Wednesday, August 6, 2008

The ultimate controversy

I know that not everyone agrees with my opinion, and sometimes I come across as an extremist. I'm OK with that. I have strong beliefs and I stand for them. You can call it extreme if you want, but I don't know how else to live. If you have a belief and don't make a significant effort to live in accordance with that belief, what do you really stand for in life? ... Not much.

Saturday I made a change in my life. A change of views that I have held for decades. This isn't some minor change like going from Toasty Os to the name brand, because I really do like the taste better. This was a serious change of monumental proportions. I changed from a PC to a MacBook. I am in fact, typing this blog from a Mac instead of a PC, and I love it.

I want to give a little history here. I will admit, I had an Apple before. It was an Apple II C. I could play some raging games of 'The Oregon Trail' on it. It was an awesome game, until I figured out all that you had to do was name everyone in the party 'Nobody'. You're going along, not feeding anyone, fording rivers that are too deep and doing everything else possible to kill everyone off, and it keeps giving you updates that say, "Nobody died". Eventually your game would end when the final 'Nobody' in the party died, but it wasn't a huge loss, the game was pretty easy to win if you played conservatively. I think that's what made it so boring.

I eventually upgraded (maybe that's not the right word) to a Commodore 64. I wonder what the 64 stood for. Was that how many MB of ram it had? Anyway. The Commodore 64 came with a cache of games unparalleled in the modern world. Sure, they were all sort of lame, but I had lots of them. I bet I had over 200 disk, each disk had at least 5-10 games on each side. I would spend entire nights going through the collection of disks, finding new games that I had absolutely no idea how to play or that were absolutely no fun. I wonder what happened to my Commodore, it was a good computer. I think it was the only computer that I ever owned that didn't have word processing software on it. That made it a great computer for a kid who was trying to avoid homework.

Then I became a PC guy. I don't know why, but I did. It was entrenched in my. I only had one friend who went with Macs. We made fun of him. Sure, he was a great guy and I really like Kevin, but I could never figure out how to use his stupid computer and he kept saying it was 'user friendly'. So if the computer is 'user friendly' and easy to use, why could I not figure it out? That may have been Kevin's little way of calling all of us really stupid. Anyway, I made fun of lots of people who used Macs for a long time because they were obviously too simple for the likes of myself who spent all of his time asking people how to operate his PC. But the PC is more complicated, so of course I had to ask, but it's more powerful... Not that I ever use it for anything except writing papers and looking on the internet. Oh, and I play an occasional game of insaniquarium.

Saturday I bought a MacBook because I've heard they have fewer problems and we've had problems with our PCs. It seems like I've been living in fear of crashes and viruses. They happen and when they eat my dissertation I'm going to be mildly upset. So I decided to spend a little more and get the bottom of the line Mac. And incidentally, the Mugwump is using my old laptop for school. He started school at home Monday and is excelling. He's the brightest kid in the class, his teacher told me so.

So sorry Kevin for everything that I said about you and your computer behind your back, I was always a little jealous and insecure. I've moved into the light and things are so much brighter (like the monitor, it's 10 times the monitor on my PC). I'll show you all the cool things my Mac can do, as soon as I figure out how to work the thing.

Update: I figured it out. The problem wasn't me or the Mac, it was blogger who wasn't working temporarily. So here is the expression I usually had with my old PC:
And below is my expression when I got my new Mac:
And below is the look that I have most of the day as I pretend to think while working on my dissertation:

Oh, and the look when I get caught making faces in the camera on my new computer rather than writing my dissertation:

(OK, that's just her finger over the lens, maybe it's better that my expression wasn't caught.

5 comments:

Alyssa said...

great post! And I love the iPod I got out of the whole mac deal.

Bri-onic Man said...

Thought I should welcome you from my iPhone! :-)
Good work. We converted a couple months ago and love our iMac.

Anonymous said...

Commodore 64. 64 = 64K. Or about 0.05 Meg

Your IIc probably had no more than 32K.

Emily A. said...

Yay! I am happy you love your new MAC. A lot of people are converting over to MAC, and I can't say I blame them for bailing on the ridiculous Microsoft empire. When I build my next computer, I may go with Linux, which is a free operating system. I am really starting to abhor Microsoft and their Windows environment. I LOVE that Apple makes user friendly devices, while Microsoft tries to but can't duplicate the artistic simplicity. Woot!

Colin Madland said...

Welcome to the good side!