New Toys

Meet "Diagnostic Kit". Diagnostic Kit is my new friend. Yes, that is right... I now feel even more like a fake doctor. This year we start PD (physical diagnosis) and with that comes the requirement to buy a diagnostic kit. The picture above is what I have... We have the handy dandy lithium powered handle, the otoscope (to look in ears, noses, and mouths) and the coaxial ophthalmoscope head to look in eyes (one setting even has a target). Can we say play time!? Along with this little kit there are 2 tuning forks (that are just incredibly fun to make vibrate), a pen light, a tape measure, and a reflex hammer (watch out for your knees and arms my friends).
YAY! The only bad thing about this new toy is the price.... yikes.

And another soon to be new toy:

That's right... I'm buying the new MacBook... most likely this afternoon. Why? A few reasons. Firstly, I LOVE my current Mac and really feel like I'm betraying it, but I think its time to upgrade. Let me explain the dilemna of the last month.

1.) Trying to upgrade to Leopard.
Leopard is the new operating system, and I've been meaning to upgrade for awhile. However, upon consulting a friend I realized that I was almost maxing out my current memory. In order to upgrade I needed to back up everything on an external hard drive (which I had to buy) and then do a clean install. This isn't such a big issue cause I've been meaning to get an external hard drive for awhile.
To put the memory issue in perspective, by iPhone has 100 MORE GBs than my computer. How sad is that?! iPhone= 160GB, Mackey = 60 GB. Can we say, wow?! And it's only like 2 1/2 years old... that's how much more awesome the Macs have gotten in the last few years. The current MacBooks have 160 and 250G minimums.

2.) Starting to run parallels.
There's only one real reason that I need to run parallel (allows you to run windows on your Mac), and that's SCHOOL. Kinda a big deal. You see, our school video streams all of our lectures, however, they put them in windows media player. This isn't that huge of a problem, cause there's a program called Flip4Mac that allows you to run them through quicktime. The problem arises from the fact that you have to completely download a lecture (taking 30 minutes to an hour) before you can stream it at anything other than 1x (I've been perferring 2x with recent lecturers).
Problems with running parallels began when I realized I only had a 1 GHz processor, and you need 2 to run parallels.

Upgrades took place and it was working fine until yesterday when Mackey decided that it didn't like parallels anymore. Basically, even after moving almost ALL my files over to my external hard drive, making just a few new ones completely finished off the remaining space in my very small memory. I know only have 4 documents + music on my computer but cannot use parallels. BOOO. This happened yesterday afternoon.

Upon my friend telling me it was time to buy a new computer (something I almost did a few weeks ago), I told her I was going to limp Mackey along until the new MacBooks came out. Low and behold... by the time I got home the new ones had been released! Divine intervention!?! Maybe.

Anyways, this afternoon I'm making another trip to the Apple store to get my new Mac! (I went this morning, but they hadn't gotten their shipment yet). And hopefully a new printer with it, which I'm in desparate need of!

Who can say EXCITED for new toys!??!?

Hopefully I can get Uncle Sam to increase my loans to help cover part of it.... Hmm. Because between a new computer and my diagnostic kit my bank account might start screaming at me.