Weird e-mail
This is one of the weirdest e-mail messages I've received in a long time. After doing some searching, I found a link at Memepool which explains some of it, scroll down to July 2, 2002 to find the entry. I reported it to Spamcop, whatever it is...

- posted by Seth @ 8:01 PM    

 
iMovie and wanting a new Mac
Today, I used iMovie for the first time. I've been messing around with some of the video from my wedding, and decided to see if iMovie was a better editor than the freebie crap I got with my Firewire card on the PC. I'm impressed. It's by far the easiest video editing software I've used, and I'm not some Apple fanboy that swallows whatever crap Steve Jobs shovels out.

It does make me wish I had a faster Mac. My little iBook 500 worked up quite a sweat, it took 90 minutes to export my 23 minute movie to the CD-ROM quality QuickTime movie. That's 90 minutes of doing nothing with your machine, but watching a progress bar crawl across the screen. Holly and I talked tonight about possibly purchasing a new Mac for home. It'd be dual-purpose, as it'd give me a nice video editor, and the ability to burn my own DVD movies, and it'd give Holly a machine to use for graphic design. She really wants to learn Quark Xpress and Adobe InDesign, so that she can hopefully move up the food chain in the advertising agency she works in. I can't really gripe about spending a lot of money so that you can learn new computer systems, as that's basically been my excuse for the money I spend on them all these years. It's also the only way that computers can be viewed as an investment, and not an expense. Being able to parlay the money you laid down to purchase the system into a higher-paying job makes sense, if you have the time, ability, and inclination to teach yourself something new.

It's too bad the machines are so darned expensive, or we'd have ordered one tonight. I see us as having 3 options, one is the top of the line eMac with an 800mhz CPU, coming in at $1449 for us education folks, though I'd have to add some more RAM, of course. The next would be the high-end iMac, also with an 800mhz G4 CPU, coming in at $1949, plus RAM. And the 3rd option is the dual 867Mhz G4 tower, outfitted with a SuperDrive, and coming in at just over $2500 by the time you get a 17" LCD display on it.

Decisions, decisions.... I'm inclined to go with either the cheap eMac, as that's going to offer everything you get with the iMac, other than the industrial design and a bit of screen real estate, for $500 less. Or to go all out and get the G4 tower, as it's a "professional" strength system that'll be more upgradeable in the future, as well as offering dual CPUs for greater performance, but it costs a whole lotta money now. Then again, the eMac is so cheap, that even if you buy it, sell it in a year, and buy another newer one, you're still saving money over what you'd have paid for that G4, and you've got a machine that's still within Apple's one-year warranty. That might be a good plan for us, if we decide to start buying her Macs for professional use, buy a cheap one, and replace it yearly. Macs tend to hold their value much more than PC machines do, there's a good used market for them on eBay, so you can get quite a bit of value back out of the machine when it comes time to sell it.
- posted by Seth @ 5:43 PM