Now that I have my new laptop, I need a good coffee shop into which to take it.
The obvious option is Tryst, the local independent hipster hangout that is barely a block from where I live, but... I've never really managed the disaffected hipster gaze thing and Tryst manages to irritate me every time I go in there. (This from a person who is generally pretty amiable.)
Yes, the coffee is good, but the service is deliberately terrible. This is probably to be expected when the website advertises its open positions by saying the the job is more about hanging out with friends than it is about actually working.
As a former waitress I should be sympathetic towards my fellow workers because I know what they're going through, but it turns out that as a former waitress I'm actually very put off by poor service because I know exactly what giving good service requires. (When it is good, I tip very, very good; but when it is bad I tip horrid.)
Hello Cupcake would be ideal, but I don't think it has wireless. It's also problematic because we aren't supposed to bring our own laptops into my workplace, so I would have to walk two miles back to the apartment, get the laptop, and then head two miles south to Hello Cupcake.
There's a Starbucks next to my apartment, of course (isn't there a Starbucks next to everyone's apartment?), but it's Starbucks.
Which means I should probably suck it up and get used to Tryst, even though today (for example) I got up to use the restroom (taking the Acer with me, of course) and came back to find that my seat had been given to another patron and, after I sat down at a different, empty seat, got lectured by the waitstaff for "making it look like I had left without paying." Um... if I haven't paid yet, why did you turn the table? Next time I'll leave a note: "I am in the bathroom. Please do not remove my plate of food. Also, I do intend to pay and maybe even tip if this seat is still waiting for me when I get back."
Or I could just practice my disaffected hipster gaze.
Showing posts with label computers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label computers. Show all posts
Sunday, February 8, 2009
Saturday, February 7, 2009
My Acer Extensa
Summer 2005: I buy a Compaq Presario laptop in preparation for grad school. It costs about $400. I pay for it with money saved from a summer of waitressing.
Spring 2006: The battery dies on my Compaq Presario. Won't recharge. I call in a handful of favors from all the computer geeks I know and they tinker around with things. No luck. My laptop is now effectively a desktop.
Fall 2007: The hard drive dies on my cord-tethered Compaq. Just up and dies. Woke up one morning and pressed the "on" button and nothing happened. I take it into a shop and, for $300, get a new hard drive with 99% of my files restored. (Yes, I save copies of the most important files; but I didn't save copies of photos, music, etc.) It will take nearly two years before I pay the $300 off of my credit card.
Spring 2007: I finally pull together enough spare cash to buy a new battery for the Compy. Pop it in. My friend and I celebrate by taking the laptop out and watching a movie together, on the porch, free from cords or outlets. Halfway through the movie the screen goes black. Battery is dead. It never, ever recharges.
Summer 2007: Compy goes to India! It's during this period that the cord stops functioning properly; unless it is attached to the Compy at exactly the right angle, it won't provide electricity. I memorize the angle. Sometimes a small thing, like someone walking next to the table, will shake the cord out of position. Power out, laptop off. (I learn to hit ctrl-S after every paragraph.)
Fall 2007: I open up what I am now affectionately calling the "craptop" and discover that the screen has gone all pink and green. Everything that would be white in color has turned pink; everything that would be black is bright green, and the rest of the colors fall somewhere inbetween. After some wiggling I discover that the monitor will restore original colors if it is held at exactly the right angle. I memorize the angle.
Spring 2008: My lappy takes approximately 10 minutes to restart from sleep state and 20 minutes to restart from shutdown.
FEBRUARY 2009: I buy a new laptop. An Acer Extensa 4420. (Edit: the box and the receipt say Extensa 4420, but the computer inside is labeled Extensa 4630Z. Am hoping I got an unexpected upgrade.)
Having this Acer in my lap feels so weird, for three reasons:
And then there's the fourth reason. The uncomfortable feeling that, thanks to planned obsolescence, this will all happen again; I'll spend an evening or two going through the Compy, gmailing myself the best photos and documents and opening them up again on the Acer; I'll re-install Audacity and Paint.Net and ZSNES and Adobe and MS Office; I'll get used to Vista; and then, maybe in a year, the slow process of laptop death will start all over.
