Mac Mini Purchase + Neighbours + Mower Woes

After a lot of researching, I finally went ahead and purchased a Mac Mini to act as my media center…or in the land of acronyms…my HTPC (home theater personal computer). If you have seen my setup at my house currently, you know that I have my Xbox running as my media center. The problem works like a dream when it comes to non-HD content. But the time is getting closer to when we’ll be picking up a big screen TV…I am waited with baited breath. I wonder what the term means?

Oh! Here’s an interesting point. It’s not ‘baited’ breath, but ‘bated’ breath! Upon further research, here’s some links that are interesting to read if you want to know what the phrase means. Neat!

http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-bai1.htm
http://www.darrenbarefoot.com/archives/2004/04/waiting-with-bated-breath.html

Back to technology talk…the Mac Mini was the chosen victor amongst a number of candidates…the big runner-up was the PlayStation 3. But the fact that I don’t play video games kind of left a bad taste in my mouth with purchasing that device. But one may wonder “Didn’t you have an Xbox as well?” Touché.

Anyhow, on a whim, I went down to the Rideau Center with Nat at lunchtime to pick it up. I had a few weeks left before my student card expired and that would save me $50.

I got there and chatted with the guy at the Apple Store (who was excellent help) and we got things going. Then all of a sudden he says “So do you want the free iPod touch with this purchase?” My eyes shone like the sun but then he realized that I was only eligible for the free printer. Basically I pay $100 up front and get a mail-in rebate of $100. Easy money! We don’t exactly need a printer considering we got a sweet one for Christmas (this was the first time I have benefited from a Christmas gift that was given to Vero and not me! Sweet!) but I took it anyhow thinking I could either give it away or sell it someone.

Funny enough, this sucker was quite huge and I had to haul it back onto the bus to work with me. I was sitting there thinking “What am I going to do with this thing? Bring it home?” As I was pondering this, I showed it to my colleague Andrea and she said she needed a new one, so $90 later, it was hers. Things worked out perfectly!

In the end, if I were to purchase the Mac Mini, outright with no discounts, I probably wouldn’t have. It’s quite an expensive device to use primarily for a HTPC. There are many other great alternatives such as the PS3, the WD-Live device, or a PC with Windows Home Media Center (or something like that) installed into it.

But I was lucky enough to have a few discounts coming my way…I had a gift card for $250, a $50 student rebate and I suppose I can consider the $90 for the printer as going towards the Mac Mini. So in the end the thing cost me $359 which ain’t too shabby.

I plugged it in last night after getting some house work done. My favourite house chore last night was watering the garden only to have a thunderstorm come through an hour later. Woops? Vero and I also went next door to welcome the new neighbours to the area with a bottle of wine. They seemed like nice people and I was jealous of his ride-on lawnmower.

Speaking about lawnmowers, my lawn is a haven for gnomes to hide inside so I was happy when Vero showed up with the lawnmower back from the shop today. It was leaking gas before and we figured it was this cracked primer button. I assembled it and put some gas in it and voila! It worked! But then I noticed it was still leaking gas! What the heck? We were not impressed with this small engine repair shop and will be calling them back up saying “So when you say it’s fixed, what does that actually mean?”

We also met another neighbour down the street who was the first house built on the street 20+ years ago! They said that their sister ended up moving across from them and their brother next to them! That is fantastic. I believe they said they had since moved on, but that must have been great while growing up with a bunch of cousins all on the same street. They were laughing at the fact that young folks like us are moving in now and the neighbourhood will be running around with kids again. Real nice people.

Clearly this Mac Mini discussion has taken a turn away from proper discussion. Vero and I hooked up the Mac Mini and I really enjoyed how it had a migration assistant which would copy my settings from my Time Machine backup. That was quite slick of them. I was in the middle of updating some software when the power went out because of the thunderstorm. I decided not to boot back up right away in case the power went out again so I’ll have to restart the process again tonight.