Happiness Is a Warm Puppy and Hot Hardware

Today's post comes to you from my hot new computer. After months of near-terminal gadget lust from installing and setting up my friend Susannah's MacBook, plus shameless urging from Greg and a bunch of my fellow Mac-head girlfriends, I finally broke down and invested in one of those 17-inch stainless-steel beauties for myself.

But Karen, you ask, don't you already have multiple computers? Yes, I do. Current operating population (not counting Greg's laptop or any of the hardware not currently in use) includes my Toshiba laptop, a work-issued Gateway workstation that dual-boots XP and Linux, and a SunBlade 100 that runs Solaris. Somewhere on an Airborne truck is a new machine issued from work, a SunRay 170 (the iMac of Sun hardware, with an all-in-one design). If you saw my desk, you'd either burst out laughing or flee in terror. I'd advise both.

All those machines are okay, and I like them well enough -- but they aren't Macs. Greg is a confirmed Mac user who kept wishing he had a PC until he bought a new Mac laptop with OS X. I was a long-time Macomaniac who had to abandon the platform because the tools I needed for work ran only on Windows, Linux, and Solaris. All but two of the old computers around this house are Macs, and I'd always wanted another one.

After spending the better part of a week at a conference for work where all of the academics worked on hot new MacBook Pros, I couldn't take the pressure any longer. I broke down, availed myself of the employee discount, and sat whining by the front door until the nice FedEx guy delivered my new baby.

Ah, but it's good to be back home again. This is the first OS X machine I've ever had, and I'm overjoyed to see that it, like its predecessors, Just Works. If I'm feeling frisky, I can even open up a UNIX shell and play command-line pilot to my shrunken little heart's content. The truly sweet thing about the new Intel-based Macs is that they can run Windows XP as well. I downloaded the BootCamp utility, set up my Windows partition, and can dual-boot into XP if I should ever feel the need.

I'm still working out a few logistical problems with my byzantine network setup and I haven't yet figured out whether I can successfully migrate my files and settings from a PC to the Windows partition on a Mac, but I'm working on it. It's just plain great to be back using a machine that's more than just okay.

Freakin' sweeeeeet.