Today I became a proud owner of a new Mac Pro. (Listens for the hissing and booing) Yes, yes, I know many out there don’t like Mac for various reasons. They are not perfect, no, but neither is Windows. In any event these new Mac computers are pretty impressive. They all now run on Intel chips and with the upcoming Boot Camp you can dual boot to Windows. Though, for me personally that sorta feels dirty on such a nice machine.

For those interested in the specs this is what I got.

• 2x 2.66GHz Dual-Core Xeon 5100 Intel Processors (Quad-Core)
• 1.33GHz Frontside buses
• 2 Gigs of 667MHz DDR2 ECC FB-DIMMs
• Nvidia GeForce 7300 GT / 256MB GDDR2 SDRAM
• 160GB and 300GB 7200rpm SATA Drives

Right now I’m running on my dual 20inch Samsung LCDs. I hope to get a nice 23inch Cinema Display at some point.

So why a Mac you might be asking. What’s wrong with my old computer. Well this actually came about sorta by luck. My father runs a growing video production company. Growing to the point that he can’t handle all the work. I tried to do a sample video project on my PC and found that is was very slow. So we did some talking and the idea of getting a Mac came about as that is what he uses. Long story short I now have a Mac.

I’m no stranger to the Mac platform. In fact When I was just learning graphics back in the day it was first on a Mac. This was back when other companies could make a Mac. Later I went to PC for whatever reason I don’t remember. Then after college I got a Mac PowerBook, which blew my current PC away at the time. I then got a G4. Though, again for whatever reason I traded them in for a PC. I’ve had 3 PC’s since then and an iBook (white). In a way I’ve always had a Mac. So this is actually nothing new to me.

Now with a full suite of video editing tool I’m certainly getting more excited about the prospects of doing some kind of animation project as I mentioned in my last post.

~gp~

I’ve been working on a server move this month. My old dedicated host has become a pain to deal with. Since the hosting company does not maintain the machine software, and I’m no Linux master, I also had a management company work for me. These two have been costing me quite a bit. Not only that but there were a lot of communication bottlenecks. I’ve been with both for about 3 years. Recently I noticed that the management team was changing into more non-native English speakers, which only was increasing the communication problems. On top of that I was starting to greatly outgrow my dedicated machine. It was only a little Celeron box. Sites were going down regularly.

My only option was to either upgrade to a bigger more expensive machine or move. Due to the recent outages a friend of mine moved to a virtual host. Looking at their pricing and packages I decided it was time to move. I would be able to save more then half of the expense and work with one team instead of two. Granted it’s not a dedicated server, but with their highest package I’m actually getting more features then I had before.

We’ll see how it works out. I should be done moving all the sites (all 22 of them) before the end of the month.

~gp~