Religious Conversion

It was bound to happen someday. You can only resist the call for so long, and then *bang* you find yourself giving in to The Calling.
Long ago, there was a Mac IIcx making strange little noises in the cubicle next to mine. I managed to escape its call, instead following down the more well-worn path. My first computer was a Packard-Bell 386SX running at 16 MHz with a whopping 2MB of memory and 10 MB hard drive. It ran the brand-new MSDOS 5.0 operating system and cost almost $800. That was then.
This past weekend, I placed an order for a 12″ Apple iBook. It has a 1.2 GHz processor, and 80 GB hard drive, and 768 MB of memory.
My conversion was delayed by several years, but will soon be complete. I will be a Disciple of Steve.
Seriously, the decision to go Mac was not one I arrived at easily. After all, thirteen years of doing all my personal stuff on DOS/Windows is nothing to take lightly. The catalyst for the switch was the fact that my Windows-based notebook is starting to show its age, and I became tired of always having to tweak and/or rebuild my XP machines and/or worry about the latest spyware and viruses infecting my environment. I was also tired of the fact that every fourth time I plugged my iPod or PalmPilot into my XP machine, the computer crashed. I did a lot of test driving (thanks to Chris and Lisa for letting me get my hands on their machines) and decided to take the plunge into the Apple world.
(I will confess here that I spent many years as a UNIX systems administrator, and in the late 80s/early 90s I worked closely with NeXT systems, so I am not walking into this blindly.)
Since I’ve been in the Windows world for so long, I figured my blog would be a good place to talk about any issues I may run into as a recent convert. I don’t intend on getting all techy– I am approaching the Mac world as a true user, not an engineer. So watch this space for more adventures in the new operating environment.
The machine should show up in a few days. More to follow!

jtl