As many of you may recall, I made a rather long winded post regard­ing the joys (or lack thereof) of buy­ing a lap­top for col­lege. In that post I touched on a vari­ety of points; on how there’s a lack of vari­ety when it comes to pur­chas­ing lap­tops, how over­priced such devices can be con­sid­er­ing that they lack suf­fi­cient com­po­nents, and per­haps one of the most poignant aspects that I ranted on, was how absolutely ridicu­lous Apple’s lap­top offer­ings are.  See­ing as how I absolutely despise the company’s over­priced and under­pow­ered hard­ware, their fisher price-esque prod­uct designs and inter­faces, as well as their lack of reli­a­bil­ity even though that’s one of their main sell­ing points, I would con­sider myself the last per­son to pur­chase such a device. To even jus­tify such a stance, one only has to look at the kind of peo­ple who pur­chase Apple prod­ucts, peo­ple like our friend Alex Guichet.

Yes, there’s no deny­ing that there’s a cer­tain air about Apple prod­ucts that is sim­ply unset­tling. Peo­ple are will­ing to wait in line for hours to spend money on a freak­ing phone, then they are will­ing to defend their pur­chases relent­lessly as if  Apple is some­how a supe­rior being in com­par­i­son to every­thing else that exists on this earth, and finally, as if to jus­tify all of this, the media legit­i­ma­tizes the ridicu­lous behav­ior of Apple and its fans by giv­ing Apple a gra­tu­itous amount of cov­er­age prais­ing their devices as “rev­o­lu­tion­ary” and “inno­v­a­tive” even though the only thing “rev­o­lu­tion­ary” or “inno­v­a­tive” about them is the fact that they come in a pearly white enclo­sure of some­sort and have a $500 price pre­mium. As some­one who gen­er­ally shies away from being loyal to any­thing that enjoys tak­ing my money, I could never buy into such a cul­ture. This is mostly because I don’t have the thou­sands of dol­lars nec­es­sary to main­tain an Apple prod­uct, but partly because it is also against my prin­ci­ples as a ratio­nal human being. How­ever, in an ironic twist of fate I was thrown a curve ball this past week. Or to put it in terms that iPhone 4 users can under­stand “your phone isn’t work­ing because you are hold­ing it wrong.”

Appar­ently credit cards have these things called reward points, which reward you for spend­ing money with points that you can redeem for var­i­ous prod­ucts. For those unfa­mil­iar with the con­cept, think of it like an arcade in which play­ers are rewarded with tick­ets for play­ing a game, which can then be spent try­ing to obtain that really cool machine gun look­ing thing for 800,000 tick­ets except this time the arcade is life the tick­ets are points and the game is how far cred­i­tors can put a per­son into debt. One of my parent’s busi­ness cards is one of these myth­i­cal “rewards cards” and as such it has quite a few “points” on it. See, for most peo­ple “rack­ing up points” would take quite a while as hope­fully their cost of liv­ing isn’t too exor­bi­tant to the point in which they can buy a plasma tv with their rewards points every month. That is of course unless they hap­pen to enjoy Apple prod­ucts in which case I am sure they could buy a house off of a few months reward points. How­ever, for our busi­ness “rack­ing up points” comes rather seam­lessly because there is a rather size­able flow of money com­ing into and out of it each month. As such, my father dis­cov­ered that he had enough points to receive a free Apple lap­top, and see­ing as how he already owns three, he decided to give his lat­est one to me for col­lege purposes.

Thus, I was pre­sented with a brand new 17 inch Mac­Book Pro.

The new Mac­book Pro in atleast 200 dol­lars worth of packaging

At first I was amused by such an acqui­si­tion. Not only was I def­i­nitely  “unpro” like most of the peo­ple who pur­chase these machines, but I was also defi­antly anti-Apple. If any­thing, I should be the last per­son to inherit such a thing, how­ever I then con­sid­ered the fact that in true Apple fash­ion, it lit­er­ally took tens of thou­sands of dol­lars worth of credit card trans­ac­tions to acquire this machine,  and as such I con­cluded that I should accept the machine, as my fam­ily had already gone through the rit­u­al­is­tic Apple tra­di­tion of part­ing with large sums of money in order to receive such a machine.  I imme­di­ately took the machine out of its box, and was imme­di­ately taken aback with sor­row because I real­ized that a poor worker at Fox­conn had prob­a­bly com­mit­ted sui­cide in order to make this com­puter. After say­ing 300 Hail Mary’s and 500 Our Father’s to repent for the lost soul that was most def­i­nitely instilled within this com­puter, I called the local exor­cist over to expel the soul and to hope­fully guide it to sanc­tu­ary, unlike the other souls that hap­pen to pos­sess all of my family’s other Apple products.

Mac Porn… notice how it is strung out on a piece of fur­ni­ture wait­ing to be “turned on”

I pro­ceeded to turn on the machine, con­fi­dent that it was no longer imbued with the evils of Chi­nese sweat­shop work­ers. In typ­i­cal Apple fash­ion, in order to fire me up about my new machine, I was  imme­di­ately pre­sented with a gray Apple logo and a mostly blank screen. Influ­enced by the Mac’s first action, I imme­di­ately took a nap for four hours only to wake up to the typ­i­cal set up screen which asks in Eng­lish what kind of lan­guage the user wants to use. Befud­dled as to why the lap­top would ask me in Eng­lish what kind of lan­guage I would like to use (that’s like ask­ing your friend what kind of food they would like to eat, right as you put a plate in front of them with the food that you made), I decided to choose Span­ish or as the machine calls it “Espanol” just to be defi­ant, and to hope­fully jump start my remas­ter­ing of the lan­guage via the immer­sion method. After the com­puter rebooted, my Span­ish speak­ing expe­ri­ence was imme­di­ately invig­o­rated by another gray screen with an Apple logo on it.

Noth­ing says “Fuck yeah I’m going to be learn­ing Espanol” like a gray screen.

Imme­di­ately bored by the lan­guage thanks in part to my machine’s ini­tial response to it, I changed the com­puter back to Eng­lish. After doing another reboot the com­puter started play­ing this very silly video which said “Wel­come” in a bunch of lan­guages. If only the com­puter did that when I switched it to Alberto Con­ta­dor mode, then just think of how I could be writ­ing this post in Span­ish. Furi­ous that the first thing my new machine did was play  an unwar­ranted video which wel­comed me to absolutely noth­ing in par­tic­u­lar, I decided to teach it a les­son and imme­di­ately veer away from all of the “pro­duc­tiv­ity” soft­ware that it came pre­in­stalled with. The first thing that I did was install Fire­fox so that I would not have to use the god-awful Safari browser that it came with. Since then I have slowly been installing a col­lec­tion of open source and free pro­grams that will hope­fully replace all of the pre­in­stalled “pro­duc­tiv­ity” soft­ware as a giant “screw you” to Apple because such pro­grams are free some­thing that is unac­cept­able when deal­ing with any­thing mac related.

Take that Safari!

If one must know, the specs on this new machine are a 2.8 Ghz Core 2 Duo, 4GB of RAM, and an inte­grated 9400 GT with a ded­i­cated 9600 GT. Apple has indeed released a new iter­a­tion of these machines with stronger specs, but for my pur­poses as a video edi­tor, and col­lege stu­dent, this will do just fine. In the end, while I do hate Apple and every­thing about them I shall reluc­tantly use this machine just as a step father reluc­tantly inter­acts with his estranged son. Sure on the inside I will hate it tremen­dously, but like a step son, I need this machine to do what I love, or in the case of the step Dad, who I love.

I also have some­thing that is “Pro” and 17 inches.

The one thing that I’ve dis­cov­ered about myself in the recent years is that I am a sur­pris­ingly adven­tur­ous per­son. Now when I say adven­tur­ous I mean it in the truly lit­eral sense of the word, as in going out and explor­ing things just for the sheer joy of explo­ration. I have done this through cycling, park­our, and more recently through hik­ing. Of course see­ing as how I live in the bub­ble of Orange County, right next to the most orga­nized per­fect place in exis­tence, Irvine Cal­i­for­nia,  I can never truly call myself an adven­turer. But in com­par­i­son to most of my rich white sub­urb peers, who con­sider an adven­ture being the con­sump­tion of two dif­fer­ent kinds of alco­hol at the same time, or going to the lat­est store at the fash­ion island, I would say that I am a freak­ing rus­tic badass.

With that being said, I decided to test my freak­ing rus­tic badassery at one of the nearby “regional” parks, Peter’s Canyon, a few weeks ago. Now Peter’s Canyon and I are actu­ally on very famil­iar terms, but in the kind of indi­rect way that can only be under­stood  if you hap­pen to be in a rela­tion­ship with some­one else, and they keep refer­ring to their best friend. Sure you’ve never actu­ally met this best friend, yet alone know if they even care for you, but due to the fact that you are stuck in a rela­tion­ship whether you like it or not, you are going to keep hear­ing about this best friend and even­tu­ally feel very famil­iar with them despite never meet­ing them. Need­less to say, this was very much the case with me and Peter’s Canyon. The per­son who I was in a rela­tion­ship with (my bike whose name is Lacy based on the kind of under­wear that I am forced to wear when I ride her) kept bring­ing up this Peter’s Canyon place to me. I would often ride on the “Peter’s Canyon” trail by my house, and would even ride by the actual park on one of my hilly climbs up Jamboree.

Think­ing back on it,  I have a feel­ing that Lacy really wanted to go to Peter’s Canyon with me, but like most of the women in my life, who are often so indi­rect with their intents at telling me things  that I sim­ply beckon them to get back into the kitchen to con­tinue sand­wich pro­duc­tion with­out  mak­ing eye con­tact with them, I didn’t really pay atten­tion to what she wanted. Unbe­knownst to Lacy though, I hap­pen to be hav­ing an affair and there’s now another woman in my life. This woman, who shall not be named for her own safety from Lacy, and I decided to try an adven­ture at Peter’s Canyon after numer­ous other hik­ing expe­di­tions together.

Now like all adven­tures, this one was slightly spon­ta­neous but also partly pre­pared. We had an idea of what we were doing and where to go so our prepa­ra­tion enthralled us dress­ing appro­pri­ately. The lass dawned some shorts and a t-shirt, while I decided to take the more classy approach of wear­ing a polo and some nice dress short. I was a freak­ing rus­tic badass, but I was also going to be a classy one.  What would hap­pen once we actu­ally got was left as mys­tery to us, thus cov­er­ing the spon­ta­neous aspect of the adven­ture. We arrived at the Peter’s Canyon park­ing lot which was so adven­tur­ous that it wasn’t even paved prop­erly and didn’t have prop­erly marked park­ing spots. We were imme­di­ately faced with tough deci­sions such as whether we wanted to pay $3 for park­ing (in an unpaved park­ing lot you bas­tards) or park two blocks away and walk to the park. Side note, park­ing at a park is kind of an ironic thing  to do, it’s like hot­ting a hot­dog, or icing ice. After pay­ing the ridicu­lous park­ing fee at the poorly con­structed park park­ing lot, which I am going to assume the city decided to build with­out hav­ing any plan to fin­ish (kind of like the war in iraq amirite?) we left the sanc­tu­ary of our mass pro­duced gov­ern­ment funded (after the bailout) vehi­cle and begin our adventure.

Classy Rus­tic Badass In Action

I’ll be the first to say that there’s noth­ing more serene than hik­ing a few hours before sun­set with the woman you are cur­rently hav­ing an affair with. The looped trail at Peter’s Canyon was only about 5 miles long but the scenery was so beau­ti­ful and the ter­rain so chal­leng­ing (at least to us sub­ur­ban Orange County adven­tur­ers) that it felt like it was much longer. At first the trail started off gen­tle as it brought us around the perime­ter of the park near the out­ly­ing street of Jam­boree. How­ever, it quickly thrust us deep into the heart of Peter’s Canyon and with that came a plethora of beau­ti­ful ascents and descents which allowed us to see the major­ity of the sur­round­ing Orange County area. After van­quish­ing those steep hills like a can of raid van­quishes an unsus­pect­ing daddy long-legs, the ter­rain began to flat­ten out and we became sur­rounded by canyon-esque veg­e­ta­tion and wildlife. Speak­ing of cans of raid, every cou­ple of miles we would encounter these dark black bee­tles  that where com­pletely harm­less, but for rea­sons unben­knownst to me would send the lass scream­ing and running.

I don’t really under­stand the mind­set of women when it comes to bugs. 99% of them are com­pletely harm­less and the 1% of them that are harm­ful will prob­a­bly only be encoun­tered one of twice in a female’s life and usu­ally at a com­pletely safe dis­tance. Yet for some rea­son at the sight of the most benign yet com­mon bugs, females feel threat­ened and cause quite the ruckus. While it is an incred­i­bly enjoy­able sight, mostly because I get to see a bug and a woman freak­ing out at the same time, it sim­ply isn’t the right way to go about han­dling bugs. Scream­ing and freak­ing out at the sight of a bug only draws the bug’s atten­tion towards the per­son thus increas­ing the like­li­hood of the bug “attack­ing” them. It’s a lot like a celebrity com­plain­ing that they get harassed by paparazzi’s all of the time, only to go around get­ting drunk, flash­ing peo­ple, and releas­ing sex tapes every other night.

The Lass before being star­tled by a bug, cen­sored for her own pro­tec­tion against lacy

On our trav­els we encoun­tered a plethora of fel­low adven­tur­ers. Although none of them were as freak­ing rus­tic badass or as classy as I was, they were all quite friendly. Lit­er­ally every sin­gle per­son that we passed smiled at us and said hi, while many oth­ers struck up con­ver­sa­tions with us. I can say with sin­cer­ity that it was one of the first times in my life when I actu­ally enjoyed tra­vers­ing and walk­ing around sim­ply because the peo­ple who we encoun­tered on the way were so friendly. This has lead me to believe that if every­one trav­eled by a rural trail or bicy­cle, then we would all be much nicer to one another. There’s a kind of unspo­ken cama­raderie that devel­ops when trav­el­ing using these meth­ods, it’s as if every­one acknowl­edges the other person’s effort when trav­el­ing via these means, and thus they are will­ing to offer their help and sup­port because they are also going through the same thing. I think it reveals a lot about human nature. At our core we are will­ing to do good things with one another and are more than ready to help each other if we are all expe­ri­enc­ing the same thing, but once we begin to iso­late our­selves, even in some­thing as com­mon as a car, then we become com­pletely self­ish douche-bags to one another.

After reach­ing the end of the loop, the lass and I found our way to the car feel­ing both a sense of accom­plish­ment and a sense of desire. We felt accom­plished for trav­el­ing the beau­ti­ful trails of Peter’s Canyon, but we also had the desire to return and expe­ri­ence more. I have a feel­ing that the lass and I will have more hik­ing adven­tures in the day’s to come, I just hope that Lacy doesn’t find out.

There really isn’t too much that I can enjoy in this world. My favorite activ­i­ties like swim­ming and bike rid­ing are often ruined by incon­sid­er­ate bas­tards, my Apple lap­top likes to freeze and die when­ever I edit movies on it, and of course eat­ing  becomes a bore when my stom­ach starts to get full. How­ever, I am still able to find solace in some of the few remain­ing puri­ties in this world such as Jazz music, Clif Bars, and my favorite, Kevin McDon­ald. With that being said, one of the last things on my list of puri­ties is the joy and won­der of buy­ing a computer.

Now I’ve had a fas­ci­na­tion with com­put­ers since the fifth grade. That was the year when I found the glo­ri­ous game War­craft 3 which required me to upgrade my piece of crap win­dows 98 machine because it couldn’t even load up War­craft 3’s cin­e­matic open­ing with­out freez­ing. From there I have a long his­tory with com­put­ers. I pur­chased the worst machine of my life, an old HP Pavilon desk­top, and used that as a replace­ment for my win­dows 98 machine in order to play War­craft 3. After about three years of hell with that machine, I bought a Dell E510 which I used to play World of War­craft on, and also used as a plat­form to learn how to upgrade com­put­ers. On my E510 I put in 2GB of RAM and an Nvidia GeForce 6800GS which were expe­ri­ences that were invalu­able in terms of learn­ing how to be self suf­fi­cient with com­put­ers, and learn­ing how to make good pur­chas­ing deci­sions when it came to com­puter com­po­nents. Lastly, I built the com­puter that I am cur­rently typ­ing this post on at the begin­ning of my fresh­man year. This com­puter was a pain because the moth­er­board that I pur­chased came dead on arrival, so while the machine did power on, it wouldn’t past P.O.S.T, despite the fact that I lit­er­ally went through every trou­bleshoot­ing pos­si­bil­ity imag­in­able. While that was a par­tic­u­larly annoy­ing expe­ri­ence at first, it taught me how to diag­nose and fix nearly every prob­lem that a com­puter could pos­si­bly expe­ri­ence. After get­ting the com­puter to work prop­erly, I can say with cer­tainty that it was one of the best invest­ments that I have ever made.

So one may be won­der­ing why I enjoy com­put­ers so much, espe­cially con­sid­er­ing the fact that nearly all of my com­puter knowl­edge and skill-sets have come at the result of numer­ous com­puter prob­lems and issues. Well the sim­ple answer is that there’s a kind of fun to buy­ing a com­puter that sim­ply can’t be found when pur­chas­ing any­thing else. When pur­chas­ing a com­puter, one has the oppor­tu­nity to select from thou­sands of options, all which come in at dif­fer­ent price ranges and with dif­fer­ent pro’s and con’s when con­sid­er­ing the buyer’s needs. What makes things fun is the capa­bil­ity to upgrade the machine or cus­tomize it in order to bet­ter suit one’s tastes.

As many of you know, I hap­pen to be going off to col­lege in the com­ing months (allegedly), which means that I must pur­chase a lap­top.  Now I feel par­tic­u­larly for­tu­nate when it comes to select­ing my lap­top because I am famil­iar with all of the cur­rent com­po­nents that are avail­able today, and I have a rel­a­tively good idea of what would fit my needs. In this par­tic­u­lar instance, I am look­ing for a lap­top in the $850 price range, with a ded­i­cated graph­ics card, a decent amount of RAM, and fairly clocked CPU. My rea­son for this is because I will be a film major which means that I need some­thing that has some power to it, but I also need some­thing that is still fairly mobile as I will be tak­ing it around with me at col­lege. Plus, I also need some­thing that is gam­ing capa­ble so that I can play Star­craft 2.

