Cable Ties

In making room for the new computer, I disemboweled the rat's nest of cables and cords and rearranged everything. I couldn't relax until all was in place. The office half of the room is now a beautiful thing. The other (guest quarters) half of the room is a disaster.

Even though the new computer is fabulous, I still have a bit of buyer's remorse just on the basis of the serious coin I dropped on it. Unlike a new car, there's a lot of configuring bulls..t with a new computer even though it's a Mac. I hooked up my Mac mini to it via firewire and all of my programs, mail settings, Safari (browser favorites) are all set, but some programs need to be "reauthorized" and wouldn't you know it, Microsoft Office had to be reinstalled from scratch.

If I was trying to be smart about money, I would have stopped at a memory upgrade on the Mac mini which was a great performance enhancer in and of itself, but I really got tired of shutting iTunes and everything else down before I could get Photoshop working at an acceptable speed.

For those of you used to idiot proof setup of the Mac, know that on the Mac Pro you actually have to go into System Preferences to get the audio to go to the plug rather than the internal speaker. I wasted a good bit of time on that one.

Now that the desk/counter is cleaned up and iTunes is playing a little Crash Test Dummies (no comments please), and Photoshop is running like I never believed it could; life is good.

Unfortunately, I can't yet scrap the pair of clunky 4+ year old PCs I have because they're running some proprietary software for work. I'm anxious to see if "Boot Camp" really works on the Mac. That's a project for another day.

By the way, Calico is off shopping with one of her friends today who's looking not for clothes, but for a digital camera. She sees how much fun Calico is having shooting for blips that she wants to get in on the fun. Blip fever is catching.

Edit: In deference to Chaos' request and given his guess was spot on, here's the pre-processed image.