Tag Archives: computers

Don’t Tell Me How to Spend My Money

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I tell yet another long backstory and get a few things off my chest. Sorry about the dirty laundry.

The other day, I did something I didn’t want to do: I bought a new monitor for my computer on Amazon.com.

The Monitor Backstory

It isn’t that I didn’t want to buy the monitor — I definitely did. Years ago, when I wrote books for a living, I had a wonderful computer setup that consisted of a 27″ iMac with a 24″ second monitor. I needed all that real estate for the work I was doing, laying out book pages on one screen and working with images, files, email, social media, and who knows what else on the other. It made my work easier and more pleasant to do, especially when I started getting involved in video projects for my helicopter YouTube channel, FlyingMAir.

But things change. I sold the helicopter and stopped doing videos. I bought a boat and started spending months on it at a time. I didn’t need a desktop computer so I traded it in for a new laptop. Along the way, I sold that second monitor, which, in all honesty, wasn’t that good anyway.

Dell Monitor
Here’s the marketing photo of the monitor I bought. Looks like a photo from Death Valley near Dante’s Point with a shit-ton of post processing and the saturation amped up, no?

But now I’m spending more time at home again, prepping to lay out another book, and making boating videos for my personal YouTube channel. So I bought a Mac Mini from Apple and bought a 27″ Dell UltraSharp monitor from Amazon to go with it.

The monitor is great and has more useful features than I need to cover here. It was working okay, but I really did miss that second monitor. So when I got home from my brief (comparatively speaking) trip south this winter, I decided it was time. I’d buy another monitor — preferably the same model — and set it side by side with the one I already had. It would make me more productive, I reasoned (whether rightly or wrongly). And yes, I’ll admit that the desire for some retail therapy weighed into the purchase decision.

And that brings me to Wednesday’s purchase.

The Amazon Backstory

I have been using Amazon.com since the only thing it sold was books. I was a Prime member when it was $49 (or maybe $39?) a year and all it got me was free 2-day shipping. I have spent thousands of dollars on Amazon over the years — sometimes more than $10,000 in a single year.

Sounds like I’m a real fan, right? Well, maybe I was but I’m not anymore. I dumped Prime when it got up to $149/year. (I think that’s what it is now, no?) I don’t watch TV and 2-day shipping is something Amazon stopped doing to my home back around Covid. I don’t like the way Amazon dominates the market and is putting smaller businesses out of business. I didn’t like the way “marketplace” vendors could be unreliable. I didn’t like the way search results — unless you had a specific make/model in mind — brought up so much crappy Chinese junk. And when it screwed up three of my orders right before Christmas, I started wondering why I was using Amazon at all. Surely I could just find stuff elsewhere.

So around mid-December 2024, I stopped buying at Amazon. Completely.

It wasn’t easy. You don’t realize how easy it is to fire up the Amazon app on your phone or tablet, find what you want (or think you want), and order it. With Amazon out of the picture, I had to source the things I couldn’t find locally elsewhere. It was a struggle. But I was succeeding. Up until Wednesday, I hadn’t ordered a single thing from Amazon. That’s about two months.

And I would have kept up the streak if it weren’t for the damn monitor.

Shopping for This One Specific Thing

Before you comment with advice on what I should have done, please read this…

  • I wanted this monitor, not some other make or model.
  • I wanted a new monitor, not a used or refurbished one.
  • I wanted to buy from a reputable source, not some guy selling on eBay or Craig’s List.
  • I know Best Buy will match prices, but not online. The closest Best Buy is a 2 1/2 hour drive from me.
  • Costco does not carry every single make/model of monitor and I am not a Costco member anyway.

I really did think this through. This post might be long, but it doesn’t include every single thing I did and thought about this.

You see, I wanted the exact same monitor. I knew it would work well with my Mac. I confirmed that it could be daisy-chained, via USB C, to the one I already had. I knew that my little Mac Mini could support two UHD displays. Not only that, but because they were identical, they’d line up perfectly, side by side, on my desktop, making a seamless ultra-wide monitor with plenty of easily accessible real estate.

