HERE I AM AGAIN....

Maybe some day I'll get better at posting more often. With three blogs, it's hard to do any one of them justice. There's so much going on right now, that I think I'm getting ready to have a BOD or a SBBD (for you windoze users, that's Blue Screen of Death, for the Mac user's, it's the Spinning Beach Ball of Death). There aren't that many sightings of the SBBD for us Mac users, but occasionally, it happens. At least I don't have to waste three hours a week doing virus and spybot checks. I had to do it for my PC's the other day and was astonished at the number of different things it has to look for. I'm glad the only thing I'm running on the PC is FireFox and Photoshop Elements 5. My hubby runs Quickbooks and Office occasionally on the desktop unit. The whole virus thing is such a non-issue for Mac users and has been for eons. Even in the OS 9 days, viruses were few and far between.

I must say I am LOVING my MacBook Pro 17" Wide-Screen. The glow-in-the-dark keyboard is totally kicker. Oh, it's fast too. Like that is an afterthought. I had to bite the bullet and upgrade to CS3. Adobe CS2 ran like a dog on the Intel chip. CS3 purrs like a kitten. Hate the new icons though. Somebody at Adobe lost their imagination. I think they went to work for Oracle. When I worked there, you could have a complete conversation that looked like text messaging. Alphabet soup. Acronyms Anonymous would have been a great self-help group to debrief ex-employees working in high-tech. No more WISE, CRM, SQL, VM, SME's, TTT, T3, CCM, SPM, blah blah blah. Now Adobe is all Ps, Ai, Id, Fl, Dw, Br, Ac, Pr, Ae, etc. Of course, Microshaft does them one better. No second letter, just one. W, X, P, E (Entourage for you Windoze people). If Mac had Access, it would be A. We have FileMaker Pro instead, FM. Then there is Apple. It is all about I. iMovie, iDVD, iTunes, iWeb, iWork, iPod, iPhone, iMac, iBook and eventually you get to iPoor. Of course I LOVE all the OS X iterations, they are all cats. Puma, Panther, Jaguar, Tiger, Leopard, Lion, Cougar, Bengal (OK, a Tiger or a bad football team), Housecat, Fluffy, Mr. Sniffy...you realize I'm making up the ones past Leopard. No insider info here. At least they are tangible things of strength. Windoze? XP. Extra Poor, Cross Purposes, Cross People. And Vista? What's that? (As all the PeeCee IT people are still asking themselves.) Such a vague term for a piece of software that is still behind the Mac OS X by several iterations. An OS X wannabe. Been there, done that, wrote the OS about it five years ago. Where ya been there, Bill? Hello!

Remember, the name of this blog IS MACSncats. So today is a Mac day. I just love it when some PeeCee owner tries to blow smoke about how much better a PeeCee is than a Mac and how a Mac isn't a business machine. I just love poppin' the hood on my little beauty and blowing their doors off. Speed wise, design-wise, usability-wise, support-wise (no techie hubby for me, don't need one for a Mac—actually I don't need one at all, but that's another story), application-wise, best of all, fun-wise. Do you EVER hear a PeeCee owner say, "I LOVE my PC!"? And who said the Mac isn't a gaming machine? Come on dudes, get your head out of your floppy slot and check out the list of top notch games ported to the Mac these days. AE just released Madden NFL '08, Tiger Woods PGA Tour '08, Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars, Harry Potter and the Order of the Pheonix, Need For Speed Carbon, and Battlefield 2142, six of it's hottest titles. Finally, consider this, can you run both Mac OS X AND XP/Vista on the SAME computer? Nay, I say, only on an Intel-based Mac. Two ways too. Boot into it, or install Parallels and run both simultaneously. I'm all over THAT!

Of course PeeCee users whine about how Macs are more expensive than PCs. Let me postulate this. I'm still using, with current OS and current software, a Mac G4 AGP that I purchased new in 1999. Count it folks, that's an 8 year old computer. I've made some upgrades, a daughter card to speed it up, some RAM, larger hard drive, DVD-R/CD-R (it had Wireless). How many PeeCee's, let's say a stock Dell machine off the shelf 9 years ago. Anyone still running current software and using it daily as a production machine (not just to surf the net)? Now that is a good investment. PeeCee's are throw-aways. You buy it with the knowledge you are going to have to replace it in two years, at the longest, to keep current with hardware and software. Not so with a Mac. Besides, if you bought a PC comparable with a Mac, speed for speed, feature for feature, oh yeah, you can't, because you are still running an antiquated OS. Sucks to be you! OK, I am admittedly PC bashing. I have to do that every once in a while because I do occasionally get tired of the smug PC people talking about how much better their computer is when they have NEVER EVEN USED A MAC! How can you say something is better if you haven't used the other? You know why PC users won't try a Mac? They're afraid they'll LIKE it. They'll be taken in by how EASY it is to use. That you can walk into Panera Bread, boot your Mac and it automatically finds the wireless network and asks you if you want to join it. No plowing through the Control Panel to set up to a different network. Sigh. You just don't know what you're missing. BTW, Office came out on a Mac first. I was using Word and Excel in 1986. You don't realize how unproductive you are on a PC compared to a Mac. How many man-hours you lose to virus issues and toubleshooting. How shallow you use your programs (i.e., you don't use most of the features of the software you do use). It's not fun to work on your PC. The Mac is FUN and it is also ALL Business too. You CAN have BOTH! No need to feel guilty having fun on your computer while you are "working". Mac users do it every day. And don't bash on me about loving my Mac. I've built three PC's and I train people on PCs and PC software. I've walked on both sides of the street. I've had jobs where my only work computer was a PC (ah, those old Oracle days...). So I DO know what I am talking about. I troubleshoot, to a limited extent, other user's PCs. So I'm not a part of the PC ignoranti. But I do live in Missouri, the Show-Me state, so if any of you would like a demo, just swing by Springfield and I will be priviledged to show you the way to iHappiness.