Mac Stories

Yesterday and today are going to be mostly about my mac and the excitement it brings.

I decided to go to Rochester yesterday to look at the option of buying a new mac or upgrading my old one.

Mom decided to come along, so we were going to make a day of it - dinner out, a movie, that sort of thing. Sadly, she wasn't feeling particularly well - and she demonstrated her disease when we are out and about. The biggest indication is repetitiveness without being aware of it. She asks the same question three or four times in a row, with barely a hesitation between each asking as if she never asked it at all. And I don't know that the answer ever sinks in. It is really frustrating after not only the third or fourth iteration of a question, but after the 10th time it happens. We did make it through the day without anyone dying, which is a good thing. Oh, and we ate at the new Indian restaurant in Geneva. Mom wasn't feeling very hungry so we got some nan and one dish to share. Plenty of food, we had a chicken dish that was yummy - and the nan was great! - still a bit pricey though. They are getting their liquor license on Wednesday or Thursday, so maybe I will stop in there and have a beer...

Anyway, back to the Mac-day. First stop, the Apple Store at Eastview Mall. I was awarded a pleasant fellow named Brian as my sales associate. Not the most knowledgeable person in the store, but nice enough. He recommended a Macbook Pro - since Apple no longer makes MacBooks. The Macbook Air has been repriced to sort of fill that niche. By the way, I am not an Apple fanatic. I think the products can be awesome, and sometimes they surprise me and do great stuff for their customers (more on that later) but I don't think they are perfect and altruistic and that their poop doesn't smell. Moving on...I asked a couple of questions and Brian quickly got out of his depth. So he asked Rob, a black shirted sales person as opposed to his blue shirted-ness, to come aid us. Rob handled my first question quickly - how old is my mac (three years). The second took a few more minutes, but the answer was that it was upgradeable. Rob recommended a place called Mac Ave if I was interested in the upgrade route.

After Rob left us, Brian went into a sales spiel for the Macbook Pro. Felt sort of canned and I was bored. I thanked him for his time and we left.

Next stop, Mac Ave. The store was in the middle of Nowhere. In Victor, ostensibly, but nothing was around it. Weird but nice little place - they sold just about everything Apple related and also had shoes and jewelry for sale. Not sure what that was about. The sales person was Chris, a high school student who seems to have a good head on his shoulders, with a plan to becoming a surgeon. Go Chris. Over the course of the next hour and a half, we chatted about Macs and about xBox and that sort of thing.

The reason I was there so long, was that I decided to spend a couple hundred dollars upgrading my current laptop, rather than buying a new laptop right now. Maybe next Christmas I will get a new laptop. We shall see. Anyway, the memory was inexpensive, they said they could do it right way, and installation was free. Yay! When the tech guy came to get the laptop, he said that he could probably fix the cosmetic issues with the laptop as well - a bit of discoloration and some bits that had chipped off the old case - for free - Apple had finally determined that there was something wrong with their cases! Yippee! So, although it took a long time, I ended up with 4 gigs of RAM (instead of the 1 gig I had before) and a new case and keyboard! Yippee! It was like getting a refurbished laptop for a couple hundred dollars. I also splurged a little and bought a wireless touch pad. I haven't used it yet - waiting till I download and install Lion (the new operating system) before I set that up.

Got home, and immediately started downloading Lion. I figured it would take a while. Sadly, it failed. I was trying to do it wirelessly at first - and that seemed to be moving glacially. Next, I connected the laptop to the internet modem directly (stopping wifi at the house for the time being). And left it running all night. And when I went down this morning there was a little message saying that the download had failed. Sigh. So, today, I am going to try again. And if that doesn't work, I am going to pay the exorbitant sum required to get the file on a thumb drive. Wish me luck!

Beautiful Eastview Mall in Victor near Rochester, NY

Could this be the future Mrs. Augustus?

Mac Ave

Look, trees - I like the evening light...

I need to figure out how to take food pictures...

My spiffified laptop!