So I fired up Duck Duck Go — my current search engine of choice; don’t get me started on Google — and put in the monitor’s model number: U2723QE. Of course, Amazon appeared at the top of the search results, but I ignored it. I figured that I’d buy it at B&H, which is where I’d seen it at a slightly higher price than Amazon in autumn.

But that price had gone up. And, to make an already too long story a tiny bit shorter, I’ll summarize my shopping experience: the monitor was more than $100 less on Amazon than anywhere else. And I think I looked just about everywhere.

Dell Monitor on Amazon
Although most pricing I saw was in the $540 to $590 range, I actually saw this monitor for more than $600 on AliExpress, which someone on social media suggested.

My Dilemma
My Mastodon post. Imagine me getting the whole story in less than 500 characters!

I stressed over this purchase. The way I saw it was that I had two choices: (1) I could save more than $100 by breaking my No-Amazon streak and buying it on Amazon or (2) I could skip buying it. There was no way I was going to spend $100 more than I had to.

I discussed this dilemma on my social media network of choice, Mastodon. The replies started coming in. The general consensus was that avoiding Amazon purchases when possible was a good thing. But when I needed to make a purchase and Amazon’s price was far better than anyone else’s, I should just go for it.

Bought Monitor
I posted this on Mastodon on the thread about my self-imposed moral dilemma.

So I did.

And Now to the Point of this Post

All that is backstory. What would one of my blog posts be without backstory?

It was one of the replies to my post about the purchase that really got under my skin. I don’t want to put the poster in the spotlight because maybe that person didn’t mean to trigger me. But I was definitely triggered and that’s what this post is all about.

The reply was:

You could always donate a portion of the money you saved to an organization you support…

I was (possibly unreasonably) offended by this.

The main and somewhat obvious reason this might offend me is the insinuation that I don’t normally contribute to charitable organizations. That cannot be farther from the truth, as I attempted to make clear (with possibly some humor?) in my response:

The organization I support right now is my grocery bill, which was $200 yesterday for one person for one week. And I didn’t even buy eggs. ;-)

Throughout the year, however, I donate to NPR, Wikipedia, World Kitchen, Pro Publica, Goodwill, the Humane Society, and others. That comes to a lot more than what I saved today.

Ben had it right: a penny saved is a penny earned. The more I save, the more I can spend elsewhere, whether its on me or for charitable donations.

(The Ben I’m referring to here is Ben Franklin, of course. He was a smart guy, even if he never really did say “A penny saved is a penny earned”.)

But the deeper reason it offended me was because I saw it as someone trying to tell me how to spend my money — and that is a particularly sore spot with me.

Don’t Tell Me How to Spend My Money

The way I see it is this: I earned everything I own, either through hard, smart work or through good investments. No, I didn’t get everything right, but I got enough right to put me where I am today as a financially secure home owner with enough money in the bank to make money one of my lesser concerns in life. There’s no generational wealth propping me up — as a few people with giant chips on their shoulders seem to think. Since graduating from college back in 1982, I have never asked for or received any financial help from anyone in my family or elsewhere, no matter how much I needed it.

Factory Photo
Here’s a blast from the past: on November 23, 2004, I took my sister and brother to the Robinson Helicopter factory for a tour. By an amazing coincidence, it was the same day they put my helicopter on the assembly line. Here I am standing next to hull #10603, holding a photo of a mockup based on a friend’s helicopter.

One of the ways I got to financial security was by making enough good financial decisions. The purchase of this monitor at Amazon for a savings of $100 is an example on a micro level. The purchase of a $346K helicopter, straight from the factory, that formed the basis of a lucrative 15-year career as an agricultural pilot is an example at a more macro level.

I spend my money the way I see fit. Yes, I have three vehicles, but the newest one is 12 years old. (The oldest is 26 now.) They all run, they all serve their purpose. And they’re all paid for. Why should I replace any of them if they’re doing what I need them to do? Why would I want to spend money on something with no real benefit? I’m not trying to impress anyone with what I drive. Why should I?

