Chris and Sarah’s blog

My wife bought me a MacBook Pro! It’s a fun little machine, I’ve named it Demeter after the Greek Goddess. I’m writing this blog entry on my new laptop as an excuse to use it for something. I’m paying more mind to appreciating the feel of the machine at my fingertips than I am to the content of this post, so please excuse my rambling. I’m still learning how to get around in OS X, but I’m getting the hang of it. Expose is as much fun as I always thought — not really much more efficient than alt-tabbing through windows, but more fun.

At first, the fact that Sarah went right out and bought me this machine scared me and upset me more than a little — she dropped 2000 bucks on it without consulting me first, plus she bought a computer without letting me check it out, and she bought it off of eBay. Granted, she had her reasons. She was getting it for me and she wanted it to be a surprise and the price was good, but still … I make software, I think I should be consulted about ALL computer purchases in my household. The truth is that if Sarah had come to me for approval before buying this wonderful thing, I probably would have said no. The price would have scared me off, plus I wouldn’t have bought it on eBay — I’d have wanted to buy it new, straight from Apple, which would have jacked the price up a lot. However, now that I’m using it, and getting to know it, I’m very grateful that she bought it for me. We got a SquareTrade warranty for it, so if anything goes wrong, we’ll be covered. All in all, it was a good buy, and it is a great machine. My wife is the best. Still, next time ask first, honey? Thanks.

Mmmmm … Apple. All the power of Unix under the hood, none of the headaches of Windows (viruses, spyware, trojans, eventual unexplainable sluggishness that gets attributed to “entropy” and can only be cured by reinstalling …), and a slick UI to boot. None of the Mac-vs-PC commercials tout the power of Unix that OS X has by way of its Darwin ancestry (and the GNU tools that it comes with, and that are readily available through fink). They should have that Mac-guy mention that sometime. It’d help remind the nerd-zealots in the audience that Macs are not just good for Mom and Dad, that they’re good for anybody. I’ve been fielding a greater than average number of random tech-support questions from family lately. The next time one comes in, I’m going to espouse the virtues of Mac instead of Linux for a change. Well, maybe I’ll espouse them both. Ha-haw, espouse!