Inflatable Sheep

Have been busy upgarding my G5, Sheena. Popped in two 512MB ‘memory modules’ to my little queen of the jungle and she is snappy as hell. Got a $34 rebate on each module which makes it even snappier for me.

Of course, the big upgrade was from Panther to Tiger (with a $50 rebate from Micro Center). Wow. Dashboard is good to look at with all the purty widgets, but I guess I'm used to Konfabulator being on my desktop all the time instead of an F12 away, and Konfabulator's widgets are smaller which I prefer.

What is a fantastic addition is Spotlight. Organizing my search results by images, documents, folders, mail, pdfs, etc. is so handy and fast. I'm using this feature a lot now.

An upgrade to Safari was included. As far as RSS, that's okay, but I'll stick with PulpFiction. And it's a certainly a cheap thrill that you can now do that ‘private browsing’ thing. But until they fix it where I don't get pop-ups in Safari, I'm sticking with Firefox.

I've taken the improved iChat for a spin. Tried a three way video chat, but it looks like everyone has to be using roughly the same setup or it's a less than perfect experience.

Quicktime 7 is really niiice for viewing high definition movie trailers.

I also got iLife '05 and Jim's book, “The Macintosh iLife '05” so that I could get the best use out of the upgrades.

Last, but definitely not least, is Sheena has a new 200G sister, Ruby. She's a LaCie d2 Hard Drive Extreme with Triple Interface (FireWire 800, Firewire, iLink, USB 1.1, USB 2.0). I went through all of my iPhoto Libraries since 2000, reorganized, and backed up absolutely everything, and I still have 130G to play with. I am so relieved to have everything backed up without having to burn a bunch of DVD's to do it.

Now to download the latest version of Quicksilver and then I think it's play time.