The Fleet
I’d rather have three old vehicles in my garage than just one with a loan on it.

Do you realize that the money I saved by not buying a new (to me) vehicle every two years — as my wasband was so fond of doing — is probably why I was able to pay off the mortgage on my home in less than 10 years? Do the math, folks. Home ownership might be more within reach than you think if you just adjust what you’re spending your money on.

And that’s the point. We all need to decide what’s important to us. It’s more important to me to have financial security with a paid-for home than to drive something new and flashy every few years. It might be more important to you to get your kid into a special school than to buy a home. Or more important to buy assets or get specialized training to build your business than take a vacation in Europe. We need to make our own decisions — and to respect the decisions of others.

The Sore Spot

Two and a half years ago, after spending a total of 10 weeks with two different boat captains on their boats along the Great Loop, I decided I wanted to cruise the Loop in my own boat. I had sold my helicopter and my charter business and had money to spend on a relatively new (but admittedly costly) “pocket yacht” that would meet my needs. I was very excited about the purchase and my upcoming journey. I wanted to share that excitement with people who meant a lot to me.

Boat for Sale
This is one of the photos on the brokerage website. I have a fondness for red, but that’s not what drew me to this boat. It was absolutely perfect for me — and a good deal, to boot.

But rather than them accept my purchase decision, they decided that they needed to tell me what a bad idea it was and to tell me what I should do instead. Their reaction made a few things clear:

  • They didn’t know me very well. This is nuts considering I already had a track record of doing unusual things.
  • They didn’t trust my ability to make my own financial decisions. This is also nuts given that I’m probably in better financial shape than they are.
  • They thought they had the right to tell me how to spend my money. This is also nuts given that neither one of them did very much of interest with theirs.

This situation put a rift in our relationship that has yet to be mended. I was offended by their stance and made it clear to them. They have neither apologized nor made any efforts to repair the rift.

And this is what makes people telling me how to spend my money a sore spot.

I should mention here that, like the helicopter, the boat and the experiences it has made possible have given my life a new trajectory at a time I really needed one. I completed the 8000+ mile Great Loop trip and am working on a book about it. I’ve already written articles about it. I’ve become a USCG licensed boat captain and have already done some paying work for people who needed training on their own new boats and have secured gigs with at least two boat training organizations. I’ve become a certified boat instructor for single and twin engine power boats. And I’ve put my boat — which is a valuable asset, after all — into a charter program where it will earn money for me this coming boating season and possibly seasons beyond. None of this would be possible if I had not bought the boat that they told me not to buy.

They might be satisfied sitting at home, pulling pages off their calendars as the days of our lives tick by, but I’m not.

Are you still reading?

This post has been an unusually circuitous drive. Like so many of my blog posts these days, I wrote it, in part, to clear my mind of things that were bothering me. Someone insinuating that I didn’t make charitable contributions — by suggesting I do so with the savings on a computer monitor purchase — both bugged and triggered me. I felt a need to get this — including the dirty laundry that went with it — off my chest.

I guess the message I have for you is this: money is probably one of those topics we shouldn’t be talking about, like religion and politics. If you feel the need to tell someone how to spend — or not spend — their money, why not hold back? Unless the person is making a lot of seriously dumb decisions that are causing financial harm, they probably don’t need or want your advice.

Instead, why not take a closer look at your own spending habits and how they are serving you?

My First Encounter with an AI

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Finding a saved then forgotten file in my Dropbox reminds me of my first interaction with an AI system a little over a year ago.

Back in March 2023, I started getting emails from Google inviting me to try their new AI system, Bard. I was curious so after receiving too many (in my opinion) invitations, I gave it a try.

March, 2023

I wanted to see what it would tell me about a topic I knew a little about: Haiku. Here’s my annotated exchange, which I saved in a text file on March 26, 2023:

Me: What can you tell me about haiku?

