the following is a strait copy/paste from my message board

i'm broke and it sucks.

My xmas haul was nice but I'm going to sound all conceited and say that it wasn't nice enough, I got a cheap portable MP3 CD Player (thanks but it doesn't fit my needs) and a couple of DVDs (Chicago and Two Towers Extended) as well as a Borders gift card (I'm not sure what I want to get aside from the return of the king sound track.)

Since I didn't make a wish list for xmas I can't really complain. Since my birthday is coming up in a month I thought I'd get a list started.

*The primary thing that I want is just strait up cash. That will help me with my day-to-day living until I get a real job and or make my business a full time thing. (Don't forget I'm a full time collage student)

*Short of that, I want an iPod. Any size will work, the bigger the better, but any will work

*I also want iTunes Music Store gift certificates (or better an allowance! ) at the moment I have a $130 shopping cart and I can't afford to spend that much in 1 shot. I also don't want to clear my shopping cart as the iTunes Music store has no way of keeping track of what I'm interested in aside from the shopping card (boo! )

*The other thing I'd like is a larger hard drive for my TiBook. At least 40 GB, but preferably 80. The drive I have now is just feeling small and old.

*$500 earmarked for PowerBook repairs. Apple has a flat rate laptop repair program where you send them the laptop and a good chunk of money, and they'll in turn fix everything that is wrong with the computer. My TiBook's screen has some pixels that have gone out, and it's just getting plain annoying, I've got the nasty crack I mentioned a few months ago, and it appears that the backlight is starting to fail. If I was to do it myself, a new screen alone would set me back $1000 (probably more than the machine is worth! )

*A new notebook. Rather than the above 2 items, you could just replace my notebook. (3 or 4 people can coordinate and get it done) there are 2 units I'm looking at. The 1st is a 14" 1.25 GHz iBook G4 with an Airport card and AppleCare. That machine comes out to $1671 with the educational discount. Yes, I'd settle for a 1 GHz unit, and yes I require AppleCare! BlueTooth would be nice but I don't require it. The 2nd notebook I'm looking at is a 15" 1.25 GHz PowerBook G4 with a Combo Drive and AppleCare. That totals to $2358 on the Educational Discount. Again, I'd settle for a 1 GHz unit, and again I require AppleCare. BlueTooth and Airport are included. Both of those units have base Ram (2x128 and 2x256 MiB respectively) and I'd want to upgrade them to at least 1 GiB, after market.

I know I'm dreaming with this list, but if 3 or 4 people get together and finance a new computer, I could then turn around and sell my TiBook and add that money to my day to day fund.

I'll add things as I think of them.

i have added a new rant to my web site, Forgotten Newbies.com talking about my local movie houses being stupid with there rates. once it drops of the front page, it can be found here

ok, i've come to the conclustion that i need more ram and HD space.

my TiBook's HD is almost full, i probably have 500 MB free on the entire drive ("nobody will ever need more then 720 KB" - Bill Gates) and my RAM just doesn't cut it for the software i always run. both IE and Entourage (yes i know, i'm using MS software) have memory leeks, the longer i leave them open, the more RAM they gobble up! my script to add my curretnly playing music to my email signiture, also gobbles up more RAM the longer i leave it open. (that is sad because it is a AppleScript) needless to say 384 MB just isn't enough! (see quote above)

to make matters worse, if i don't perioticly quit/relaunch IE/Entourage, i start swaping to disk. that starts eating up my HD space and before i know it i have a diolaug box complaining about not enough HD space to use VM! AHHHHHH!!!!

the worst part is, for some reason Mac OS X doesn't seem to clear up it's swap space (is it like that for linux too?) once it's made a 80 MB swap file, it won't un make it! even if i quit every program i have running, it doesn't unmake he swap files. and there is no way in hell i'm going to sudo rm any of those swap files, i'm sure i'd kernal panic on the spot ;)

so, like i said, i need more RAM, and i need more HD space. :-\

Edit 4/27/03
wow, i posted this on the 1 year (or was it 2 year?) aniversory of Mac OS X and didn't even realize it! anyway the reason for this edit... in january, i upgraded my TiBook to 1 GB of RAM and it now runs much much better. i also got yet another hard drive for my tower and put lots of 1 GB partitions on it. i'm too tired to explain why i did all the partitions though...