This is random but fun. For a few months now I have had the thought of getting an old laptop or something from Craigslist to be a non-internet-connected writing tool. BECAUSE FACEBOOK IS SO DANG DISTRACTING. I know, a little discipline goes a long way.

So does a little whimsy. I just finished reading Steve Jobs’ biography by Walter Isaacson. It’s amazingly written and brilliant history of Jobs and also Apple. I realized while reading it that I grew up with them. As I blogged earlier, my parents bought our first Apple when I was 3 and I have never looked back. Apple product launches were big deals. I was in high school when everyone started using Napster and in college when everyone started carrying their mp3s around on iPods. Then we all started buying from iTunes. Then we started reading magazines on iPads. We’re transitioning to keeping all our files in the iCloud. Big cultural changes from this computer company.

Reading about the design process of these products was fascinating, and I have a lot of respect for Jobs and how he settled for nothing but perfection. He could be a jerk, but he had a vision, and he pushed people to reach it. The design of the first iMac G3, those colorful desktops, was especially fascinating. We had them in my high school computer lab; I always thought they were cool. They were a big deal because they looked like no other computer that had existed up until then, and they were the first Apple desktop priced under $2,000.

I had a wild hair to see what they were going for on Craigslist, and before I know it this little blueberry desktop was in my possession for…$50. Crazy. It has word processing on it and needs nothing else. Runs like a champ, and the OS is surprisingly fast for it being a 15 year old machine.

Old school.

I’m hoping it will lend itself to many an uninterrupted brainstorming/writing session. If I can channel a little Jobs brilliance through it, that wouldn’t hurt either. The only person to have a screaming fit at will be me, though, so I had better be nice to myself.

New school.