Thanks to Apple, the Learning Commons was seeded with a shiney new TiBook for CAREO development. I've adopted it, replacing the older PB G4/400 that I had been using. What a difference. Wow. Really.
This thing has a speedy 1GHz G4, half a gig of RAM, 60GB hard drive, and a built in Superdrive (CD-R, DVD-R combo drive). Holy crap, that's just plain nice. Before, I'd have to lug out a big, bulky external firewire CD-R drive to do my weekly backups (I use .Mac Backup every Friday morning to back up ~/Documents, Mail, Preferences, and a few other things). Now, I just insert the blank disk into the slot on the front of the machine... Nice. I just did a quick backup of some other stuff, and it struck me how elegant that really is.
Oh, and having access to a 64MB Radeon-class video card means Quarts Extreme works GREAT on the TiBook! YAY! The entire UI is so much zippier.
Anyway, thanks again, Apple. Of course, when you want it back, you're going to have to pry it from my cold, dead hands... ;-)