Eris is a PowerBook G4 who seems to have become my main computer. She belonged to Ratha initially, and that's where she got her name. While Ratha and I were living together, I bemoaned the fact that Eris seemed so neglected—Ratha had two other laptops, a little IBM ThinkPad named Felix on which she ran Linux and a massive Sager named Agora, and had bought Eris mainly “to have a Mac for testing”, so she tended to slip through the cracks. I gradually ended up adopting her (she participated in a rescue mission for Robert's hard drive, among other things), and after I had been helping Ratha with Thisishappening for about a month, Ratha agreed to give me Eris as payment, in lieu of a fee. Much more sentimental, anyway.
Eris runs Mac OS X 10.3.5 at the moment. She has a 1GHz processor, 512M of RAM, and a 60G hard drive (which is badly underutilized right now). I found a program that can make Capslock an additional Control on the Mac, among other things, but it's slightly flaky. The screen is 1280x854 (slightly widescreen), which should be nice for watching DVDs, should I ever get around to doing that.
Actually, a lot of Eris' faculties are underused at the moment, but that's mostly because I just don't need to do those things right now. She's a nice piece of hardware though—light (5 pounds or so), large screen, good battery life, built-in wireless, a little less common-looking than an iBook (although I suppose the lack of distinctive appearance is the one complaint I'd have). People comment pretty often on the Electric Sheep screensaver.
The main programs I use are Terminal.app, Mail.app, Safari, iChat and Stickies. (On Windows I generally used Notepad to fulfill the role that is now filled by Stickies. Stickies are much better.)
Eris seems to have kind of a split personality—she seems fairly innocent based on her hardware, and Ratha has said that her favorite color is probably white, but her namesake is the goddess of Chaos. The phonetic similarity to Aeris is interesting, though.
Kenn Hamm
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Last modified: Sun Aug 29 10:55:30 2004