Sobriety can hit you hard sometimes

In the midst of trying to rebuild my music collection which I lost, I tried to play some of the AAC files that I had ripped from my CDs. I couldn't do it without things getting so choppy that it was a total wash. I quickly loaded KSysGuard, which is the equivalent of the Windows Task Manager, and then I was greeted with an ugly truth: my Linux desktop made Windows look like a Heroin-addicted anorexic girl dabbling in bulimia with respect to memory use. About 1GB of RAM used up while running a full desktop (KDE 3.5.6), a media player (Amarok), a fresh instance of Firefox and some inconsequential server apps like Apache and MySQL. Now, that's not that big of a deal because I boosted my laptop to 2GB of RAM.

I must confess that I am sorely tempted to switch my laptop back to Windows on utilitarian grounds. I enjoy Linux; at heart I converted from Windows to a Unix user about 9 years ago when I started dabbling with Linux at 15. That is why I am now firmly convinced that my next laptop absolutely must be a MacBook Pro. It is the only way that I can have my Unix and have a usable desktop that is written by one large software engineering team that has a common vision for how things should work.

So, in the mean time I think I will stay with Linux because it meets most of my needs, and is still usable. It's just that I am starting to yearn more and more for the days that I ran OS X exclusively in college and before that, when I could escape to BeOS (the closest thing to utopia, desktop computing has ever known). It's starting to grate on me because I use a computer so much at home. It's like being forced to drive the average American car because you can't go Japanese; it works, but you know it should be better, but can't do anything about that; I consider my 2007 Honda Civic Coupe to be the finest mechanical creation I have ever owned if that tells you anything.

I think that what is driving me nuts about this is that I am a developer, a code monkey (who would have thought from my blog) and a software engineer in training. You can ask Rachel, and she will tell you that I spend too much time hacking away at my laptop doing things from jerryrigging a work around to get Mono to build from subversion, to writing my own Java code for accessing the XML-RPC framework that Movable Type uses. The problems is, my time is running out, and my cash is getting even shorter because I have bigger expenses on the horizon... a house in Loudon County or Warrenton maybe? Car payments on a Honda Civic and an Acura RSX Type-S. Some medical stuff that needs to be done in the next year. I may have to pay my way through grad school. Doesn't leave a lot of room for making stupid, dumbass decisions on buying computer hardware. I need to get it right. My next laptop may also be my last one until it dies.

And "it" is not my interest in the laptop. So, I bide my time. I wait, patiently for the next generation of multicore laptop CPUs to hit the market. In the mean time, I cry and die a little inside as I realize that one fucking codec (AAC) is making me look askance at my Linux desktop even more than realizing my Linux desktop is sucking down RAM like a fat kid in a Coca Cola plant. When you have a 1.6Ghz Pentium M laptop with 2GB of RAM choke over a bloody AAC file that iTunes could handle easily on a far less powerful Mac, you'll understand. You'll also realize that those aren't warts you're seeing on the face of your computer, but pox marks with Clearasil on them.

Time to grab my iPod Nano and go take a stroll around the complex.