Bard:
A haiku is a Japanese poetic form consisting of three unrhymed lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables, respectively. Haiku often contain imagery and focus on nature or the seasons. The first line of a haiku introduces the subject, the second line develops the subject, and the third line provides a conclusion or resolution.

Haiku are thought to have originated in Japan in the 17th century. The earliest known haiku was written by Matsuo Bashō, a Japanese poet who is considered to be one of the greatest haiku masters. Bashō’s haiku often focused on the beauty of nature and the fleeting nature of life.

Haiku have become increasingly popular in the West in recent years. Many people enjoy the challenge of writing a haiku that is both concise and meaningful. Haiku can also be used as a form of meditation, as they can help us to focus on the present moment and to appreciate the simple things in life.

Here is an example of a haiku:

A single frog
Jumps into the ancient pond—
The sound of water.

This haiku by Bashō is a classic example of the form. It introduces the subject (a frog) in the first line, develops the subject in the second line (by describing the frog’s jump into the pond), and provides a conclusion or resolution in the third line (by describing the sound of the water).

Haiku can be a beautiful and meaningful way to express ourselves. If you are interested in learning more about haiku, there are many resources available online and in libraries.

I liked the definition of haiku that Bard provided, although I wasn’t sure about the phrase “Haiku have become.” Is haiku singular or plural? Bard used the singular form — “a haiku” — in the next paragraph. I don’t know and it isn’t what I focused on.

Instead, I focused in on the syllable count, which I was taught was important in a well-formed haiku. 5-7-5.

Me: Your example does not have five syllables in the first line.

Bard:
I apologize for the error in my previous response. Here is an example of a 5-syllable haiku:

Snow falls in silence.
The world is transformed into
A winter wonderland.

What bard could have pointed out was that it was a translation from Japanese to English, which I assume it was. Instead, it provided a new example with a problem in the last line.

Me.: Your new example does not have five syllables in the third line.

Bard:
You’re right, it doesn’t. I’m still under development, and I’m always learning. Thank you for your patience as I continue to improve.

I let it go.

June, 2024

Today, after finding that file on my computer, I decided to blog about it. After writing and formatting the first half of this post, I went back to Bard, which is now Gemini, and tried the same prompts. Note the differences, which I think are important.

Me: What can you tell me about haiku?

Gemini:
Haiku are a traditional Japanese form of short poetry. Here’s a quick rundown:

  • Structure: Haiku consist of three lines, traditionally with 17 syllables. The first line has 5 syllables, the second line 7 syllables, and the third line 5 syllables again (5-7-5).
  • Origin: They originated in Japan and are rooted in older forms of Japanese poetry.
  • Focus: Haiku typically focus on nature and capturing a fleeting moment or image.
  • Modern haiku: While the 5-7-5 syllable structure is a common guideline, modern haiku in English sometimes stray from this to focus more on capturing the essence of the haiku tradition.

Well, this was a better description that took into consideration many people’s belief that syllable count doesn’t matter. But it (cowardly) did not provide an example. So I asked for one.

Me: Can you give me an example of haiku?

Gemini:
Absolutely! Here’s a famous haiku by Matsuo Basho, a renowned haiku poet:

Old pond / A frog jumps in
The sound of water (5-7-5)

How interesting! It gave me a different translation of the same haiku? And it specifically indicated the syllable count.

Me: Your example does not have five syllables in the first line or seven syllables in the second line.

Gemini:
You’re absolutely right, I apologize for the mistake. Here’s a different haiku example that adheres to the 5-7-5 syllable structure:

Summer sun warms skin,
Cicadas sing their loud song,
Daylight fades too soon. (5-7-5)

I had no problem with this haiku written in the traditional style. In fact, I actually liked it.

Me: Very good. Thank you.

Gemini:
I’m glad I could help! Is there anything else you’d like to know about haiku, or would you like me to try writing one for you?

It apparently didn’t realize that it just did that. [insert eyeroll emoji here]

Me: No, thank you.

