American in Spain

Apple finally launched their iTunes Match service this week. If you don’t know what that is, I’ll explain briefly. In the eight years since Apple opened their iTunes Music Store, they have been amassing an enormous collection of digitized music that they have the legal right to sell. If you buy a song from them, and your computer crashes, you can redownload that song again whenever you like, since, rather than a physical medium like a CD, what you’ve bought is the right to have that digital file.
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Yesterday morning I had a video conference with Bangkok, as international men of mystery like myself do on Friday mornings. It was actually with my friend Jacob, who is there for a month on business and had his workday cancelled because of the heavy flooding Thailand is currently experiencing, so he was bored in his hotel suite and sent me an iMessage. When I initiated a FaceTime call with him, I realized as soon a I pressed the button to call him that there was no way it would work.
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Almost two years ago, I bought a Hackintosh: a normal Intel PC that can be converted to run Mac OS X, resulting in an $800 computer with the power of a $2400 Mac Pro. I can’t remember the last time I’ve been so pleased with a computer purchase, especially two years later. One important decision I made was to go with a Solid State Drive for the boot drive. The biggest bottleneck in common use of most modern personal computers is the hard drive access; processors are fast, memory is fast, but hard drives are slow. As if using an SSD wasn’t fast enough, I bought two of them and used RAID striping, a technique which splits the data evenly across both drives, so when I want to load a file, half of the file is read from one disk and half is read from another in parallel. As you might imagine, it’s pretty speedy.
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This weekend, we finally moved our old British refrigerator into Grandpa Ramón’s house (third floor, no elevator). It has been unplugged for three years, sitting in a corner of the covered area where my father-in-law keeps his chickens, so there’s a chance it might not work anymore. They say you have to keep fridges working or they can break. Of course, he’ll need to find a power adaptor first. The other thing in the pile next to the refrigerator was my old G5 box. We decided that we wouldn’t be needing it anymore. In retrospect, it was rather silly of us to bring from England, but whatever.
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