A Man on A Planet

Unlike my unfortunate counter parts who cut themselves literally, I occasionally find it useful to figuratively incise myself. For the majority of this semester I’ve been churning my techno-lust toward the buttery notion of purchasing and using the newest Macbook Air. You might think of it as a Pokemon that I desire to capture and train (install applications).

My techno-lust increased when I finally found myself exploring the $1.99 Wolfram|Alpha iOS app that I purchased last June (2010). Of course I played (using dates and population densities i.e. http://j.mp/hAj6WY and http://j.mp/fAHifo) with it when I bought it but, I had no idea how useful I’d find it once classes started.

This particular incision is related to the fact that sometime after the midpoint of last summer, a department moved to the university where I work from the university that I’d attend that coming fall. Due to working as a PC Field-technician, I was assigned to assist the department in there transition on the side of their new home (someone from their prior location assisted with moving them out of their old home). During one of the migrations, I noticed that their previous home used Citrix to make webapps of certain software packages. Since I was equipped with an active user id for this university, I decided that I’d attempt to gain access to something on their Citrix server. *drool* They had Mathematica listed as an available application. I found myself excited due to hearing of the product in the past and having the Wolfram|Alpha app for iOS. Unfortunately, I hadn’t used it at that point and found no great use for it at the time. Being the goldfish that I am, I soon forgot about the application.

During my first semester, I found out that Wolfram|Alpha had then recently been released for the Android OS (my phone). Of course, I spent the $1.99 to get the app. My current total spent on Wolfram products is now $3.98. At this point, I began digging into the app quite a bit more than I had on iOS… mostly due to my forgetting that the app was there. Oddly, after getting the Android version, I began regularly using both versions. As time proceeded, I found the app satisfying both my academic and trivia interests to a great degree.

Another thing that occurred during last semester was that we finally began hiring student workers in office. One of them happens to be a beast in his awareness of intellectual material. One day for some reason we had a discussion about the release of Mathematica 8. By the way, he’s a freshmen (I know Masters students who haven’t heard of the product).

Anyway, due to all of these things happening, I have little excuse for not remembering that Mathematica 7 was available to me for free. *sigh*

Just before I started writing this post, I sat down and started the tutorials. I’m pretty impressed. I think that it is safe to say that I’ll be a lifetime user after graduation. Still, I do want to have a local installation. I am usually near an internet connection but, I want to be able to have access to the tools wherever I am. At $139, to spend or not to spend?