dresese

iMac G5

Since my old iMac was dying, I decided to get a new iMac G5. The price was not too shabby, the screen was great, and the latest generation of iMac G5's were more reliable than the previous batches.

I received the computer a few days ago. As I anticipated, it is quite fast, and it has lots of screen real-estate. There's been a few pleasant surprises. First, great programs such as Quicksilver, which seemed too draining on resources before, now work quickly and without causing any delays anywhere else. Apple's Dashboard functionality, which always seemed too slow, and too useless, now is fast, and while it has no new functionality, I now realize that previously it just wasn't useful enough to compensate for the pain I was suffering. But since the pain went away, now I find myself using it occasionally, usually to check on the weather and use the SysStat widget.

Also, I got iLife for free, so I was pleased to find that the latest iPhoto now is quick enough for me to use again. Which is good, because it is a nice program for keeping everything organized. I also used GarageBand, which is fun. I amused my children by playing "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" on a big electric guitar. Right now, that seems to be the extent of my musical talent.

The Transit Strike

Along with every other NYC blogger, I feel compelled to post on the transit strike that happened today. I didn't particularly need to go into Manhattan today, but I was interested to see what kind of havoc would be unleashed in Forest Hills.

Forest Hills has a ton of commuters that travel to Manhattan every day, so today when there was no subway, almost everyone seemed to default to taking the Long Island Railroad. The LIRR was totally prepared, and had set up a booth to sell & check tickets. This is necessary because the ordinary system of selling tickets via machine and walking around and checking them on the train doesn't work so well when people are packed like sardines. I anticipated a big line. However, it was much much longer than I had anticipated. It went down to the corner, which wasn't so surprising...

...and way down the block, as far as the eye can see...

...and after 5 or so blocks, around the corner, then around the corner again.

Everyone was amazed at how long this line is, but they still lined up anyway. What else could you do?

In the street people were stopping to ask cars driving by if they were going into Manhattan, and if so, can they have a ride. Shuttle buses were lined up on the side of the road. And I saw many school buses, which may or may not have been doing extra duties.

Hopefully the strike will be over tomorrow. I feel sorry for these people, waiting outside for hours in the cold, just to go to work, knowing that they will have to do the same thing again in reverse, in just a few hours.

Time for a new Mac

My four year old G4 iMac is dying. It crashes all the time with graphic card errors. My hard drive is also slowly dying, and has numerous unrecoverable errors. And of course the constant rebooting is probably turning my hard drive filesystem to swiss cheese.

I took my iMac in to Tekserve, a well-known Mac shop by my gym. They estimated it would cost around $550 to repair everything. For a 4-year-old iMac, that's a bit much. So I lugged my iMac back home and considered my next move. First of all, though, I noticed they had changed my desktop settings, so I was now using thousands of colors, instead of millions. This seems to be have been a smart move, and the crashes have been much less frequent after they did this.

At any rate, I still want to replace my iMac. The question is, to what? One possibility is a laptop. However, I don't really have a laptop lifestyle. So the other possibilities are a G5 iMac, and a Power Mac. I'm a little reluctant to get a G5 iMac, since reportedly it runs quite hot, and component and disk drive failures are common. Even the second-generation iMacs, which fixed many of the reliability problems of the first generation, still seems to have some problems. On the other hand, the PowerMacs are really for power users, which I am not, although I do occasionally do some video editing.

The price is really bothering me, though. I can get a pretty nice iMac for less than $2000. A comparatively nice PowerMac runs around $2500 without a monitor, although that does have the extra processor. I don't need the expandability of the PowerMac, but I'm afraid of reliability problems in the iMac. What should I do?

A Jay Update

By popular request, here's a small update on my friend Jay. First of all, let me repost his famous mustache picture (from this post):

Warning! Do not be fooled, as I was. This is not a handlebar mustache. It is merely a mustache that looks like a handlebar.

After this picture was taken, Jay went to Ohio State University to become a Physics professor. A short while later, I got an update from him saying that he has started dating a wonderful architecture grad student there. Just a few days ago, he tells me he got married to her in a small ceremony in Hawaii.

So there you have it, the update on Jay. But, status of the famous mustache? Currently unknown.

Mama's Empanadas

The empanada is a food I never really encountered before moving to New York. I haven't been to many empanada places, but I have gone to a local place many times. From my experience, empanadas can range from fairly large (3 would be a meal), to about half that size. Outside the Queen's Center Mall is an excellent empanada place, which has a small sized empanada, Mama's Empanadas.

Their menu is fairly large, with about 20 different types of empanadas, along with other miscellaneous items. They have two types of empanadas, flour ones, and corn ones. They both are good, but I prefer the corn ones, which have a great bite which is both firm, crunchy, and tasty. The insides of the empanadas usually works well, except the spinach & cheese, which I thought was too watery.

Overall, I recommend this place highly. The best empanadas I've had so far, although my experience is too limited for that claim to mean much. By the way, this place is takeout only.