could sell the G5 for $1799 (which, if I go through the reseller, nets me $1199 back), and also running on the assumption that I could sell the Cinema Display for $300 (which gets me $210 back through the reseller), I could pick up a refurbished current-gen 24″ dual-core iMac for about $100 out of pocket (plus tax).  If I sold everything myself, I could get a new dual-core iMac and actually make money on the deal, or even get a refurbed quad-core machine and still come out about $40 ahead.  The challenge would be making sure I had everything on the G5 backed up to either the external hard drive or the Dell doubling as a crappy-ass media center / crappy-ass gaming console before wiping the drive and re-installing Leopard (which, incidentally, I might be able to charge a little more for, though I’ll be sad to lose the cool little box it came in).  Pretty much everything I’d need to take with me lives in my user folder, though, so that shouldn’t be a terribly huge issue.

I’m contemplating heading down to the reseller tonight and having a conversation with them about anything special they can do for me that might sweeten the deal with them handling the transaction for me.  There’s also the rumor that there’s new iMac spec bumps due next week, so I may even be able to get in on the ground floor of a brand new Mac for a bit cheaper by buying a show unit if that ends up being the case.  I’m inclined to go through them in any case, since it feels a bit safer than selling the thing through Craigslist (which I infinitely prefer over eBay, especially since we recently threw out the monstrous box the G5 came in), even if they do take a fairly steep 30% comission fee.

The final advantage to having an Intel Mac, of course, is the ability to run Windows on it, which would be great with VMWare or Parallels so that I don’t have to bounce between machines or try using RDC to do 3D modeling work for games and sundry the way I do now (which honestly hinders productivity).  Since I’ve already got a copy of XP Pro that’s no longer in use after giving Oscy’s old PC to her dad (at least, I think we kept the disc…), I don’t even have to worry about spending money on a Windows lisence, I can just get VMWare or Parallels and rock out.

Well, tonight I did something rather unexpected.  After finishing up what I hope is the final draft for The Archiver’s 12th issue (coming soon to a virtual news stand near you!), I decided to delve into making Firefox my default browser.  Anyone following this blog knows how much I’ve hated on Firefox’s appearance in OS X in the past, and I’ve actually made several unpublished attempts at ranting about the almost-but-not-quite-there default theme in Firefox 3, so this is quite a change of heart.

There were several things that ultimately pushed me over the edge.  First was Firefox 3’s support for Aqua controls.  Second, the absolutely stunning GrApple theme by Aronnax, which fits in with OS X so much better than the default Firefox theme does (though I must say that OS X is the only OS that really makes the new Keyhole back/forward control look good).  Third, Delicious finally put out a beta of their new extension for Firefox 3, which was the single most important functionality requirement I had for switching to Firefox 3 full-time.

I had to do a little bit of tweaking to get the Delicious extension to look the way I wanted… the only thing that really bugged me was how ugly the default tag icons looked against the dark gray of OS X’s windows.  In the end, I probably spent 45 minutes pouring through Firefox’s innards looking for the extension and the icons it uses.  Since the icons ended up being inside the .jar file bundled with the extension, I had to get creative and figure out how to tweak the user chrome (not to mention dig through tons of CSS in the Delicious .jar to find the right class) to make the changes I wanted.  Not being in the mood to build a new tag icon from scratch, I went the simplicity route and just removed the tag icon completely, then halving the size of the space it took up to provide more bookmark bar-like spacing between the dropdown lists (I use Favorite Tag view).  I also bolded the text to make it a bit more like the bookmark bar.  If I feel up to it tomorrow, I might go crazy and dig up the actual style for the bookmark bar items to use in the user chrome for the Delicious toolbar.

I’m going to run Firefox 3 as my default browser on the Mac as an experiment for a week or so, and see if the system is more responsive after leaving the browser up under load for several days than it typically is under Safari. A lot of my problems with memory usage would probably be aleviated by just cramming more RAM into this thing, but I’m trying to be cheap right now.