Laptop widower
I have a confession to make: I'm sharing a laptop and it's driving me up the wall.
I've had my PowerBook G4 for nigh on two years now, and it's pretty much become an extension of my body. I do 98 percent of my work on it, even though I'm not a road warrior in any sense of the word. But I really enjoy the household mobility it brings: Wireless networking and wireless phones mean that I can work from any corner of the house I wish, from the master bedroom to the family room to the kitchen to the living room.
In fact, I very rarely spend any substantive time in my office, as the piles of papers, boxes and unswept cobwebs can readily attest.
In the evenings, Bonnie and I like to relax with our favorite shows, and this season, there's been a veritable embarassment of riches in network and cable television programming. It seems like there's something on worth watching almost every night of the week, and on the rare night there isn't, I've got more than 30 percent of my DVR's hard drive space spoken for -- not to mention a steady stream of DVDs from Netflix and the local libraries to choose from.
So we spend almost every night after putting the kids to bed in front of the living room set, and it's been my custom for years to sit down with my laptop as we do.
Some time ago I realized that I was spending more time paying attention to the laptop than I was to what was on or what Bonnie was saying, so I'd park it with the power cord plugged in and try to be attentive.
Bonnie took this, I think, as a sign that I was done with the the PowerBook, so she's gotten into the the habit of signing herself in (I set up a separate account that she gets to through Fast User Switching) and visiting the Web sites she likes to go to on a regular basis.
Now, Bonnie has her own desktop Mac -- It's a "lampshade"-style iMac with 1GB of RAM, not a shabby system at all. But it's in the family room.
So almost every night now, I find myself without a laptop, and a jones to do some late-night work or catch up on some research, or just to have IMDB open so I can see whether that actress that I'm watching on Dark Kingdom was the same one in that episode of The Sopranos that I remember.
And I can't. Because I'm sharing a laptop.
Last night I told Bonnie that when her iMac is finally due for replacement, I'm not going to buy another desktop machine.
I'm pretty sure this is a practical example of why so many consumers have been getting laptops over the past couple of years. If nothing else, it reduces marital strife.
Oh by the way, I'm writing this from my desktop machine in my office.