My parents were in town over the weekend for the ADAA Art Show over at the Armory on Park Ave. (My dad is more than a little interested in art, as you might expect.) While I enjoyed wandering around the enormous show and admiring very expensive pieces I will never buy, I found something else even more entertaining: the choice of laptops used at all the gallery booths.

Of course, MacBooks and Macbooks Pro were extremely popular – nothing surprising there. But what did surprise me was how many black MacBooks there were. I have never paid much serious attention to the black MacBook; after all, you’re paying an extra $200 for nothing but a slightly bigger hard drive and a paint job. I acknowledge that there are probably people for whom that drive bump makes all the difference. It’s just something that I would never buy, much like I would never have bought an iPod Mini. But I guess that extra $200 is nothing when you’re selling million dollar paintings, because I don’t think I saw a single regular MacBook at the show that wasn’t black.

Also very popular was the Sony VAIO, which I saw probably as often as the black MacBook and slightly less often than various configurations of MacBook Pro. And a few PowerBook hold-outs, particularly in the 12 inch model (which is of course still prevalent outside the art nerd world as well). Beyond that, only a handful of notebooks from neither Apple nor Sony, and I don’t think I saw any booths with no laptops at all.

Overall, a subtly different collection than you’d get among the average group of non-art nerds and wildly different from the average population, I suspect. Oh – and the art was good, too.

So last week was a moderately eventful one for me. Most significantly, I started work at a new company on Tuesday after switching jobs recently. Why? The usual reasons, I think — bigger company, more benefits, higher salary, and most importantly, work that I think will challenge me in the right way. As those of you who’ve followed this site for a while already know, I generally don’t discuss work here, so this is probably the last you’ll hear of it. But feel free to take this opportunity to recommend amazing lunch places in Chelsea.

Last week was also Valentine’s Day, of course. Chris and I celebrated in our usual way — which is to say, we mostly ignored it, being not so much fans of going out in Manhattan on holidays. Interestingly, we both bought each other new notebooks. Mine is covered in fantastical monsters and came with roses, his features a monkey and came with a zombie card. (Yes, of course they’re both from Etsy. Where else would I find a valentine on the topic of zombie euthanasia?) All in all, a satisfying day completely free of last year’s 1800flowers.com nightmare.

And the third noteworthy event last week was that this site turned nine years old on the fifteenth. I am pretty sure that means it’s over the hill in Internets years; maybe I can use that to excuse the infrequency of my posts. And consider the usual regrets about missing the first year of archives appropriately expressed. Incidentally, this also means that this time next winter the site will be an entire gorram decade old, which is more than a little terrifying. I suppose terror cupcakes will be in order.