macabre0

It all started in 1991. I moved to Seattle to enroll in the University of Washington and became friends with a guy named Brian Stone. Best friends, in fact. We were both pretty geeky and we spent a fair amount of time online "talking" with people and playing computer games. At least once a week we had that age-old argument....Mac vs. PC. He argued for the great strides Macs had over the PC and I argued about how I couldn't buy games and software that I used for the Mac. It was a limited platform, keeping me from doing stuff I wanted to do, and on top of that they cost...oh...a heck of a lot more. I was baffled by his undying Macintosh devotion. He was flabbergasted by my "stick to my guns" attitude towards PCs.

Somewhere mid-summer 2000 I acquired some additional new friends. These friends, one of them eventually my husband, were also Mac proponents. At least one of them worked for Microsoft on Mac programming. Background chatter about Macs followed me throughout my life, and the sight of that white apple symbol started to become more common. I resisted. After all, Macs still didn't offer me the stuff I needed. I can't run Adobe Captivate on it, I couldn't run Word or Excel on it. Regardless of how good the Mac version of those files were, they were incompatible for me with the world of business and academics I lived in.

Then, a few years ago, the cornerstone of my argument crumbled when Apple announced it was partnering with Intel to create Macs that had the ability to dual boot into both the Mac OS AND Windows. My resistance to Macs decreased, but didn't completely crumble in the face of this announcement. Still, rumors of various friends of mine switching over to Mac from their PCs started surfacing, and over the past year or so I have consistently heard nothing but raving from people who made the plunge after 15 or 20, even 25 years of using PCs.

So two days ago I joined the throngs of people switching over to the Mac world. I am now the owner of a shiny white MacBook. Barring the fact that I don't yet have Office for the Mac (a friend is getting it from the company store this week hopefully), it seems to have most of the stuff I would need for a computer. The interface poses some amount of frustration when, say, I want to switch between various windows I have open in Safari, but overall the transition has been easier than I expected it to be. I have a long history of causing Matt's Macs to crash just by looking at them, so the fact that this machine has been running more then 24 hours without a death requiem is a pretty good sign.

My old laptop is in the shop under warranty to fix a small power-related issue, and then it goes to Leya for future use. It has been a good friend for the past three years while I wandered the long path of grad school, and now it will go into the hands of someone who will love and appreciate it as much as I did, I think.

So, Mac users out there, are there special tips you want to give me on using this thing? Special quirks you love about the Mac that I might not pick up on in my time playing around with it or from Matt?