A word or two about Macs

A great friend of mine, Sharon, who I seem to only hang with when there's a book festival or a Journey/Billy Idol and other Rock ManSluts concert to go to, is deciding what laptop to buy. Since I believe everything is connected in some karmic, Buddhist way, this blog will teeter back and forth from being a plea to her and everyone else (sans gamers, the haters and the uncool) to get a Mac and an ode to Mac-ness in general.

Actually, I don't know much about my Mac. And that's why I love it. I don't need to know much. 98% of all problems can be easily solved by the lay person. It's user-friendly. So user friendly that I believe it is the ideal computing machine for all people like me. And by that I mean people who have the computing skills that I do (Grandmas, soccer moms, small to medium sized children, etc.)

For instance, last night, Mi Chica Graciela and I finally saw each other on AIM and tried out iChat with our built-in webcam thingys. It took forever actually because everything worked fine except that she couldn't hear me. After much much ado, I thought maybe we should just restart our programs. And it worked!!! I find that anytime something isn't working very well on a Mac, you can usually just restart the program (not the entire system) and all is well. I wish I could press restart on certain moments in life. Like last week when I spilled a $15 glass of chard on a customer. But that's neither her nor there. Except that I really can't get the incident out of my day-mares. Maybe this will help. . .



I have no shame. . . . Anywho, we webcam-ed for like an hour or something. It was soooo fun, but webcams really need getting used to. It's kind of wierd at first. I didn't get the amateur porn vibe or anything, just that wierdness of live video. I felt like I always had to be entertaining. I kept showing her the unexciting stuff in the room, like the bottle of hot sauce on my table, and my dog, who didn't get it. Or I'd make faces. And wave. (Am I really turning 26 next next month?) Then she wanted to share music, and do funny dances, for which I was totally down cuz it seemed like pretty standard webcam activity, but even though she was with me in many ways, it felt wierd dancing in front of my laptop to the latest Justin Timberlake club jam, even though i really love his dance songs. Oh man, the moment we got it to work, Gracie just LOLed for like 5 minutes straight, and I started bouncing and dancing on my couch. It's just so fun, and just plain crazy to experience.

Gosh, I digress. Geez. Anyways. Back to my MacBook, which my friend says to name Mac-galing. It's the tagalog word for, uh, like, something that works well, or something that is cool. Hard to translate. You can say it instead of Bravo. . . . So, there's so many things to say really. I'm writing on a Sticky note, its a simple note program but you can basically use it to write whatever you want. I guess it isn't Word, but I wasn't about to spend $80 on the Office upgrade when I don't need excel and all that other stuff. I find Stickies perfect. You can color code and you don't have to toggle between docs, they literally look like Post-its on your screen. You never have to hit save or anything. And if I ever have to make a pamphlets or anything, well, I could always hack InDesign, my fav design program.

There's those other Mac things like widgets, but I hear you can get those on PCs too now. Expose is a Mac thing too, and whatever they call that cool function that happens when you press F11.

Spotlight is the "Search" function that is really much better in design and function than it's counterpart on Windows. So is the Finder, which I guess is similar to Windows Explorer. But also looks better, and works better. I can honestly say that most things on a Mac not only look better, but work better. Which helps to reduce typical computer rage to about 4% of what I usually experienced on PCs.

Hater you call me? I don't hate, I appreciate. Apple puts out alot of good product. I never said perfect and I never will. I know they're pricey and I know that "Mac people" are usually obnoxious, but that's ok because things are changing. The thing is that Macs are expensive but the thing is they're worth it, like all good investments in good products. Someone thought about all the little things so that even though you pay more, you really do get more.