¡Muchisimas Gracias A Todos!

Remember when having a computer in your house was totally SF? The first computer I encountered was in 1973 when I worked for this start-up company in Santa Clara, CA, with the funny name of Intel. I worked in the stock room and worked my way up to the Shipping/Receiving dock. They had these big rooms full of machines with big honking tape reels and something that reminded me of the teletype machine over which my dad would receive news reports when he was Program Director at KSAB-AM on Okinawa. Years later, I worked at a company named Telesensory Systems, Inc., in Palo Alto. I worked my way up from the Shipping/Receiving dock to the position of Expeditor and then Junior Buyer. We had this computer system with monochromatic monitors in which we entered data. This is about the time I met Matty Boy, game designer and Popular Vocalist. He bought one of the first Macintosh computers. My uncle and cousins were working at Apple then, too.

My first home computer was an Apple II I found abandoned in a storeroom at St. Francis Church in San Jose sometime in the late 1980's. Father Eck was very kind and let me take it home. It looked like this:

It had a monochromatic monitor (green, of course!), two 5.25 floppy disc drives, and a Daisy Wheel printer. It was noisy and interesting and my first home computer.

Then, in 1992, I came into a little money when my Godfather, Uncle Red, went on to glory and it turned out that I was the sole beneficiary of his life insurance program. So I called my Uncle Bob who worked at Apple and bought my first Macintosh computer. It was totally advanced, with a colour monitor and 18 mbs of RAM and a huge 250 megabyte hard drive. Whoohoo! I also discovered this internet thang with listserves. I even tried to telecommute. That didn't work well, but I wrote all my essays for my B.S. at SFU on that thing, using the Daisy Wheel printer. It looked like this:

My daughter, Anne, took it with her to Emerson College in Boston and was laughed out of the dormitory!

While at seminary in 1994, we went crazy and purchased an Apple Performa. It had a 750 mb hard drive. My cousin, Diana, who was working at Apple asked me if I could wait until June and they would be producing a 1 gigabyte hard drive. I said, "Why would anyone need anything that big?" and bought the Performa. It came with us to Panama (so did the Mac) and I wrote my Master's thesis The Establishment of the Standards of the Book of Common Prayer on it (hello! HELLO! Are you still awake?). It looked like this:

I moved it to my office at the church after we visited the U.S.A. in 2002 and purchased one of those new-fangled iMacs. It was blue, and had a 5 GB hard drive. We wuz State of the Art! Combined with our dial-up modem, we wuz invincible. It looked like this (just in case you forgot what they looked like):

I upped the RAM and even advanced to the new-fangled O/S X, a mysterious operating system which was super cool. Meanwhile, the Performa wasn't cutting it. My sister, Melanie, was visiting us and purchased an eMac for me at the brand new Mac Store here in Panama City. It was super cool, with its 40 GB hard drive and Intel processors. It replaced my Performa at the oficina en Parroquia San Cristóbal, where it is still in residence (but driving me crazy). It looks like this:

Then, one day in 2005, the iMac died. We went to the new MacStore here in Panama and encountered the Macmini. I was worried about the price, but purchased it on faith. At the same time I purchased it, using our Missionary Account, someone deposited an equal amount in the Missionary Account! So we decided that We Were Meant To Have The Macmini. It was pretty cool: 1.25 ghz PowerPC processor, 40 GB hard drive, super-cool flat-screen VGA monitor. We loved it, especially since it could travel with us. It looked like this:

However, as you all know, it has had it problems in 2009, and, even with a new hard drive, went to the Great Computer Store in the Sky this month.

So, yesterday, we went to the Mac Store on Calle 70 en San Francisco en Ciudad de Panamá  and purchased as new Mac mini as a result of your generosity. Now, David, I DID talk to them about the VGA to DVI adaptor, and the sales person assured me that the one I had would work, but, when we got home, we discovered that it didn't. So we were unable to use the new computer until today, when we purchased the proper adapter. So, now we have THIS:

2. GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 3 MB shared 1.2 cache. 2 GB DDR3 SDRAM, 320 GB hard drive, and SUPER DRIVE. AND Leopard 10.5.6. So "thank you" to everyone, and I am spending the evening getting to know this thang.

I'm figuring that Red Mr. Peanut Bank and Gallito Mescalito and friends will have a Super Special Hallowe'en Thang tomorrow.
Speaking of said holiday, why do all the wankers Newscasters on CNN and Other Channels keep saying that today is "Hallowe'en Eve"? WTF does that mean: "All Hallows Eve Eve?" Sheesh!