Oooh. Shiny.

Happy early Birthday and Christmas to me! As my Twitter followers know (thank you for not dropping me during the saga), for the last week I've been expecting a package.

It finally arrived in Vancouver, after an epic journey from Shanghai, through Anchorage, the city of Ontario in California, and Seattle. Even though I bad-mouthed UPS's tracking system (which due to weird intermediate data updates made it look like my package bounced around between Fredericton, NB, Shanghai and Richmond, BC a few times), the box arrived a day earlier than advertised.

When its video output began glitching extensively, I limped along my old laptop for 14 months. For the last 4 of those months, it would only boot in Safe Mode, leaving me without audio and significant application performance lag. I loved my PowerBook, and I drove it into the ground. To be on the safe side, in June I bought a $100 used iBook, just to get me through the summer and the cash flow deficiencies generated by renovation expenses. Said iBook has 1/3 of my old hard drive space, displays YouTube video at about 3 frames per second, and, for a writer, exhibits the useful and productivity-enhancing trait of a cursor that randomly jumps three lines forward or backward in the text if one types too fast.

Some may be disappointed to learn that "The Shiny" is simply a new MacBook Pro. Some may think that I got overly excited over a measly piece of hardware. I don't care. I am full of squee. We can all use more squee in our lives.

But it's not the aluminum unibody that makes it truly shiny, or the high-res anti-glare screen, or the fact that I can now video chat when I never could before, or that I can now finally do some iPhone/iPad code development (yes, SG, I *will* finally get to that evil timer we discussed). Or even that the keyboard doesn't contain a poltergeist.

Nope, what makes it shiny is that I will write my next book on it.

- "This little light of mine, I'm gonna make it shine..."