Gemini:
You’re welcome!
If you ever have any other questions, feel free to ask.

Is AI Worth It?

Despite this second encounter, I still believe using AI to teach and assist us in writing tasks is a big mistake. Not only is it prone to errors — even today! — but it consumes huge amounts of electrical power in a world already suffering from the effects of power generation on climate and air quality.

I could waste spend the rest of the day coming up with examples that showcase AI’s shortcomings, but so many people already have. I don’t understand why anyone would want to rely on a system that is clearly not ready for prime time and can do more harm than good.

I don’t want to live in a world where “intelligent” systems are telling us to put glue on pizza or eat rocks for their mineral content. Do you?

Back It Up, Folks!

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If you’re not backing up your important data, you’re just waiting to lose it.

I was chatting with a fellow pilot the other day about archiving all the videos we accumulate with our GoPro cameras.

“I went to the store and bought a 5 TB hard drive for under $100,” he told me. “Every single photo or movie I ever recorded is on that disk.”

“How often do you back it up?” I asked.

He looked at me blankly. The truth is, he didn’t have a backup for it. He had every photo on one hard disk drive and it wasn’t backed up.

Hard Disk Crashes Happen

I’ve lived through more hard disk crashes than the average person. I’ve even lost a manuscript to a hard disk crash. I think it was that loss that taught me how important it is to back up every file I don’t want to lose.

As I type this, my 5 year old iMac is copying files from its internal hard disk to a backup disk. The iMac has been acting funky for a while and it got to the point where it just wasn’t functioning at all. I booted from the internal recovery disk and ran Disk First Aid on it. It found sectors it couldn’t fix. When I restarted from the normal startup disk, Finder wouldn’t work. For those of you who use Windows and don’t know Mac OS, it’s as if Windows won’t open anything for you. The solution was to go back into Recovery mode, make a new startup disk on an external hard disk, restart the Mac from that, and back up all my important files onto that new hard disk.

You might say, “Maria! Didn’t you already have a backup?”

To that, I say, of course I did. I actually have TWO backups of the entire going bad hard disk. But how can I possibly know if both of them are good when the source is bad? Why take chances? I’ll copy all the files over to make a third backup I know is good. Then I’ll reformat the bad drive and, hopefully, the problems will go away. Then I can reinstall the data files on the newly formatted hard drive. Or, in this case, on the computer I bought to replace it anyway. (I need to get that old iMac running to trade it in for the maximum cash back.)

As for backups of the new computer — a brand new 15″ MacBook Air I got to replace a 2 year old 13″ MacBook Air and the 5 year old 27″ iMac — I’ll periodically back up to an external hard disk, but I’ll also likely back up to the cloud. It’s not something I want to do, but it’s a good and reliable solution and I’m already paying for that cloud space. It would be dumb not to do it.

My Media Storage Solution

Going back to my GoPro and other media situation…

My media file archives and backups work like this: Each year, I buy a pair of 2 TB portable hard disks. I name one for the year and one for the year followed by BU. So this year’s disks are 2023 and 2023 BU. As I travel about, I copy all of my photos and videos from my phone, my Nikon, my GoPro, and my DJI drone to the hard disk for that year, organized by date. So a folder containing the videos from a flight I do today might be named 061923 Wenatchee Flight. When I get home from my travels, I use an app like SuperDuper to synchronize the two hard disks, using the primary one as the source. So if I add or remove files on that primary disk, those changes are automatically reflected on the backup disk.

Understand that the video files I accumulate are huge and take up a ton of storage space. The more I have, the more disk space I need. I’m trying very hard to keep total storage per year under 2 T, but this year I wound up buying 5 T drives because that’s all I could find. I’ll still just put one year’s worth of files on it.

If any of my original or backup disks go bad, I still have the other disk for that year. To lose a whole year’s worth of media, I’d have to lose both disks, which are seldom in the same location for any considerable length of time. To lose all my media, I’d have to lose all of my disks — there are about 6 years’ worth at this point so that’s 12 hard disks.

