out with the old, in with the bold

The ratty laptop I had bought from a pawn shop in Walla Walla seems, to borrow a spam phrase, well and truly fcuked. After careful consideration, I've decided to drop the idea of data extraction, which would just mean more money down the drain. Most of the data I'm losing isn't irretrievable, anyway: my interviews are still stored in my digital voice recorder, and I still have the CDs for the programs I'd installed on the laptop-- MS Office, Photoshop Elements, etc. The one major loss is that I had typed up several pages of the transcript of my Metanoia Peace House conversation, and that's going to have to be redone from scratch.

I've just ordered an optical drive--a tiny little USB 2.0 8X DVD/24X CD-ROM drive. Once I get the drive, I'll be filling my Asus's brain with all sorts of nonsense, and hooking the notebook up to my parents' Verizon network so I can download crucial programs like Google Earth-- an absolute must as I continue the eastward march.

The Asus seems to work fine-- no bugs thus far. Let's hope it stays that way for a long time. I think of this computer as a sort of stopgap, something to tide me over until the end of the walk. What I really want to purchase, before I head back to Seoul, is a Mac Mini to replace my old workhorse of a G4, currently in storage at Sperwer's palatial abode. When I was working in Korea, I often hung out at the office because the office computer, despite being four years old, was so much faster than the G4, which had been purchased in 1999. Watching video or memory-intensive animations on the old Mac was well-nigh impossible. At the very least, I'd like to be able to watch YouTube while at home! So, being a Mac fan, I'm shooting for a Mac Mini. Better to buy it here than in Seoul, where it'll be about 40% more expensive (even Korean products are more expensive in Korea!).

So I suppose I'm going to chuck the nasty Dell laptop. Tonight, I'm also going to try hooking my Asus up to my father's computer to see if we can't get some data-suckage going. I might even be able to coax MS Office onto my notebook via this indirect route. We'll see.


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