Believe it or not, it gets old saying “mm. Tired. Work same as always. Pass time somehow not studying actuarial exams.” (That’s the type of brutally honest portrayal you should expect of me by now.)

While dealing with my G5 reinstall last week, I was reminded of the godawful squeal my computer makes when transferring data over the ethernet port (yet another symptom of the Achilles’ heel of the G5: the stupid noisy power supply)… and so I decided to get the dumb thing changed (though others have had limited success with the procedure) while I still have a one-year warranty. At the very least, there’ll be some record that I wasn’t happy with the thing while it was under warranty.

So I’m presently living out of my powerbook, and will be for the next five-some days. While it is more than adequate for my portable needs (“huh?,” says the people that know me, “What portable needs?”), it’s somewhat wanting as a desktop replacement. I do get a kick out of running my powerbook screen as a second monitor (I’ve hooked it up to the G5’s monitor, and use that as the primary): it’s fun being able to place windows you want open, but not in the way, onto a second screen. Of course, the ability to run more than two programs at a time without severe slowdown might make this feature more valuable.

So there you have it. I’m presently installing iTunes 4.5, just released today, to check out what all has changed. Word has it that there is a new Party Mix feature included; in my opinion, the use of “party mix” as the name of a feature ought to be a feature in and of itself.