My friend, in my opinion, is putting all of his eggs in one basket — and that is never a good idea if you don’t want to lose all your eggs.

The Video Editing Audio Workaround

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The hoops I have to jump through to get the cockpit audio right on my YouTube videos.

I’m in the process of switching from ScreenFlow to Filmora Pro as my primary video editing software. I needed an editor that could edit 360° videos to add title screens, callouts, and additional audio. To my knowledge, ScreenFlow could not do this. That didn’t surprise me since ScreenFlow was designed primarily as a video screen capture and editing tool and the only reason I was using it was because it was cheap and it supported picture in picture.

I should mention here that in the past, I’ve used iMovie (limited) and Final Cut Pro (the old version was great; the X version is not). I knew that Adobe Premiere would do what I needed it to do, but I was not at all interested in paying Adobe a monthly fee to be able to access the files I created with its software. I believe software should be bought — not rented.

Filmora has a bunch of really good tutorials on YouTube and it was pretty easy to learn — not that I know everything about it yet. And the “lifetime” price did away with the nonsense of software rentals, letting me buy the software just once and get free upgrades and free customer support forever (however long that is). It was $180 after tax, which fit my budget.

But…

It wasn’t until I’d begun using Filmora Pro that I realized that it lacked a feature I really needed: the ability to turn stereo sound into mono sound.

Let me explain.

My videos usually have two sources of sound, each for a different type of sound:

  • One GoPro Hero7 Black records ambient sound — normally, that’s the sound of the engine and rotors as I start up, fly, and shut down. In the beginning, I left this sound out, but a lot of my fans claimed they liked it. So I made sure I had one camera running to capture that, even if I didn’t use the video that went with it.
  • Another GoPro Hero7 Black records the sound in my intercom system — normally that’s the sound of me talking to the camera or on the radio or phone. (When I’m on the phone, you can only hear my half of the conversation.) That’s captured through a connection between the camera and my intercom system via an NFlightCam Audio Cable. Channel fans apparently really love my narrations — who knew? — and the sound of radio chatter, so this is an important component of my video setup.

The problem is, the intercom audio is recorded on just one stereo channel: the left. (This is a shortcoming of the cable which, according to the folks at NFlightCam, is a problem with the one part of the cable they buy from GoPro for their products. In other words, according to NFlightCam, it’s GoPro’s fault.) If I use this audio in my videos as is and someone listens through stereo speakers or headphones, they notice that the voice is coming from just one side. And they complain.

When I used ScreenFlow, it had the ability to turn stereo channels into mono. That combined the left (with sound) and right (with no sound) into one channel that sounds like it’s coming from somewhere in the middle. That got the complaints to stop — when I remembered to take the extra conversion step.

But Filmora Pro doesn’t support the combining of two stereo channels into one mono channel. So there’s no solution in this software.

Of course, there’s a workaround — export the audio only, convert it stereo to mono, and import it back into Filmora Pro. Here’s how I do that with the software I already have:

  1. QuickTime Pro Registration
    I save old software and I’m very glad I saved this application. My iMac is running MacOS High Sierra; I don’t think this will run under Catalina on my laptop.

    Open the video clip with the single channel stereo sound in QuickTime Player Pro 7. (Note that I didn’t say QuickTime Player, which is the current version of the software. No, I’m using the version from 2009: QuickTime Player 7.6.6, which requires a registration code. This was the good version of QuickTime, which allows editing and screen recording and includes all kinds of other neat features. I recovered and saved this version when it was overwritten by the limited feature version that came after it.)

  2. Convert to Mono
    Why can’t Filmora Pro have a Channels pop-up menu like this one?

    Use the Export command under the File menu to save the Audio Only as Sound to AIFF. Before exporting, click the Options button and be sure that Mono is selected from the Channels pop-up menu. This is how I convert stereo to mono, but the resulting file is not compatible with Filmora Pro.

