P365 - Day 157 poor neglected eMac, I haven’t seen you for a while

I worked from home again today, with the intention of turning what I’d written down last week into a document that made some kind of sense.

This meant a shift from my cosy reading chair to my ergonomic OH&S-approved-by-work computer desk, upon which my 2003 eMac sits forlornly, after having been upstaged by my MacBook last year.

I got it as part of an insurance settlement following a power surge that wiped out most of the electric and electronic equipment in our house. It took several months, and many phone calls to the insurance company (and possibly a couple of letters of complaint as well), before the electrical repairer that the insurance company had seemingly picked out of the phone book because it was the first one listed in our area admitted that he actually couldn’t repair my poor old fried Mac Performa, and the insurance company agreed to get me a new computer.

I can’t remember exactly which model of Mac Performa I had, but 580CD rings a bell. If that’s the one, according to www.everymac.com, it

featured a 33 MHz 68LC040 processor, 5 MB or 8 MB of RAM, and either a 250 MB or 500 MB hard drive in a relatively-compact all-in-one case with a 14" color display. The Performa 580CD was sold in Canada, Asia and Australia, and was discontinued in February 1996.

Yep, five MB of RAM and a hard drive measured in megabytes. A 33MHz processor.

I may well laugh now, but it was the first computer I ever owned, and I loved it. I was shattered when it was fried.

The replacement eMac has an 80 GB hard drive and came with 128 MB of RAM. As you can imagine, I was pretty over the moon with it eight years ago, and couldn’t imagine how I’d ever need anywhere near 80 GB of memory.

That was before I got a digital camera, a digital camcorder and had a child.

Say no more.

I don’t remember the last time I actually used it, and it felt weird to be using a desktop Mac again. I’m now so used to the MacBook trackpad that I kept reaching for the non-existent trackpad on the keyboard. (I don’t do that at work, mainly I think because I mouse with my left hand, whereas I trackpad and mouse at home with my right hand, so I don’t get confused at work.)

Apart from the fact that it had been so long since I’d used it (maybe we had a power outage since then) that it had reset itself to 1 January 1970, everything else was working fine, and I got a good amount of work done today.

And I took a couple of photos.

These pics are edited in Camera+ and put together in another nifty little app called PicFrame, which lets you make picture montages on your phone in different sizes and layouts. I like it a lot except for an annoying habit it has, of whenever you try and move a picture around in its frame, the Rotate/Mirror menu keeps popping up.