Being Grateful For What I Have

I hope those of you who read this blog on a regular basis don't get the wrong impression! Despite my various posts, my life is not one long series of new, ever cooler gadgets! A lot of it is just me trying to keep up with the fast pace of modern technological change and to do so without having to expend what I consider to be ridiculous money. In reality, I often sit in wonder at what my modest income has been able to afford me. 

My daily driver "workstation" is an "Ivy Bridge" generation i7 with a Crucial half-terabyte SSD and 32Gb of RAM along with 3 more terabytes of mass storage. All this goodness resides in the Cooler Master Cosmos II Ulber-Case and attached to 4 pretty nice Lenovo ThinkVision monitors which affords me enough desktop real estate to do pretty much whatever I want without having programs double up in space. I use it every day and have never been frustrated in not being able to do ANYTHING! It's pretty much perfectly suited for my needs. 

However, for me, my real prize is the ThinkPad X1. No it's not the later carbon fiber model. It's the original one built around the "Sandy Bridge" i5. Spec-wise, it's not all that impressive. The screen's 1366 x 768, 13" The CPU is of course 3 generations old now, and being "non-carbon" means that it's significantly heavier as well. However, there's hardly anything I don't love about it. It's thin and light in the real sense of those words. The screen is a nice size and low enough resolution for my aging eyes to be able to see well. The SSD, and 8Gb of RAM make it fully capable of everything that I use it to do. As soon I pry her old T500 out of my wife's fingers, it will get a 600Gb Intel 320 SSD in the 2.5" drive bay. Last night I cloned it's Crucial M4, 256Gb mSATA SSD onto a Crucial, 480Gb M500. While that was going on, it occurred to me that never in my wildest dreams did I ever think I'd be able to own a cutting edge design notebook computer with over a Terabyte of solid state storage in it!