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PowerBook Goodness!

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This morning, I have two computers sitting in front of me: The first is the one that I built from scratch a few months ago. That one has been almost completely unused (as of late) except for trying to get Windows XP re-installed from a scratched disc. My best friend is coming up this week, and I’m having him bring his Windows CD so I can use my serial. Once I get XP re-installed, I can finally begin the process of re-installing the rest of my applications, and getting my digital life back in order.

The other thing in front of me was a suprise from my wonderful, beautiful wife: A 17-inch Widescreen PowerBook G4. I almost wet myself as I opened the black box and saw the words “Made by Apple in California”. The only Macs I’ve ever had were at least 10 years old when I got them. I’ve had a thirty-three MHz Performa 550 with twenty megs of RAM for quite some time now. But, I’ll tell you, System 7.5.5 isn’t nearly as elegant and beautiful as 10.3 is.

I was up until 5am last night toying around with everything: getting iLife installed, installing Classic and XCode, and downloading Camino, Firefox, and Thunderbird.

With my 6.0 megabit internet connection, I was able to download ALL of the software updates and get them installed in under 5 minutes.

Now I just to find a way to remove the lick marks from my 17-inch LCD…

Ryan Parman

is an engineering manager with over 20 years of experience across software development, site reliability engineering, and security. He is the creator of SimplePie and AWS SDK for PHP, patented multifactor-authentication-as-a-service at WePay, defined much of the CI/CD and SRE disciplines at McGraw-Hill Education, and came up with the idea of “serverless, event-driven, responsive functions in the cloud” while at Amazon Web Services in 2010. Ryan's aptly-named blog, , is where he writes about ideas longer than . Ambivert. Curious. Not a coffee drinker.