Yesterday Apple unveiled its newest tower series, the Power Mac G5. It has been described as both a “cheese grater” and an “electric razor”; as looks are somewhat secondary to performance, in my mind, I think I like it. That’s important, as one of these towers could be the Last Computer I Buy [in quite a while]. When I started saving cash, early in my prolonged college career, I told myself that part of my savings would go towards buying a new computer before my educational discount ends (i.e. when I graduate). The day my educational discount ends is beginning to draw nearer.

In my favor is the simple fact that computers are reaching the point where they are fast enough for any basic task that the Average Joe would ever want to do. My current computer still runs acceptably, running the most current operating system, after 3 1/2 years—which was rarely (if ever) said about earlier computers after a similar amount of time. I suspect that a new G5 tower will last at least 5 years; the only thing really limiting its life span is the inevitable bloat of software. If you download Apple’s QuickTime propaganda (video) about the G5, you’ll witness Photoshop launching completely in one bounce. [The number of times an application bounces in the dock while it starts up is a rough way of measuring the performance of one’s OS X machine.] I have no idea how many bounces it takes to launch Photoshop on my current machine, but it sure as heck is more than one; it takes 19 bounces to start up on a G3 PowerBook, FWIW. I’m intrigued.

Outside of Apple’s news, yesterday was pretty much ignorable.

Today was a different story, though. After exercising and working, I gave Katie a call and had a somewhat stilted conversation with her (it’s been a while). Sadly, the class holding her up from graduating, aside from having to finish the Honors College thesis, is one of the basic pillars of higher education: Health and Human Performance. Happily, that means she’ll be around this summer. I then went over to drop off Back to the Future parts II and III—I had lent Katie part I quite some time ago, and I now have BTTF on DVD. At Katie’s house I met a remarkable person: Eva.

And you though I was going to be talking about Evangelion again, didn’t you?

This one’s name is pronounced “eave-ah,” not “eh?-va.” [I swear, every time I try to say her name I have to spend a second and think about what I’m doing.] Eva is the one-year-old daughter of, from what I gather, one of Rochelle’s sisters. [Rochelle is a house mate of Katie; Brian and Eric will remember the New Years Eve we spent with Rochelle and Connor.] She (Eva) apparently just learned how to walk a week ago, and is now moving all over the place.

Eva’s the anti-Evangelion, and she stared me in the face. Multiple times. Babies tend to do that with me.

It’s hard to think that things be falling apart when you have a baby looking at you. It just doesn’t seem right at all. And then she does this thing where she sticks her (tiny!) tongue out and rapidly moves it left and right, saying “la” with each change in position…you just have to smile!

Katie decided to make Chai Tea, despite not having a solid recipe in front of her (the best we could find in her cookbooks was a list of the typical ingredients, but not their proportions). The others (Rochelle’s two sisters, and Aurora, another house mate) turned on Punch Drunk Love in the living room. Eva checked in on both parties repeatedly throughout the evening. Katie and I later made a quick trip out to Dari-Mart to get some milk, an essential ingredient of chai tea; on the way I solved the mystery of why Katie’s interior lights (speedometer, radio, etc.) didn’t work. [I had had a similar experience one time driving to Andy’s place at night; turns out the Carolla has a brightness knob with a low-end setting of “black hole.”] That was easily my triumphant moment of the evening.

Katie then made the tea while I observed, and we both took a small glass to drink while watching the end of the movie with the others. As Katie later observed, she had put a bit too much pepper in; I was thankful I had a small amount, though I think it would have tasted fine otherwise. The movie was also off; although it starred Adam Sandler, it wasn’t really funny at all. We basically walked in on a scene where Sandler’s character gets into a car accident, gets out of the car with some metal bar, and proceeds to silently knock all four passengers in the other vehicle around a bit. Quite disturbing.

All in all, not a bad day. I’ve been invited to play pool with Connor and Rochelle on Tuesdays, and Katie says I can drop by again (ha ha), so maybe I’ll have a few more people to interact with this summer.