11 years ago I was a senior in college seriously doubting my degree choice and deciding to stick it out merely because I was so close to being done.

11 years ago I thought I had found the one… I’ve since found “the one” several more times :S

11 years ago I was 2 months from getting a 99 tacoma… and 5 years 2 months from a 05 Tacoma….

11 years ago my closest friends were in the military serving their country or in college or in the case of one not even in high school yet.

11 years ago I had 3 roommates… one dissappeared into the ether, one married his girlfriend and another will get married in the next year.

11 years ago I started this “blog” because I didn’t want to study for a cobol final. Yeah that’s right Cobol.

That’s how Not A University rolls.

So part of the joy of a MAC is you can replace various system icons with icons of your own or others…. Lets just say I found a found a Futurama icon pack and I couldn’t contain myself when I found “Al Gore’s head”

Hypnotoad and Leonard Nimoy are just the gravy/icing on the proverbial cake.

So I took a few days last week and just checked out of reality for bit… and by checked out of reality I mean I had a “staycation” and by “staycation” I mean I’m to f*cking cheap to go anywhere with out a damn good reason. And even then there is going to be alot of damn whining.

From here on out we are going to call the “staycation” what it really was… “Tom fucking around” (Tfa).

So on my little Tfa excursion, I had two markedly different experiences for the about the same price…. on one side I went a picked up “Medal of Honor” for the PC… on the other side I got some zombie novels. Guess which one I enjoyed infinitely more?

First “Medal of Honor” not the greatest game ever, but decent for a single player campaign and lets face it these things are built to be multiplayer and almost no attention is played to the single player experience. I have to say after playing this game it was almost enough to turn me off to first person shooters set in anything close to the real world at anytime. It’s hard to describe and honestly I don’t want to write about it anymore.

OK so after the depressing experience that was “Medal of Honor” my brother had texted me and said I need to check out “Day by Day Armageddon” he then tells me that since I liked “World War Z” I will really like this (great now my brother is amazon.com). So I pick it up on the kindle (more about that in a minute) and sometime around noon on Friday I sat down to start the book… my plan was to read for a hour and then text Curtis to see if he wanted to go shoot guns… As Curtis will tell you he got no such text. I honestly didn’t put down the damned kindle until the battery ran out at around 6 that night. I finished it the next day. So on Sunday I’m going through zombie withdrawal and pop on to amazon to see if there is another book coming out soon, and to my pleasant surprise there is another book available on the damned kindle. Amazon one click purchase for digital goods is very dangerous… especially for zombie books. I read the second book in a afternoon it was just as awesome as the first book. Now granted I don’t have high standards for zombie books, but if you thought “World War Z” was good you will probably like “Day by Day Armageddon”

OK so now a word about digital books… I find that I’m having the same issue with digital books that I had with digital music some years ago. My first issue is apparently I’m not to be trusted with books in digital form since when I went to go “loan” the “Day by Day Armageddon” books I found there were not eligible for loaning, then I started looking at all of my kindle books and sure enough none of them are enabled for loaning. What the hell I thought Kindle could loan books now… so a quick search through the Amazon FAQs section reveals that loaning books is restricted by publisher…. well hell I guess I’m not going to be buying the next book on Kindle. Which now leaves me at a interesting crossroads… while I enjoy having books digitally across multiple devices I have to say the no loaning part (for the most part for me) is a major impediment to the platform. I know that nook has some sort of loaning functionality but I need to research that more before I think about going down that path.

Lets be honest if I got a nook color I would so hack it and put android on it….. On which I would read my Kindle books

In the spring 2011 race I sacrificed a HTC Incredible with the help of the lower deities Coors and Budweiser….

I think I may need to find a new church… or at the very least stop taking my phone to NASCAR….

