Hey Mac, Spare a Song?

There's a pithy little platitude that goes something like, "life is what happens while you're making other plans". There is a reason why philosophical tripe like that endures... because it often true.

Take for instance my unplanned reentry into the world of Mac. This happened in a big, big way a few weeks ago when it became clear my company-provided Acer was exhibiting the dreaded death rattle and various associated symptoms of that slow, painful death all PC users will know at one time or another.

"I will not spend more money on another piece of [junk] laptop again", said I, defiantly. I have burnt through all the major brands; Dell, Gateway, Acer, IBM. Am I saying they are all crap? Nope. I am merely saying that I have always preferred Macs, (my first computer ever was an Apple IIGS). I did most of my high school and college work on Mac.

It's a blonde v. brunette thing... you like what you like, who's to say why?

Brunettes, by the way. Not that you asked.

And so a quick flash of the geek signal went out to long time friend and all-time personal tech support person, Greg, who also happens to be an Apple Store employee. Whether a "Genius" or not, he is a literal one when it comes to all things electronica. It was handy having a live-in help desk person in college when that term paper somehow got filed under some elusive folder, or you were facing the dreaded blue screen of death.

I had a PC back then; college is a time for experimentation. I'm not proud of everything I did, but I learned from it and came out a better person.

Post school, it was back to Mac. I had an iMac G4, (the flat screen on the swing arm attached to the snowball base). It was, and still is the most revered appliance I have ever purchased. Now 11-plus years old, it is still in service with Emily's parents. It will soon be replaced because time has passed it by, not because it doesn't work. If we never advanced beyond 2002 technologically, I would have been set forever. All these years without a failure... any failure. It has been spot-on perfect.

Back to present day and a deadline looming for a huge and extremely important project. At least my old Acer kept it all together until about 5 minutes after I needed it to before finally slipping away into the night accompanied by the telltale smell of burning that can only mean one thing. Mort.

Greg set me up with a MacBook Air, which is a literal polar opposite to the old Acer with respect so size, weight and perceived quality. I ordered it on a Monday. I needed it for a Wednesday presentation for that big project. Time was of the essence.

Meanwhile, in Washington D.C., someone resolved that they needed Emily's nearly identical laptop more than Emily did. They liberated her MacBook. I tracked it but the trail eventually went cold. Hope, and the MacBook were lost.

Greg came through. I picked the new computer up from his house on Tuesday evening. He spent two hours with me hooking me up with all I needed and showing me the finer points of the new OS, which I have limited experience with.

I stayed up much of that night putting my newfound OSX knowledge to good use, creating the presentation that would be live at 10:00 am. the following day. I hope there will be more on that topic soon.

Em got home from D.C. and we ordered her a new computer to replace hers. Luckily insurance, and the venue from which her computer was stolen picked up the tab.

Meanwhile, I was reveling in the the glory of my long-lost iTunes library. It is so nice getting reacquainted with music I haven't heard in years... because I never wanted to hook my iTunes library, (stored on an external hard drive), to a PC. It just felt wrong.

I spent hours, days, months worth of sleepless nights crawling the internet and stealing much of that music back in the day when I first got a cable modem and Napster ruled the world. For a brief few months, porn was the second most popular reason why people logged on to the internet.

Then the feds jumped in an stormed the home of a twelve-year-old girl and took her away at gunpoint in front of her entire neighborhood in broad daylight and the free, unregulated internet peer-to-peer music sharing revolution was essentially over. True story.

And now I have both my music and a big problem. I have a 121 gb of flash memory space (no moving hard drive in this machine!), and it is very nearly full because of said music. Emily's space would soon be, too. A solution must be found!

I bought an iTunes server/mass storage device. So now, I can keep my media libraries on that and we can simply stream them to our computers, freeing up valuable space and providing one library, backed up redundantly on two drives. Did I mention the third drive that will be stored in my fire safe? Oh, and of course it's backed up on the cloud to. If the world ends, my music collection shall remain.

And that music library will continue to grow because I have resolved to divest myself of all physical CDs. I have resisted this for years, because even though I'm pretty savvy, I equate ownership of something with its physical presence. Once all catalogued and backed up, I  shall take my CDs to a second hand music place, sell them for what they are worth and use the funds to buy more used CDs with the intention of adding them to my library, selling them back and repeating the process until diminishing returns catches up to me and there is no more money in trade to be had for new-to-me CDs.

I think this will be more economical than buying albums and songs on iTunes... and it gives me ownership to move the files, something iTunes only allows so many times. Plus, it will give me the chance to engage in the passé, but still wonderful process of going to a music store and flipping through the racks, hoping to find that thing you never knew existed... or had forgotten you couldn't live without for even one more second.

Cost? Too much. It's all too much. But that's never stopped me before and I suspect, coming up on my 38th year that it's just a part of me I'll take to my grave. No point in fighting with fate. You lose every time.

And that sounds a lot like philosophical tripe, you can take to the bank.