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iMac

So after having spend a number of months with my MacBook Air and the wonderful mixture of unix, foss, and a very pretty GUI, coupled with the extra cash I have from working 40hours/week this summer (http://beaversource.oregonstate.edu Now with more social and project integration!), I decided to get an iMac. At first I was looking at the Mac Pro, but the cost is pretty high, and I'd still be using my old monitor, while not being able to use a lot of my old hardware (Mac Pro only use ECC ram for example). The iMac I got is the lower end 24" (lower end is relative to Apple only making stuff with 1gb+ of ram and a Core 2 Duo at the very least) but I upgraded the video card to the Nvidia 8800 (a sight improvement over my former 8600) since it has Linux compatibility in case I decide to dual boot. I got the thing on Friday, and after a weekend with it, i can say I'm quite happy with my decision. Its very responsive, and obscenely big screen (as big as my TV) and I've got MacPorts coreutils installed, so my cd, ls, rm, mv, etc are all GNU and my ls has color (BSD ls doesn't have color). There are still some kinks to work out, but that's no different than any newly formatting system.
Some of the very cool extra benefits of having a Mac with a nice video card is that both WoW and SporeCC play *really* well. I've been playing WoW using Recruit-A-Friend as well, and that has made it quite a bit of fun. I've included a link below to a slideshow of most of my level screenshots (I have a mod to screenshot everytime I level, but didn't install it until I was a few levels in) and I'm getting about a level an hour even through my 30's as long as I'm focused on leveling. There is even one of getting a level in ~15min as a result of a mutual friend running us through Stockades.

RAF leveling slide showimage #2image #3image #4image #5image #6image #7image #8image #9image #10image #11image #12image #13image #14image #15image #16image #17image #18image #19image #20image #21image #22image #23image #24image #25image #26

Along with the slideshow, I also wanted to include one of the creatures I made in SporeCC. He's kinda angry looking, but its one of the ones I'm quite proud of. His name is Scklip.