… well, kinda.

After a bit of indecision last week week, I have now bought myself a Mac Mini. It’s a very basic Mac Desktop that comes without the mouse/keyboard/mirror… I mean, monitor. It’s still pretty pricey, but then that’s Apple for you.

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A few weeks ago at work I got to play with a Mac for the first time and was pretty impressed with it. This has given me a bit of motivation to get a Mac of my own to play with so I can familarise myself with the set up and also hopefully provide better support for the system in future. I’ve been looking at the Apple store quite a bit since then and the first conclusion I came to is naturally it’s all a bit expensive… I mean great value of money, as corrected by the Mac Fanboy I met the other day.

The entry level Mac is £999 (21.5 inch screen) and a Macbook with a decent sized screen is £1500. This is a bit much for me, the lowest Mac is a fairly good price but I really don’t want the additional screen on my desk as I’d have to keep moving things around each time I wanted to print something, which will get annoying really quickly. And NO, I’m not getting rid of my PC as I actually want to play games at maxed out settings!

After much looking around I’ve started to look into the Mac Mini – this is basically a stripped down standard Mac but with no screen, keyboard or mouse. I believe it will suit my needs nicely as I can connect it to the second port on my monitor and let Synergy do the rest. I don’t need a hugely powerful processor, graphics, or a hard drive. The only thing that has got me torn is do I settle for 2GB RAM or pump it up to 4GB?  If I increase the RAM, it’ll set me back £650 and that’s with staff discount deducted. What do you guys think?

Instead of watching the Royal Wedding over the weekend, I was having way too much fun building a Media Center PC for my Mother. The reason for this was because the Digital TV Recorder I had bought for her Birthday in 2008 had finally given up the ghost (wouldn’t record a damn thing!) after almost three years of giving us grief. I thought I’d build a basic PC dedicated for this purpose, because I wasn’t in the mood to encounter various problems with another unit and didn’t really want to replace the whole thing a year down the line when HD Freeview becomes available in our area.

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As you can see, it’s been a while since I’ve updated this thing. This is mainly because I’ve been a bit preoccupied throughout the god-awful month of January. Rather than drone on about the kind of month I’ve had, I thought I’d summarise it all with bullet points, huzzah!

• Got back to work after a two week stint of annual leave making me feel more miserable than ever. The news of redundancy back in November wasn’t a huge deal at first – although naturally I was still pissed – but now the reality of it all has set in. My current job ends on the 31st March 2011.

• Blue Monday was last week, y’know, the most depressing day of the year. It’s an equation that takes into account debt, weather (it’s been shitty), the time since Christmas, time since failing New Year Resolutions, low motivational levels and feeling of need to take action. I like to call mine a Blue Month, January has been bloody awful as a whole.

• I developed a Minecraft addiction, at one point I clocked up around ten hours in a single day. I’ve since sickened myself of this game after digging a 3 mile long tunnel in a few hours.

• Through the said addiction I failed my 70-272 MCDST exam. I didn’t put as much effort into study as I probably should have and I also attribute a fair amount of my failure to Microsoft’s crappy essay-length questions.

• I’ve managed to pre-order the Nintendo 3DS for £199.85 instead of the RRP of £230, which everywhere else is selling the unit for. Other shops are starting to drop their prices, I’m just keeping my fingers crossed that GAME will follow suit, as I have £20 worth of points that would knock the price down to £180 for me.

• I’m now studying for the 70-272, properly this time. I’ve kicked my Minecraft addiction and gaming is taking a back seat. I get to play Dead Space et al when I’ve been good.

• I’m losing chubb again, I’ve walked home from work three times in the last week.

I’m sure February will be a better month as a whole, it can’t get much worse than this so I shall try to be positive.

Another thing that made Monday a good day was the arrival of my new laptop. I had ordered it the Tuesday before and thanks to Amazon’s crappy estimate system it came late. It was supposed to arrive on Saturday – I even stayed in for it! *facepalm*

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