Currently I keep my beer in my keg freezer in the back room which has no light… (this part is important)

I’m going after a Coors in a bottle, since it’s late and I don’t want anything heavy… I feel around and find the right kind of bottle, put in a coozy, twist off the top and go back to my movie…

I start drinking and after the third drink I think to my self… did I get a bad Coors?   (Yes yes I know there is no such thing as a “good” Coors)

Once again I pause the movie turn on the light to look at the expiration date and to my horror discover I have not a brown bottle of Coors but a clear bottle of Highlife??

Damn… it’s the last of the beer from 4th of July… foiled by Curtis yet again.

And he wasn’t even trying this time (probably)

So flash forward to 2010 it’s 3 years since the last major bout of upgrade fever… and honestly I don’t think it’s returned. Do I look at the new Core i5 MacBook Pro’s and go “damn that is one sexy machine”? Oh hell yes I do. Am I going to stick with Mac as my laptop platform of choice…. at this time I’m going to say that the answer is yes. I don’t feel this over riding urge to go and purchase a new laptop simply because it’s new. Other then a different body style and upgraded guts what does this new mac do that my existing mac doesn’t do?

In a word not a damn thing. Actually I’m starting to think that I may pull windows off my mac with the exception of a vmware environment. Why install windows on a mac? well in a word “games” and I have to think about the last time I played a game on my mac (spring of 2009) after that I’ve booted into windows just to update it and the AV software, I’m normally back to the mac os within a hour or so. At this juncture it seems kind of dumb to keep a windows partition on my mac. Vmware has matured as a product that it’s pretty usable for those one off devices that won’t work with mac (which in my world are far and few between).

What I find interesting is what I choose to do on my mac vs my pc….

Photos… mac
Videos… editing the one time… mac… watching pc
surfing… pc unless I actually unpug the mac and take it to another room… and honestly I would just assume leave the technology in the office when I get home / get done working.
games… pc
blogging… what ever is most convenient… which again depends on what I’m doing quick dumps seem to go better on the pc… longer sessions (pretty much anything with the category of “musing of a back porch”) tends to be written on the mac. Not that the mac is any better it’s just more portable which lets me get creative in other spots.

When I think about how I use mobile technology I know that a iPad while cool would probably not be used as anything more then a media tablet and digital photo frame. And if I had pictures that I wanted to show off in HD on a 10 inch screen I would so buy one. But I don’t and I tend to be more old school in my technology usage (I still prefer a command line for Christ sake) and combination of mac-book air with a mac mini seems like it would do well for me. At the very least the mac-book air wouldn’t burn my legs like my mac book pro.

Why a Mini and a Air? The Air would be for the day to day stuff, surfing and writing… The mini would be for more cpu intensive apps (vmware, iphoto editing, something with more then a 12 inch screen) of course the cost of those two items is just about to the point of a mac book pro and why buy two when you can have one at the same price.

The part in all of this that drives me up the wall the most? Other then a slightly undersized hard drive (which is fixed very easily by a afternoon and $75) I have zero problems with my mac and it does everything I need/want it to do! I don’t know if I’ve finally hit the point of not needing the latest and greatest or if maybe just maybe I have found technology that can fulfill my needs for a extended period of time.

God it’s hell to have my problems.

Honestly I don’t care if the Suns make it to the Finals… I’m just happy they beat the Spurs. Even if Steve Nash had to take another beating to get the team a win.

Of course being a Cardinals fan… you don’t expect much out of your team… being a Suns fan…. all you expect is misery tempered by the occasional bits of joy. This is one of those occasional bits of joy.

With that being said one of the more things I find very interesting in how my friends perceive wealth. I’m talking not just money, but the other things in that make up a person’s little corner of the universe. Over the course of the last decade or so I’ve observed that for the most part that my perception of wealth has changed greatly. Once based entirely on amount of income and slowly but surely migrating to breadth of experince in life and not based at all on income. Don’t get me wrong, income helps but only so far as putting together the next trip to wherever. I don’t know where this shift originated from, I do know that it seems to be one extreme or the other with me (i.e. obsessed with the bank account bottom line or could care less).

So here is my question… is saving already built into the monthly budget or are you planning on having your spawn take care of you?