The New G5: Day One

Oh mah lordy, the G5 came today (the wife was home, fortunately, when FedEx turned up). I had requested free 5-day ground delivery, and it only took two days to get here, so I saved some money there.
First: It’s huge and heavy. My G3 looks like an embarrassed cousin next to it, and I felt a bit sad to let the old thing go after its years of service. But remember all the bad things it wouldn’t let you do, I told myself, much like a bereft guy thinks when he starts to long for and romanticize his ex-girlfriend.
I had to go into Virtual PC and grab some files I wouldn’t be getting again, then I shut down the G3 and went through the G5 startup. It plays Royksopp’s “Eple” when you startup the first time–a nice touch. In a few minutes it was ready to go. I had a quick look around. Ooh! Garage Band! Ooh! Graphic Converter pre-installed? Ooh! Quick Books! Ooh!
I shut down and opened the side panel to have a good look inside. I wanted to transfer my two old drives’ worth of stuff over and thought I could just plug ’em in to the secondary drive bay. Oops! Nope–I would learn later that I have IDE drives and these are ATA. Shit.
I backed up my main G3 drive, then, to my LaCie drive after starting up the G3 again. The desktop picture was one of a heartbroken girl crying and playing records, which seemed to suit the mood.
I also discovered that my PCI card (Firewire card with three inputs) doesn’t work in the G5–they take a different kind. I wasn’t even going to try the memory–I have a feeling that ain’t gonna work either.
My only complaint so far–only two Firewire 400 ports kinda sucks. I don’t like to chain too much, and at the moment I have one snaking around the front to the port there.
Installed some essential stuff: Office X (which I bought about two years ago when Jessica was at CalPoly expressly for this moment), BBEdit Lite, Firefox. Spent an hour or two transferring my OS9 mailboxes to Entourage X and figuring out how to easily import all my old bookmarks into Firefox (cut and paste the HTML using BBEdit). Realized feeling at home is directly related to having my Inbox and Bookmarks near me.
Got the desktop looking like my old one and I shall be modifying some more. Computer nice and quiet…
Talked to Mom, who is ready to toss out her iMac–maybe the G3 won’t be going too far then…