006: Costs And Investments

Remembering the first computer I bought: It was a Dell Inspiron 2600 laptop. I loved configuring and ordering that thing online. I loved pulling it out of my backpack. I loved assuming everyone was in awe as I hacked away at the keyboard (they weren’t).

I used that laptop all through undergrad and a bit into graduate school. I attempted to keep it going for a bit longer with added memory and a new hard drive.

It wasn’t meant to be.

After cleaning it up, I handed it over to my dad who ended up using it for another five or six years.

Why stroll down computer memory lane?

I was thinking about my recent move to Substack and how it mirrored my switch from PCs to Macs.

My PC era was great. I learned a lot about memory and motherboards and buses and a whole lot of things that are somewhat irrelevant in today’s world. From desktops to laptops to servers to email exchanges, tearing apart and rebuilding those machines was a great thrill.

Then it wasn’t.

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I wanted to focus on productivity and output. I cared less about building a powerful computer and instead focused on ease of use without tinkering.

Hello MacBook Pro.

Easy. Little hardware configuration. Focus on output was front and center.

(While I still do a lot of tinkering, it’s mostly software tinkering these days.)

My switch to Substack mirrored the above.

I felt I was doing too much tweaking without enough output.

If there are no Krispy Kremes in the home, I can’t eat them.

While Substack doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of other platforms, those bells and whistles are the Krispy Kremes: If they aren’t available, I can’t spend my time tweaking or configuring or changing them.

I can focus on the output.

Hello Substack.

(And hello The New Communicator.)

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