Sure, I say, this time around I'll treat the Acer right. I'll never touch the mousepad without first washing my hands. But I know it wasn't really because of finger residue that the battery, the cord, the hard drive, and the monitor all failed. It's because they were built to fail.
And so I can hardly be as thrilled about my new laptop as I was the first time I opened up my Compy.
But it's nice to have a machine that doesn't turn everything pink and green. ^__^
Spring 2006: The battery dies on my Compaq Presario. Won't recharge. I call in a handful of favors from all the computer geeks I know and they tinker around with things. No luck. My laptop is now effectively a desktop.
Fall 2007: The hard drive dies on my cord-tethered Compaq. Just up and dies. Woke up one morning and pressed the "on" button and nothing happened. I take it into a shop and, for $300, get a new hard drive with 99% of my files restored. (Yes, I save copies of the most important files; but I didn't save copies of photos, music, etc.) It will take nearly two years before I pay the $300 off of my credit card.
Spring 2007: I finally pull together enough spare cash to buy a new battery for the Compy. Pop it in. My friend and I celebrate by taking the laptop out and watching a movie together, on the porch, free from cords or outlets. Halfway through the movie the screen goes black. Battery is dead. It never, ever recharges.
Summer 2007: Compy goes to India! It's during this period that the cord stops functioning properly; unless it is attached to the Compy at exactly the right angle, it won't provide electricity. I memorize the angle. Sometimes a small thing, like someone walking next to the table, will shake the cord out of position. Power out, laptop off. (I learn to hit ctrl-S after every paragraph.)
Fall 2007: I open up what I am now affectionately calling the "craptop" and discover that the screen has gone all pink and green. Everything that would be white in color has turned pink; everything that would be black is bright green, and the rest of the colors fall somewhere inbetween. After some wiggling I discover that the monitor will restore original colors if it is held at exactly the right angle. I memorize the angle.
Spring 2008: My lappy takes approximately 10 minutes to restart from sleep state and 20 minutes to restart from shutdown.
FEBRUARY 2009: I buy a new laptop. An Acer Extensa 4420. (Edit: the box and the receipt say Extensa 4420, but the computer inside is labeled Extensa 4630Z. Am hoping I got an unexpected upgrade.)
Having this Acer in my lap feels so weird, for three reasons:
- I'm running Vista.
- It isn't exactly the laptop I had planned to buy. I had planned to get the HP Netbook 1010 which was retailing for $299, but then I learned that the 1010 didn't have an ethernet port, and to use it I would need to buy a router ($50) and to use the router I would have to install the drivers which would require me to use the router's CD, but netbooks don't come with CD drives, so I would have to buy a CD/DVD attachment ($100)... and suddenly this tricked-out Acer is the more frugal choice. But... sigh... it isn't the cute choice. (I tell myself that buying an actual laptop instead of a netbook is better; that having a computer with a CD/DVD drive and actual memory and two cores is a good thing; but that friggin' netbook was ADORABLE in a Hello Kitty way and the Acer is just ordinary-looking.)
- Any time I spend more than, say, $100, all of my former starving-graduate-student alarm bells go off: Did you really need that? What if something happens and you don't have enough savings to cover the expense??? Never mind that I have plenty of money saved and this was a purchase that should have been made FOUR YEARS AGO.
And then there's the fourth reason. The uncomfortable feeling that, thanks to planned obsolescence, this will all happen again; I'll spend an evening or two going through the Compy, gmailing myself the best photos and documents and opening them up again on the Acer; I'll re-install Audacity and Paint.Net and ZSNES and Adobe and MS Office; I'll get used to Vista; and then, maybe in a year, the slow process of laptop death will start all over.
Sure, I say, this time around I'll treat the Acer right. I'll never touch the mousepad without first washing my hands. But I know it wasn't really because of finger residue that the battery, the cord, the hard drive, and the monitor all failed. It's because they were built to fail.
And so I can hardly be as thrilled about my new laptop as I was the first time I opened up my Compy.
But it's nice to have a machine that doesn't turn everything pink and green. ^__^
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