saving ink

*Or, in which I geek out for the first time on this blog. Your regularly scheduled rants about the news media will resume shortly.

Yes, it’s been forever since I’ve written here. No, I’m not dead, though part of me is - and not in some exaggerated metaphorical way or anything, but literally - my computer died at the end of October. My beautiful, two-and-a-half-year-old brain extension in the form of a MacBook Pro decided to depart for the great scrapheap in the sky - or its logic board did - at the absolutely least opportune time for me, the end of October, when I had a heap of commissioned Unsound photos to shop, gigs and gigs of Iceland photos to sort, shop, and post, and, of course, work to do, as my personal laptop is also my work computer.

So here I sit, nearly a month without my baby, and what have I learned? First of all, backing things up is awesome. Even though there’s nothing wrong with my hard drive and when I get my computer back, all of my files should still be there, thanks to the cheap 320 GB portable drive I use as my Time Machine disk, I’ve been able to access all of my files for work from my latest backup while my computer’s been at the shop.

Second, it shouldn’t happen, but sometimes, 2.5-year-old motherboards die, even if you take damn good care of your machine. Yes, even if it’s a Mac. And when it does, and if your laptop is not under warranty (of course), don’t take the shop’s suggested price for fixing/replacing it, but instead, do your research. Thanks to this, I’ll have a brand new 2.6GHz board to replace my fried 2.5GHz for roughly $500 including shipping and labor, rather than the $930 for a new board alone the Apple guys wanted to charge me. Still a hell of a lot of money to spend just to get a dated machine running again, but a lot less than a new one, which I definitely can’t afford.

A side-note to point two is that it’s much better to have an emergency savings account to pull this kind of money out of, than an emergency credit card - both for your wallet and for your peace of mind. Had I no savings and had to put this repair on my card, I’d just be tempted to get a new machine if I was going to spend the money anyway, especially if I were offered a shiny no-interest deal on it. But I love my current machine (when it works); it’s still running like new, I can run every program I need on it (including resource-high games like StarCraft II), and frankly, I prefer the all-aluminum body over the newer black-framed ones, so I have no need to spend $2000 for a new computer just because I could.

And finally, there’s the topic of this whole spiel: using one app at a time. Since my computer broke, I’ve had two alternatives: my iPhone, and the ancient G4 that my boss dug up so I could have a computer at the office (which I’m writing on now). One is designed to run one program at a time (yes, even with multitasking), and the other is so old and slow that it only functions properly when running one program at a time (even after I pimped its RAM and upgraded its OS from Panther to Leopard and did a massive hard drive cleaning spree).

While at first this seemed like a huge disadvantage, and it was taking me twice as long to do most tasks as it would have taken on my own laptop, I’ve now gotten used to both this machine and its limitations, and turned them into advantages. I no longer have my mail client on all the time, which before would cause an automatic reflex to open the program the second that new mail sound chimed. I no longer have 30 tabs open in my browser, because the G4 really, really doesn’t like that - which forces me to read the contents of each tab as I open it, take what I need from it, and close it right away. I can no longer have four or five Word docs plus a Pages file open at the same time; in fact, it’s quite difficult to have any Office program open at the same time as a browser, forcing me to actually edit without interruption. Forget about running iTunes or Spotify with more than two other programs open. Oh, and when I’m Photoshopping or Lightrooming, that’s all I’m doing.

(Side-note two: I have to say, it’s impressive that a seven-year-old, 1.25GHz PPC machine with under a gig of RAM can even run Photoshop and Lightroom, much less run at all. Of course, this is significantly undercut by the fact that my machine died at only two and a half years of age.)

After the initial frustration subsided and I came to terms with the fact that I will be MacBook-less for over a month (and bought this sweet adapter to watch my iPhone videos on my TV), I’ve found that this forced single-tasking is both extremely difficult to get used to, and ultimately far more effective. It’s been a constant struggle with my own, easily-distracted brain, that I’d tried to wage with less success using tools like Isolator or Think on my very multitasking-capable laptop. Now it will be a struggle to maintain this focus once my own computer is back, but I think this experience has given me the motivation to truly give it a go, now that I’ve seen just how effective single-tasking can make me.

Needless to say, after reading numerous rumors about Lion’s iOS-like interface and push towards full-screen programs, I’m definitely looking forward to the upgrade. Here’s hoping my MacBook is up and running by then.