A record of my life as a reader, writer, and father (not necessarily in that order).

I’m back. I’ve got a new laptop: a 13” MacBook Pro 13. My third Mac in a row. Here are my old Macs and iPods, a Museum of dead Mac Products, if you will.

The iBook and the MacBook each lasted for around five years. (I tend to use things as long as possible. I have an Epson printer/scanner that’s six years old.) The iPods both had their hard drives replaced by me at some point, extending their lives by a year or two. I now have a year-old  iPod Nano. Yeah, I’m kind of hooked on Macs. Though my phone is an Android phone.

The new Mac was my Christmas present. It was an unexpected large expense, though. I was hoping to get one more year out of my old MacBook. I had thought about hictio’s persuasive advice for a Linux laptop. Honestly, for my needs (writing, email, blogging, playing music) I could easily get by with a Linux laptop. The problem is that a large chunk of my music collection is tied to iTunes and my writing files are done using Mariner Write, an excellent word processor with a very small footprint, but which uses a proprietary format.

As far as pictures, there are some passable photo storage programs for Linux. Other than cropping, I don’t use much, if any, of the functionality of iPhoto. So as happy and content as I am with my new very fast, shiny sleek MacBook, I’m making long-term plans to make my content a bit less platform-dependent.

In the short-term, I’m running again. Short distances for now, taking it slow as I work my way back up to where I was before my ankle started bothering me. So far I’ve been able to run without pain.

I also created a new page, China 2012, accessible at the top of the blog. The page contains links to every post I did about my family’s trip to China last summer. That should make it easier for those of you who are new to my blog and want to read about that big adventure.

I hope you all had a wonderful holiday, whichever faith you do (or don’t) belong to, and I wish you a very happy and prosperous New Year.