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.

Technology

I had this great idea for today's Blog having to do with some experiences last night, but they are going to have to wait until tomorrow. I got to school this morning and turned on my computer as usual. It opened up fine, but instead of seeing my family, I saw a stock background and most of the icons on my computer were gone.

That was a little weird, but I continued to try and check my email as I usually do in the mornings and found that all of my Internet settings were gone. That means that I can't even get to one of my accounts and I had to work to get to the others. No big deal, but it's really weird. Then I thought, I hope that all my files are still there. I went down to the start menu and scrolled up the "recent documents" heading. The little pop-out think simply said, "empty".

That is when I began to get a little stressed. Let's recap what was going through my mind. First, I have done about 20 hours of work on a research project that i don't have saved anywhere else. Sure I probably have about 40 hours to go and the data is all still online, but I really don't want to have to redo the first third of that project. Then I thought of all of the classes that I've taken in the last two years of college; the course notes that I have saved, the assignments, presentations, research... It's all on this computer and nowhere else. After those thoughts I was very stressed. (You should all be proud, I didn't say any bad words... at least not out loud).

I took a little time and looked around in different places. "My documents" was empty except for what usually comes with a new computer. I still had all of my programs, even those that I've added fairly recently, but not a single file that I had generated. I checked the C drive. Nothing was there. So I unplugged the computer and took it to the techs on the other side of the building.

He started looking through the places where I had already looked. He didn't find it and i wasn't surprised. He then looked at the hard drive (you know the little pie graph of how much memory you have used and free). I said I thought it looked about like normal. He then asked if I had any music on my computer. I said that I did, but not a whole lot. He said that the amount of used space was not enough to store much music. I had gone to this guy to save my day, but things were not looking good. He then started snooping around in the hard drive and a few files later he found one labeled "desktop" and it contained everything that had previously been on my desktop. He then hit the mother load with another file that contained all of my precious work for the last two years.

So evidently while I was sleeping last night, my computer spontaneously moved everything from where it belongs to one file that can only be accessed a certain way. I have it all back now and I can rearrange it on my computer (except my favorites from the Internet, that is totally gone and I'm upset because I don't remember all of the stuff that was on there and I had some good links on there). So when is the last time you backed up your hard drive? I think today is a good day to do that. In fact, I have already put everything important on my jump drive.

And the link to simplicity... Isn't technology supposed to simplify our lives? I have absolutely no desire to file all of my documents on paper in a filing cabinet, but it bothers me how upset I was about losing information. Is that what is really important in life? (I'll give you a hint, the answer is NO). Sure it represents work and time, but it's not that big of a deal. Losing my family... That would be a big deal and i frankly don't think I could handle that, but a computer or a file is just a little stuff.

So that is why i am trying to simplify my life. I want to get back to what is important, my family. I also want to make positive contributions to the world around me and for that reason I am receiving more education and working to promote sustainable development and healthy living. But when it really comes down to it, the most important thing to me is my family and my beliefs, nothing else really has any substantial value.