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Ivan invited us to a roller derby last night. The wife couldn’t make it, but I went with our daughter.
I was wondering if it’d be like roller derbies I see in movies, such as the recent one with Ellen Paige, Whip It. (Had to look up that title.) Well, for better or worse, it was like roller derbies portrayed in cinema.
My daughter had a hot dog, played a lot of skee-ball and got to go to bed a little late. She had a good time.
My Canon S95 camera is still the bee’s knees. I Love it. I bring it everywhere in my small Timbuk2 messenger bag, protected by its little Olympus neoprene case.
Its color rendition is phenomenal and it takes excellent video. It’s still not for taking photographs of moving targets, such as my daughter. I have my Nikon D90 for that.
This Saturday, 13 August 2011, I picked up a MacBook Air 13.3” 1.86GHz Core 2 Duo 256GB SSD 2GB via Craigslist. Bought it from a good guy. It’s super clean and still has six months of warranty. I plan to add AppleCare to it to extend it two and a half years. My biggest concern would be an SSD failure.
This thing is fast. Last week, my cousin showed me his new/used MacBook Air (same specs but 4GB of RAM in his) and I was instantly in love. I’d seen them at the Apple Store and loved the 13.3” models while hating the 11.6” models. But seeing it next to my Mac, running apps and seeing how fast it is really sold me on it. So I started looking for one on Craigslist right away. I’d given up hope of finding one at a price that made it worth it to me to not just upgrade to a new i5 model to get that hyperthreading goodness.
I offered him $875 (asking $1100) and he accepted. I think it was a fair price all around. My cousin got his for $960 a few weeks ago (right before the new i5/i7 models were announced), so my price was on par with that.
Boy, this thing is fast.
I ran the OS X Snow Leopard Migration Assistant on this Mac and my old MacBook Pro 15.4” 2.16GHz Core 2 Duo 500GB HDD 3GB and — voila! — two days later, it was done, at about 8:05am this morning.
Things are working really well on it so far.
I consider this to be actually a very conservative purchase. My old MacBook Pro (three-plus years old now) was getting very slow (probably in need of an OS wipe after upgrading it from Tiger -> Leopard -> Snow Leopard). Putting an SSD in there troubled me because if it failed, it’d take a bunch of work to pull it out. And every time I’d take it apart (to install or remove), I’d risk breaking the computer each time. Plus the hassle. Plus if I had to send a broken SSD back to the manufacturer, I’d want to leave the MacBook Pro in pieces for weeks waiting for the repaired SSd and I don’t really have a safe place for that (kid-proof) in my home.
So I consider this upgrade a measured decision that I’m really happy with.
Update: It’s Tuesday, 4 October 2011. I’ve been using my MacBook Air regularly since I got it. It has completely replaced my MacBook Pro. I’m very happy.