Number 8

It was so nice today, which by now is actually yesterday, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to ride the “spaceship” one more time before winter decides to get serious. I needed a destination though. I’d been meaning to get out to the Green Hills Apple Store and see what that’s all about, so that’s the direction I pointed myself.

Number 8
Number 8 resting atop Number 6

The Green Hills Apple Store isn’t quite so nice as the San Francisco store, but hey it’s a store filled with geeky Apple goodies so I was happy. So happy in fact that I accidentally bought a new computer, a Mac mini to be exact… and a KVM switch to boot.

I’d been thinking about this for quite a while actually. My PC has been making me less and less happy lately, and the Mac, besides just being a better operating system, really does a much better job with multiple users in my opinion. I have much finer grained control over just how much access my kids have to various applications and built in parental control for email, web browsing, chatting, etc., etc. Also, “my” laptop isn’t technically mine and I wanted to offload some of the more personal items from my work machine to something at home. Quicken stuff comes to mind.

Installation was hampered by the fact that the mouse I was using on the PC uses a PS/2 connector and I couldn’t find the USB adapter that I know is around here somewhere. So I had to buy a new mouse. I figured I’d simply leave the PC connected to the old mouse and use the new one for the Mac. Well, the PC wasn’t having any of that. It no longer wants to have anything to do with my old mouse. I think it’s feeling indignant about the new machine resting on top of it. Oddly enough, the old mouse communicates just fine with the mini, seeing as the new mouse is also a wireless Logitech. Windows… *sigh*.

So, the new machine is a 1.42GHz G4 Mac mini with 512MB of memory. It has been christened Number 8. Not very creative I know, but it follows a long line of computers who’s names began with “Number”: