Saturday, September 23, 2006

Change of Perspective

Without getting too deep, I have been pondering lately how drastically one's perspective on something can change over time. I'll keep it simple with one example.

I used to love building computers. Everything about it. I kept up-to-date on all of the components that were out there, knew their specs by heart, and pretty much knew the best price on anything at any time.

Those days are long past. I no longer give a rip. I want my computer to work, I don't want to touch it, and I pretty much have one that is just "good enough." Until iTunes 7 came out that is, and suddenly I found my machine lacking.

Those who watch this blog saw me love iTunes 7, but also rant about it. However, I never even blogged about my biggest disappointment. After seeing how sweet cover flow looked, I couldn't wait to use it at home. However, I was instead greeted by this message when I enabled cover flow at home: "iTunes is unable to display artwork on this computer." Huh? Why? Talk about a worthless error message.

I immediately hypothesized that my last than fantastic Rage XL graphics card simply wasn't up to the task. A bit of searching on some forums pretty much proved me right. Thus, I was in need of a graphics card. I really didn't care though, and didn't want to spend time researching it. Once again, I really just wanted to be able to click the "good enough" graphics card button on Amazon or something. In the end, I went to eBay, narrowed the list by a few features I actually knew that I wanted, and bought one. Radeon 9250 it turns out, don't really care about the specs, they are good enough, and met the most important criteria, my price point of $30.

Now, I have cover flow goodness. Sweet. Now, lest I forget:

Hawks 24, Worthless Illini 7. Go Hawks.
I'll see all the cool folks under the lights at Kinnick next week.

1 comment:

---ryan said...

I'm with you on the "don't care" thing. I used to live on the expensive end of computers. I bought multiple $3k computers during my college years. I've quite possibly purchased 3 computers with $3k since then and that was over a much larger span of years.

I find that I enjoy using computers a lot more than I enjoy building and fixing them. Perhaps this is because I build and fix them all day for a living :)