Julio Santos

I’m taking 5 minutes away from the mac, to tell yall how it’s going…but then I’m going back!

When I decided to upgrade my first computer,

I came across the first in a long series of forks in the road. Apple or IBM PC-XT? At the time, the apples looked too much like the Commodore 64 I already had, and the XT seemed way more hackable (no I didn’t think about it for too long - I just listened to my gut, that’s all). So I went with the XT.

For the longest time, PCs had the right level of hackability to me. About a decade later, Linux was great but mostly for people who liked to code by moving magnets close to the disk (I hear it’s better now). Macs were for people who didn’t like to code.

PCs seemed to provide just the right level of hacking satisfaction - and I could afford one.

Okay, enough with this apologizing.

For the past few years, the mac combination of pretty and power has been very tempting. I couldn’t resist no more and finally got me one of those things!

(click the image for more)

At first, after the excitement of running Finder, and iChat and ls -lisa, I thought I was going to hate it. None of my key shortcuts that I’ve known for so long, seemed to work. ctrl-c doesn’t copy, and ctrl-v doesn’t paste.

The most frustrating thing was the installer. After downloading and double-clicking the file, it shows this huge dialog with a very simple message:

Drag this big-huge icon to this big-huge location (or something like that).

Well, I couldn’t see it. Clearly no install will have be that easy, so why are they lying to me, telling me that all I have to do is drag this icon? Why they don’t tell me how to actually install this app?

Well, I guess I’ll try what they’re suggesting, since no one is watching. I know it won’t work, and I won’t mention it when it will obviously do nothing.

Drag…drop…

Whoa! It did work!

So anyway, I’m starting to get the hang of it. Enough that I’m hooked. Speaking of being hooked, time to play with it some more.

One of these days I’ll compare the Thinkpad and the Macbook Pro side by side, just for extra fun.