The Apple Story

No...this is not a story about The Apple, though that would have been fun.

This is a story about change. It's about taking a baby step towards the idea of acclimating to something new. Next year is going to bring a LOT of change. Might as well get used to small bits of it at a time.

As some of you may know, for a while now, my Dell laptop has been dying. It started off with a single green line down the length of the screen.

That line grew.

It grew and grew and grew until it became many lines, and not all of them green. It was very festive, really - just in time for everyone's holidays!

Then it started doing interesting things like going to sleep while I was in the middle of typing something. That wasn't very fun.

I knew I had to get a new laptop soon and I was sworn against getting a Mac. I was strictly a PC user - blah blah blah. Same old story, right?

Thing was - I realized that it just made the most logical sense to move away from the PC. For one thing, PCs are using Vista which has all sorts of problems. They're discontinuing it in a few months, but I don't have a few months to wait and I wasn't about to get a computer that wasn't going to work right. Second of all, when they discontinue Vista, they're going to start using Windows 7 which apparently is very similar to the way Macs look. So either way, I'd have to get used to the whole Mac set-up. So why not just get a Mac, then?

Why not, indeed.

And so I type this from...my very own Mac. It's a bit strange to get used to, but it's rather nice, really. I'm not afraid to experiment on computers so it didn't take me long to figure out the ropes around here. At least, enough of them to do basic things like write blog posts.

What was really cool was that after I set it all up, it somehow knew about my old Dell. Under "shared" on some window, it had the name Calcipher - which was what I had named my old computer (after some character in a book that I liked four years ago) - and then "inspirondell" - which is, of course, my old Inspiron.

How did it know?

Inspired, I decided to give this new computer a fun name too (don't worry, it actually asks you to name it, I didn't do it for no reason at all), and so I named it Hobbes - like in Calvin and Hobbes. I find I often say/think things that are very Calvin-ish, and occasionally I have conversations with people that end up being somewhat Calvin and Hobbes-esque, so I figured it was appropriate. Besides, if I had a computer that actually had personality, I'd probably want it to be somewhat like Hobbes.

Behold - my desktop!


My old desktop was similar - it was bright green with a Calvin and Hobbes strip in the middle.

...Was? I mean - is. After all, I do still have my old Dell. It's just...an old, worn out Dell that probably won't last too much longer.

Can you believe I'm writing this on a Mac?

The thing about Macs is that they're rather Lefty. I don't mind this. After all, I do random things Lefty, anyway, even though I'm technically a Rightie (weird, huh?). But the USB drives are on the left side. The headphones go in on the left. The CD drive is on the right. You even close screens on the left. Everything is the other way, sort of like a mirror image.

It really is rather odd to have a new computer. The screen is smaller. And glossier. The keys are more spread out. Or they seem like it, anyway.

It's like that squinched in your stomach kind of feel. Like you're somewhere new and sorta homesick. But so far, I really like this computer. And I like it even more now that I've named it Hobbes.