jason thurber's blog

After 4 back-to-back days of “open house” we accepted an offer and now, less than 30 days later we have closed escrow. We’re no longer owners, but instead have assumed the role of renters (we’re renting back for a month or so). I got a nice little thrill today when I went to check my accounts online and saw that our mortgage is now Paid in full (I suppose it would be ever more thrilling to see that and actually get to keep the house 😉 ).

Picked up a 2.16ghz MacBook Pro this weekend from the Apple Store in Valley Fair mall. Today Apple announced a speed bump of the base MBP (along with the new MacBooks) which meant that the 2.16ghz chip was “included” in the high-end MBP. So, when you go with BTO (build-to-order) a loaded MacBook Pro is $300 cheaper than it would have been.

I went into the Apple Store, explained this to them and they refunded $300 to my card, which was nice! Note: There is a 10 (or 15) day window where Apple provides price protection, so it was luck that I didn’t pull the trigger a bit sooner on this.

Since December I’ve been using a smoking Sager 9890 for “work stuff” (namely, running XP, Office/Outlook) and anything that needs to happen really fast (like photo processing or playing Grand Theft Auto). The Sager 9890 is a crazy machine: dual 80gb drives in RAID0, Nvidia GTX 7800 video card, 2gb ram (with 2 spare slots)… the fastest machine I have ever used, bar none! My old Powerbook 15 (AiBook G4 1.25ghz) was used for… um, browsing on the couch and watching TONS of Top Gear. Now that the MacBook Pro has been out for a bit, can dual-boot to WinXP, is fairly stable, and you can get a “properly” equipped one without going the BTO route, I’ve decided to pull the trigger and go with a single solutio.

So… I’m writing this from a MacBook Pro 15.4 2.16ghz with a 100gb 7200rpm drive (currently has 1gb of RAM, but help is on the way). It currently has Parallels running XP with everything I need on the Windows-side of the world and (of course) OSX for doing everything that doesn’t involve Outlook :). I’m very pleased Apple decided to go the Intel-route, as this has allowed me to consolidate work and, well, other work in a single machine. I like to work in OSX, but sometimes I need to work in XP. The MacBook Pro will let me do both… now I just need to come up with a good name for it (the AiBook was never called anything but PB15)!

[Update] My new 1gb stick of ram from Transintl.com came in today. It makes a HUGE difference!