This morning, I have two computers sitting in front of me: The first is the one that I built from scratch a few months ago. That one has been almost completely unused (as of late) except for trying to get Windows XP re-installed from a scratched disc. My best friend is coming up this week, and I’m having him bring his Windows CD so I can use my serial. Once I get XP re-installed, I can finally begin the process of re-installing the rest of my applications, and getting my digital life back in order.

The other thing in front of me was a suprise from my wonderful, beautiful wife: A 17-inch Widescreen PowerBook G4.

I almost wet myself as I opened the black box and saw the words “Made by Apple in California”. The only Macs I’ve ever had were at least 10 years old when I got them. I’ve had a thirty-three MHz Performa 550 with twenty megs of RAM for quite some time now. But, I’ll tell you, System 7.5.5 isn’t nearly as elegant and beautiful as 10.3 is.

I was up until 5am last night toying around with everything: getting iLife installed, installing Classic and XCode, and downloading Camino, Firefox, and Thunderbird.

With my 6.0 megabit internet connection, I was able to download ALL of the software updates and get them installed in under 5 minutes.

Now I just to find a way to remove the lick marks from my 17-inch LCD…