TRACKS OF TIME

At the risk of becoming an unpaid shill* for yet another company that doesn't need my help and could just as easily irritate me the next time, check out the tracking info on FedEx's shipment of my MacBook Pro:


It doesn't say there, but Apple's initial target date for delivery was May 1 — a week from Monday. Instead, I might actually get it on Monday. Glad I didn't tack on the extra $15 to expedite shipping.

As for this computer, while it's functional and all, it's definitely time to switch up. I've been putting up with more and more of the beach ball, and apparently that infuriating cursor is rarely seen on the new Intel machines. But more than that, I ran out of hard drive space months ago, have gone on a deletion spree more than once, and have even turned my old 2nd gen. iPod into a permanent hard drive. Just today I downloaded a program with the unmemorable title of Disk Inventory X (indeed, I've forgotten what it's called several times since beginning this post). But here's what it does:


That there is the contents of my hard drive, all 54.6GB of 55.8GB worth. The big blue area? Those are MP3 audio files. The goldenrod boxes distributed throughout? They're audio files too, as are the turquoise rectangles on the right-hand side. The fuschia† sections are JPEGs and the red areas are applications. Run your mouse over one of the sections, and it'll tell you what on the hard drive you're looking at (so long as the blasted beach ball doesn't make an appearance). That tiny National Geographic cover outline is Ween's Quebec.

I suppose the massive amounts of storage given over to audio files is a banal obvservation in this second half of the still-unnamed 00s, but I still haven't gotten over the fact that I could start the first song in my iTunes playlist, fly back out of the country for a three weeks, return on the 21st day, and be there when the last song finally plays. I should totally do that.


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* I'm like the writers of The Sopranos — product placements on the Washington Canard are earned instead of bought.

† If you've never tried, Google's Image Search makes a handy back-of-the-envelope color checker.

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posted by WWB at 11:35 PM |