I Am a Nerd

(Pretend you're surprised.)

So, Apple announced some stuff today.

When I turned on my computer at school today to do attendance, I opened up macrumors.com and just let it be.  (They auto-refresh during important events.)  When I went back to it at snack time (after my whole class lined up to talk to Patrick on the phone...more on that later), several new things existed in Apple Land.

1.  The Macbook Air.  An odd name for a really, jaw-droppingly pretty computer.  If you're the kind of nerd that finds computers pretty, that is.  The nerd in me is channeling my inner Veruca Salt and demanding that I Win The Lottery Now and buy one...but the adult in me is saying, "No, your PowerBook is still chugging away; it's your desktop that will soon die, and you should be saving your money for that."

So, someday...though the fact that my seven-year-old iBook is also still chugging away as Patrick's portable DVD player makes me a little dismal about how long this one'll last. ;-)  Five hours of battery life is nifty, but I wonder what it would be under real conditions, like watching a movie (that you did not rip and encode yourself, of course...ahem).  Still, there's something about the idea of a computer that weighs three pounds and is narrower than a quarter that's just...cool.

2.  iTunes movie rentals.  Meh.  I'm a re-watcher (and a re-reader) so I prefer to own my media.  But it's something a lot of people were clamoring for, so hopefully they're happy.

3.  iPod touch update.  Meh.  I don't own one, but it seems to be things that most people expected in the touch in the first place -- they wanted an iPhone without the phone, and that's exactly what the touch is now.  Ironically enough, some posters on macrumors are now complaining that the touch is a phone without a phone.  (Every time there's a big Apple event, I tell myself I won't read the subsequent comments, which are a ridiculous mess of entitlement and whining.)

4.  iPhone update.  Now, that is cool.  Being an organizational freak (on the computer; in real life, I am hopelessly disorganized), I am overjoyed at the multiple home screens.  (I am a nerd, remember?)  I like the "locate me" feature in Google Maps (which, of course, happened shortly after I bought a GPS, but it's nice to have the backup).  I am really excited about being able to view lyrics (nerd, remember?) and navigate movies by chapters (nerd?) as well.

Unfortunately, the external hard drive that held my extensive iTunes library is the one whose power supply died, so I can't install the update until the new power supply comes (and hopefully works).  Boo.  :-(

5.  AppleTV update.  Oooh, I want one of those.  I have ever since it came out.  I have a ton of stuff in my iTunes library (I'm slowly -- oh, so slowly -- um...not-ripping all my DVDs so they can be safely stored away)...so much so that it doesn't all fit even on my shiny new iPod Classic.  So, while I can watch stuff on my TV that's on my iPod, I can't watch things that haven't been synced over -- and, in situations like this, where I can't access my external hard drive (and, thus my iTunes library) syncing is impossible.

The price came down; you can buy media directly on the device and it'll sync back to your iTunes library (rather like buying something from the iTunes wifi store on your iPhone) -- so in situations where I can't even open iTunes, I could still buy...whatever I wanted to buy.

Problem is, I don't have a TV it'll talk to -- my TV has only the old composite (I think that's the term for the yellow, white, and red things) and coax inputs.  I could buy an Apple TV, buy a Slingbox, plug the Apple TV into that, and the Slingbox into my TV...but that's a lot of expense.

(Now, if Sling comes out with an iPhone client, I might just do that, but at the moment, that's prohibitively expensive.)

And, it'll pull content from...ta-da...the piece de resistance (at least for me).

6.  Time Capsule.  Essentially, network attached storage plus a wireless router all in one.  Also, one terabyte is two hundred dollars less than what I paid for my current network attached storage device (also a terabyte, though an earlier generation of what's on the web page now).

(Ironically, I remember the Christmas that we bought for my dad a -- gasp! -- one gigabyte hard drive.  It was Something then, I tell ya.)

I want one of these so bad, I can touch it right now.

(I am lusting over a networked storage drive.  Kill me now...I am Steve Urkel.)

Anyway.

One of the main reasons I haven't upgraded to Leopard yet is the hassle of Time Machine.  The automated backup concept is awesome, particularly since I have something like fifty in-progress stories...some of which date back to the early 1990s.  (No, I'll probably never finish them, but still.)

The thing is, Time Machine won't work over wireless...the only hard drive I have big enough to tolerate the amount of space the backups would eat up is my terabyte of networked storage.

Until now.

Plus, and this is a huge plus for the Apple TV I don't have but desperately want: it'll pull content from Time Capsule.  So you can pay for the smallest amount of storage because the rest of your stuff is still available on the Time Capsule drive.

It's awesome.

Okay, now that I got my nerdiness taken care of, Patrick decided to walk to Subway for breakfast this morning.  I called him at our snack time, and then let Superhero, who has been having very good days, talk to him.  The next thing I knew, I had every kid in the class except Elastigirl lined up at my desk for their turn to talk to him.  It was very cute.

Superhero did have a minor breakdown today, but he'd been being teased during recess by PH (who then proceeded to squeal for fifteen minutes after recess for the express purpose of getting M to copy him), and he got over it.

Also?  Bulldozer has been put on different medicine.  His parents didn't tell me this, but they did tell our psychologist.

Aide J was out today, and we had a very, very good sub.  All around, a good day.