Entry for July 08, 2008

"Konna ni takakattakke?"

Was it always this expensive?

Today's phrase is brought to you by the subprime loan induced investment fund money induced rise in oil and food prices and the things I purchased to upgrade the old iMac so that it would be compatible with iPod Touch.

The non-geeks reading this will find their eyes crossing. The geeks will have their eyes crossing at my sheer ignorance.

I bought the iMac, the kind that looks like a white LCD monitor stuck into a scoop of vanilla ice cream, sometime in 2003. Until recently, it was running OS 10.3. I didn't think there was anything wrong with it, save that iPhoto was rather slow. I could surf the net, read and write mail, play CDs, save them on iTunes, write Word documents and work out Power Point presentations.

(Oh, and I could blog, too.)

Then the Pumpkin Daddy announced that he would like an iPod. Not just any iPod, but iPod Touch. Preferably with 16GB or more.

His birthday was coming up, and it seemed a good a thing as any to get for a tall handsome man who swiffs floors and does laundry and dishes without being asked. So I did research, and discovered that the iPod Touch was only compatible with OS 10.4 or later. So I did research, and discovered that my iMac, which was running on only 256MB of RAM, was not going to be able to deal with 0S 10.5.

So I bought a new memory card online. And it went in without too much trouble, and the iMac ran so much faster than it did. Particularly iPhoto. So I though it would be able to handle OS 10.5 and bought that too, at the Apple Store Then I found that I couldn't get it to load. Apparently, the DVD player had broken, and I hadn't realized it. Since I bought the iMac in 2003, any warranty it had was void. Repairs would cost 4,9500 yen ($462 or thereabouts at the current exchange rate of 107 yen to the dollar). Um, no. So I did more research and found a DVD unit with FireWire, and bought that online. And then I bought a USB hard disk online for data backup purposes. I managed to install OS 10.5 with the new DVD unit.

So I was all pleased with myself and I decided I would blog my success, along with pictures of my ripening tomatos and the wonderful thing the Pumpkin Daddy has done for my morning glories. Then I discovered that iPhoto didn't want to start. So I did some research...my current version of iPhoto is not compatible with the new OS.

I can't live without iPhoto. I have all the pictures of the Pumpkin Princess since her conception there. So I will bite the bullet and buy the new version at the Apple Store.

I've bought a new memory card, a DVD unit, and OS 10.5. I am doomed to buy the new version of iPhoto. All together, they cost more than the 8GB iPod Touch.

This has got to be the most expensive birthday present the Pumpkin Daddy has ever received...and I haven't even bought the iPod yet.