  3. Double-click the resulting Audio file in iTunes to import and open it.
  4. Use the Convert command under the File menu to Create an AAC Version.
  5. Drag that version out of iTunes and into a Finder window to export it. I now have a version compatible with Filmora Pro.
  6. Drag the audio file into Filmora Pro’s media window.
  7. Drag the original video file into the Filmora Pro timeline.
  8. Unlink the video file’s original audio track from the video track.
  9. Delete the unlinked audio track from the timeline.
  10. Drag the mono audio file into the Filmora Pro Timeline and line it up exactly with the video track that remains. That will synchronize the two tracks.
  11. Link the two tracks together so they cannot be edited out of sync.
  12. Repeat the above steps for every video clip with a cockpit audio track.

And then…

From that point, all I have to do is add the second audio/video track — assuming I want the ambient sound audio track to play behind the cockpit audio — synchronize it with the cockpit audio/video so the sounds are right, unlink the audio/video from in that second track, get rid of (or adjust the size of) the second video clip, and add subsequent clips, doing the same for each, for the length of the video. I also need to be sure there’s 20 seconds with nothing much going on at the end so I can add end cards. Then I add the title screen with “theme music” and animation and any annotation text, including a reminder that the video description has lots of information that might answer viewer questions.

In all, I think the video editing process takes about 10-20x the amount of time in the video clip. So, for example, a 10-minute video would take about 100-200 minutes to edit.

Rendering varies depending on the length of the video, but at least it doesn’t require any additional effort on my part. Uploading to YouTube also takes a while, but only a few minutes of actual work as I fill in the form with the video information.

So yes, it’s involved.

A lot of folks think flying a helicopter is hard. I think it’s a lot easier than editing a quality video.

A New Laptop

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I finally replace my aging MacBook Air.

Back in the days when I wrote books about using computers — roughly 1991 through 2012 — I used to buy a new desktop computer every two years and a new laptop every three years. 2011 was my last big computer purchase year: I bought a 27″ iMac and an 11″ MacBook Air.

I used the iMac for seven years, replacing multiple parts under AppleCare, before it finally got so unreliable — think spurious rebooting — that I had to replace it with another 27″ iMac last year.

MacBook Pro
Unboxing my new laptop this morning.

The MacBook Air was killing me with its sluggishness. I bought some time my deleting as many files as I could from the hard disk — mostly removing all music and most photos — so there was plenty of free disk space for the operating system to play with. That helped a bit, but so did running only one application at a time. Soon, even that didn’t help much, so I replaced it the other day with a 13″ MacBook Pro.

I still haven’t decided how much I like the new machine. What’s interesting to me is that the new MacBook Pro weighs about the same as my old Air and is the same width — despite the fact that the new one’s screen is considerably larger. They keyboard feels good, but the trackpad just doesn’t feel right at all. It is wicked fast — well, compared to its 8-year-old predecessor.

Oddly, back when I wrote about computers for a living, I really looked forward to getting a new machine and setting it up. Back then, it took a lot of work — digging out installation disks, manually re-entering configuration information, troubleshooting little problems to make sure the new computer worked just like the old one. These days, setting up is a lot easier with basically all the software available online for download and configuration information copied from iCloud or elsewhere, but I dread doing it. I bought this computer on Monday and it sat on the countertop on my kitchen island waiting for me to open it, which I finally did this morning.

What do I use my laptop for? Mostly blogging, emailing, and keeping track of my accounting records, etc. when I’m traveling. But this laptop should have enough power to edit 1080p HD video, so I can get more videos online without being a slave to my big computer up in my loft.

I’m hoping I have an old laptop sleeve that’ll fit it. It would be a shame to scratch it up.

This blog post, by the way, serves two purposes:

  • First, it’s a test for my installation of MarsEdit, which is my blogging tool of choice. It looks like it’ll pass the test.
  • Second, it’s a test for my actual blog, which has been having permalink problems for the past three months that have been resulting in broken links and missing files. I’ve really got my fingers crossed that it works the way it should. I have a lot of blog posts that need publishing; if this works right, you’ll see a flurry of other ones over the next few days.