I started my search look­ing at a pop­u­lar com­puter maker who I hap­pen to own stock in, Dell. Dell offered me a stu­dent dis­count and what looked like a fairly com­pe­tent stu­dio note­book for around $900 which I thought was a good deal until I did a search on the “ded­i­cated” graph­ics card and found out that it was a piece of shit. What amazed me more so, was the fact that such a graph­ics card couldn’t be upgraded. Dell has a long his­tory of being highly cus­tomiz­able and with­out such options at my dis­pos­able I imme­di­ately checked Dell’s stock price to see how the com­pany was doing. Appar­ently the com­pany is being sold at $12 a share and is under fire for know­ingly sell­ing com­put­ers that didn’t work. Upon real­iz­ing that I bought Dell’s stock at $27 I imme­di­ately began to shit bricks, and threw my mon­i­tor through the win­dow in disgust.

After illegally appro­pri­at­ing a new mon­i­tor from a nearby house, I then turned to what I con­sider to be one of the best com­pa­nies in the world, Newegg​.com. Newegg is a com­pany that is known for hav­ing some of the cheap­est prices on com­puter com­po­nents any­where, and also for hav­ing some of the best cus­tomer care avail­able via fast, timely, ship­ping and very gen­er­ous return poli­cies. While Newegg did  faith­fully point me in the direc­tion of a few decent lap­tops in my price range, their com­po­nents and the rep­u­ta­tions of the lap­tops’ man­u­fac­tur­ers caused me to look else­where as both were questionable.

I found myself at a sel­dom expe­ri­enced impass where, for the first time in nearly five years, I did not know where to look to get the best deal on a com­puter. So I began search­ing man­u­fac­tur­ers. I started with Sony which had great look­ing lap­tops but they had an unex­plained $200 price pre­mium, then I went to Lenovo which had well priced lap­tops with decent com­po­nents, but their web­site seemed sus­pect and unre­li­able. I found a few good lap­top deals but they were through Best­buy Worst­buy and I absolutely refused to give that com­pany any of my money. I even took a gan­der at Apple’s web­site to see what they had to offer, and I saw a com­puter with com­po­nents that I could pur­chase for $700 being sold for $1800. I sub­se­quently bought a gun and shot my neighbor’s illegally acquired mon­i­tor, bring­ing my over­all bud­get down to $800.

Then I remem­bered an old com­pany that my friend Thomas Lyons and I used to get into fights over, Gate­way. See when I had pur­chased my Dell E510, Thomas had just received a lap­top from his dad who worked at Gate­way. Being the douchebag that I was, I had to tout the fact that I had the supe­rior machine in my hands (even though com­par­ing desk­tops and lap­tops is absolutely ridicu­lous), and Thomas replied with a rhetoric that “Gate­way has awe­some lap­tops”. I don’t par­tic­u­larly know why I remem­bered this quote from Thomas, though I am sure it has some­thing to do with the fact that I insulted the com­pany that his Dad worked for, for no good rea­son other then to make myself feel supe­rior to him based on what I pur­chased, which I add is an incred­i­bly douchey thing to do and some­thing that I regret terribly.

So I went to Gateway’s web­site and found an excel­lent lap­top that they have being sold for $850. It has a strong 2.53 GHz Intel Core i5 proces­sor, 4GB of ram, an ATI HD 5600, and a 17 inch screen, which is basi­cally every­thing that a film major could pos­si­bly need in a com­puter. Thus, I set that com­puter as my pre­mière can­di­date for pur­chase. While I haven’t pur­chased it yet, I can’t help but laugh at the irony that Thomas’ words were true, Gate­way does have kick­ass lap­tops.  With that being said, I am still dis­ap­pointed by how crappy com­puter man­u­fac­tur­ers are mak­ing their machines nowa­days. They either come in at $1000 and lack vital things like a ded­i­cated graph­ics card, or a decent amount of RAM, or they come in at $600 with absolutely crappy com­po­nents and no way of cus­tomiz­ing them to be decent machines. I am quite lit­er­ally appalled at the lack of options and log­i­cal price ranges that are offered by today’s pre­built man­u­fac­tur­ers, and I am very happy that I can build my own machines because oth­er­wise, I’d find myself in pos­ses­sion of some really crappy computers.