Rest in Peace, Old Mac

Well, it's finally happened. My trusty old iBook has been set aside and replaced. It didn't die in a horrible crash of unutterable proportions, but simply got old, as few computers get to do. Old, slow, cranky, but thankfully never wrinkly.

RIP: August 2001 - January 2008

The new computer's on-board camera

takes a picture of the old,

now shut down, its sleep light no longer glowing. 

Goodbye and Hello. 

That old iBook and I have seen a lot together. It's been my trusted technological companion since August of 2001, a few months after Mac OSX and the new, square, white iBooks came out. It saw during its 7.5 years of service:

• an upgraded hard drive, from 10 to 40 gigs
  
• new memory added
  
• an airport/wireless card added
  
• a new keyboard (after the cats kindly removed the 'E' key)
  
• an external screen when its own became dim
  
• a new battery after the old one failed to charge

It helped me through many projects, fun times, and transitions:

• 1 close call in which I nearly left the Mac universe (I've been a Mac user for as long as I've used computers) for the PC universe, and this Mac kept me so securely in the fold that now I can't imagine using anything else
  
• 1 master's program and over half of a PhD
  
• 2 autumns of PhD applications
  
• seemingly countless term papers and their associated documents
  
• 1 breakup (one which was a very good thing, too)
  
• 1 wonderful spouse (really and truly: way back when he first met me, Coffeeboy was impressed that I had an iBook and that it was running beta software. He figured I must have been a fellow geek of some sort). 
  
• 1 year of wedding planning
  
• 44716 emails stored in Eudora, now successfully and safely transferred to Apple's Mail program
  
• 5 homes in 3 different states
  
• all the photos for a knitting blog, slowly, slowly opening up in iPhoto, and slowly loading in Flickr
  
• innumerable history files in my web browser for knitting patterns and yarn
• the beginnings of a dissertation, and its very many documentary demands

You almost never crashed, old friend. You never lost my data. (I have all my emails going back to 1996, freshman year of college, for example. That's almost an insane amount of memory and data). You would have kept on trucking along, maybe at 15 mph instead of 60, if I had let you.  You got me through a good majority of the previous decade of my life, and I can only hope that my new computer proves to be as excellent a machine as you were, that it can assist me through whatever comes next with just as much ease and style!