Category: LiveJournal

I just shut my Power Mac G5 down for what will likely be the last time, after nearly six years of flawless operation.

I realise it’s just a computer, but I’m a bit wistful at the moment. I ordered it the day the quad-core machines were announced, and it arrived on the 17th of November in 2005. It’s been my computer through rather a lot of changes in my life… from the mundane like Apple moving from Frenchs Forest to the city, to Lily being born (and all the drama and psycho-ness from her mother, ugh), to the best thing that’s ever happened to me: falling madly in love with my beautiful kungfupolarbear, proposing, and getting married. 🙂

I used the hell out of the computer through that whole time, and never once did it skip a beat. Farewell, G5.

I was sitting at my desk at work, and saw a tweet that seriously caused my heart to skip a beat… “Apple says Steve Jobs has died”. And it was true. I know it sounds trite and ridiculous for someone who was the CEO of a multi-billion dollar international company, but I honestly teared up, and am still in disbelief.

It’s no exaggeration to say that my life would be totally different without Steve Jobs and Apple. We had a second-hand Apple ][e that my uncle gave us, and I spent many an hour playing Wavy Navy. My dad used to bring home his old SE/30 from work and I’d have great fun mucking around in MacPaint and just generally learning how to use it. We always bought Apple machines, even during the mid-90s when just about everyone else had abandoned them. I was the sole Mac user for pretty much the whole of my school career, and was frequently laughed at for it. Now I look around on the train on the way to work and just about everyone has an iPhone, and there’s plenty of Mac laptops as well. How things change.

I ended up getting a job at Apple in 2003, and worked there for six and a half years until our whole call centre was made redundant. I’m not at all bitter, because it worked out brilliantly, I love my current job and wouldn’t have gotten it without having had the job at Apple to begin with.

I can’t even imagine how life would have turned out if not for Steve and Apple.

RIP, Steve. We’ll miss you.

Last weekend was (mostly) rather excellent!

Friday night we went to our regular favourite Chinese restaurant, New Shanghai, in Chatswood, with gypocalypse and his girlfriend, and another friend @wobster. The food was excellent as always, and afterwards we went up to San Churro. HOLY CRAP. I’ve never had hot chocolate quite like that. It was more like the consistency of pudding!

On Saturday night we went over to gypocalypse‘s for a bad movie night, which featured glorious 80s action cheese in the form of Commando and Escape from New York. Well, Commando was glorious, Escape from New York was just booooooring.

Sunday night, was mum and dad’s for dinner, and hanging out with them and my sister and her fiancé. That was lots of fun, as we get along really well, and my sister’s fiancé is a really nice, laid-back, funny guy. Her previous boyfriend was a pretty useless idiot, so we’re really happy she’s found someone nice.

And lastly, not that it’s part of the weekend, but last night we went to see Dylan Moran at the State Theatre. We’ve seen his standup before, and it’s brilliant, and the show last night absolutely did not disappoint in any way. My entire face hurt from laughing so much.

In less good news, right as we were sitting down to dinner on Friday I got a call from my dad saying that my grandma (the only grandparent I have left, and she’s turning 87 this year) had been admitted to hospital with blood pressure of 210/80. 🙁 Thankfully since then we’ve found out that she’s stabilised and is doing a lot better, and she might be getting fitted with a Pacemaker, depending on what the surgeons think.

And now, to bed! Phew.