Red Ryder BB Gun

Ralphie knows exactly what he wants:



He doesn't just want any old BB Gun, he wants "an official Red Ryder, carbine action, 200-shot range model air rifle." When I was a kid a remember how specific I was about things that I wanted, too. However, as I have gotten older I seem to have gotten less specific about certain things that I want. For instance, when I was shopping around for a new guitar, I had a few criteria that I was looking for (steel string, cutaway, acoustic/electric), but I didn't have a specific brand or model number in mind before I eventual settled on Tigrão.

However, over the last few months I rediscovered how fun it is to want something really specific and make plans to get it. I'm grateful to Mike McMurtrey for bequeathing Laddie the Laptop to me, but he wasn't exactly top of the line when I got him and he's gone steadily downhill since then. Observe:

The hinges that hold up the screen broke beyond repair, so for a while I could only use the computer if I first found a sturdy object to lean the screen against. However, my brother-in-law Tom, a highly skilled mechanical engineer, rigged me up a piece of string duct-taped to the top and bottom of the computer to make the thing a little more portable (and making it into an object of great curiosity for onlookers).

The battery was shot before I got the computer, so whenever I used it I had to have it plugged in. However, the power source's cord became so frayed that I had to strip the paper off part of a twist tie and wrap the metal around the exposed wires to complete the circuit. It was always very temperamental - sometimes I had to tweak the tightness or placement of the twist tie for 5 minutes before that dang green power light would finally come on.

But this is all external and says nothing of the computer's performance. Let's say I wanted to open Word. After double-clicking the icon, I could take a bathroom break, go out and check the mailbox, and pour myself a bowl of cereal in about the time that it would take Word to load. The total size of the hard drive was about 27 GB, so I had to store a lot of my pictures on a flash drive and crank down the bit rate of my MP3 files to 64 kbps (ridiculously low) just so that I could fit them on my hard drive.

For 8 of the 9 years that I was in college I never had a computer and I did all my computing at school computer labs, which at both Utah and Michigan were populated almost exclusively with Macs. I got so used to Macs that when I came into possession of a PC I found myself wondering why certain things about it had to be so annoying and why couldn't it just work smoothly like a Mac.

So you could say that my Red Ryder BB Gun has been a Macbook Pro. They are not the cheapest things, but luckily my Michigan student ID card does not expire until 2015, so I was able to get a nice student discount. I actually waited for about six weeks before my purchase because I was told by Apple employees that during the summer they would run a back-to-school special wherein they give away a free iPod Touch (a $229 value) with each computer purchase. However, much to my chagrin, the Apple employees were wrong; the promotion was changed this year to be a $100 gift card to the Mac App store. Bleh. Oh well, I'll hang onto it and maybe it will be useful at some point in the future. And they did throw in a free printer, so that was cool.

My MacBook* has been really fun so far. My favorite thing to mess around with right now is Garage Band, a music recording program. I picked up some cables and adapters so that I can plug my guitar straight into the computer - my two big toys plugging into each other. Over the last year and a half I've made a lot of recordings of me playing my guitar and singing with the crude little microphone and voice memos tool on my iPod**, so compared to that Garage Band is like having a whole laboratory where I can add all kinds of effects to my acoustic guitar or voice and layer multiple tracks on top of each other.

I've never been the kind of guy who usually splurges on big toys, but so far it's been great and fun and I have no regrets. I just hope I don't shoot my eye out.

*I have yet to give it a proper name. My roommate mistakenly referred to it as a "Mactop" the other day, and I though that was kind of funny. Any other suggestions?

**Which is not as crude as the recording method I used as a teenager, as described in this post. It would be fun to recreate that "Capital I" recording.