D15c0v3r3d L05T

Yeah, and I hate l33t 5p34k.

Coldstone Ice cream makes me want to hurl. I think Acura makes the junkiest cars on earth. GigaPixel Photography is not cool. Hopefully you realize at this point I’m kidding… just a little teaser. I just wonder how much of the time we intentionally enter into a situation that can only result in disagreement and bad feelings. I mean, people do that to each other because it’s kinda fun to fight and bicker… but with a large successful company? Not so much.

I recently read a post from a consultant that worked in my office last year. Mike’s post is a scathing review of his experience with his Apple MacBook Pro. While I read his post my thoughts drifted back to conversations I’d had with Mike and his highly opinionated/immovable discourses on right and wrong user interfaces. Being an extremely opinionated/immovable personality myself, these conversations were a lot of fun. Mike is more highly educated and much more academic in his interests than myself though. I do remember sympathetically feeling the buyer’s remorse that he had about the MacBook and frustration over the fact that he had dropped/damaged it one day before he could return it, thus giving up any hope of returning or lucratively reselling the laptop. Most of our conversations gravitated around differences in opinion about Windows features and interface. I remember repeating almost et nauseum “the Mac is just different, it’s a choice you make as to whether you want Windows or Mac.” Mike seems to literally hate his experience with the Mac and amazingly has only great things to recant over history with his Dell computer. I think it’s a shame that he has had such a rough go of the Apple experience. I’m afraid Mike has been tainted forever and he appears to actually have developed a level of hatred for Apple even though a single event that Mike needs to assume full responsibility for (the perilous dropping of his MacBook) really resulted in his inability to just back out of the Apple journey he embarked on. I chuckle with acerbic pleasure the mental playback of Steve Jobs recent press release where he says “Apple wants it’s users to be happy” and imagine Mike shouting from the audience “I’m not happy Steve!” Poetic license in my little daydream would be Steve replying “Sorry Mike, but I can’t help that you dropped your laptop.” Perfect ending… Steve shrugs and tosses a MacBook bumper to Mike. Enough of that, all in good (harmless) humor. As I perused Mike’s post and some other news blogs that flame Apple for it’s disregard for the norm I could not help but type out a few lines.

Different from Mike’s background with Windows is my saga leading to Apple’s OS and hardware. I had grown weary of Microsoft’s Windows offerings many years ago. Be assured that I’m not targeting the OS as my only frustration with my Windows experience. In all the years I used MS Windows there were far too many late nights and weekends spent trying to hammer out why something went wrong. As a developer who plays with a lot of fun stuff like languages, servers, and other “toys” I could never keep a Windows computer running right for over 6 months. Despite the egregious offenses by Microsoft and software vendors of the programs I run on Windows I still respect those individuals who love Windows. Microsoft’s world class workstations didn’t become popular because they are trash. I’m no fanboy of any single Operating System and I believe we all have different ways we prefer to work and play. Although my experience has been great on the Mac I would never drive a person to the Mac under some pretense that life is guaranteed to be better on the other side. I often times am asked by friends whether they should buy a Mac or a PC and quite often I tell them to just stick with a Windows PC. Typically I find that people won’t truly appreciate the hardware and interface differences between a cheap PC and a Mac. With just a few questions like “what do you do with your computer” and “what is your favorite program” I can determine whether a person would be able to make the jump and not experience buyer’s remorse. When a person really feels like making the leap then I coach them through the “hard” changes they would have coming their way, otherwise I just let the sheep graze in their old stomping grounds.

I moved to linux for some freedom, and boy did I get it. There’s a ton of distributions, open source code, builds, makes, and dependencies… checking dependencies… maybe twice.;) I began wandering as an innocent sheep amongst hardened wolves… but freely INDEPENDENT! Typically I could run about anything on my linux computer without trashing something else. I installed Java, Tomcat, Jboss, ruby, rails, groovy, grails, jekyll and a ton of other products and everything ran just fine. (unless of course I decided to upgrade the kernel.) I had resolved to only visit Windows when absolutely necessary and that “necessary” interlude with my WinXP computer ended up only being for Lotus Notes development. My linux distribution of choice is openSuSe Linux, although Ubuntu is also very appealing for their desktop advances. I really had reached a point in linux where I felt the freedom of being to do whatever I wanted, with whatever tool I wanted, in confidence that my ThinkPad would not be compromised by any one program or application I was running. Gone were the days of spending 199 - 299 dollars for an operating system on every computer I built. I was now living a double life between Windows and Linux but for the most part was a happy camper. Gone was the guilt that I had locked myself into OEM versions of Windows on my clone computers when in reality the OEM license is a luxury provided only to Microsoft System Builders for resale computers. (regardless of what egghead.com or your best friend IT guy might say.) My ultimate observation that licensing for Windows OS software and vendor software installed to run on Windows is restrictive, cryptic, daunting, and for the most part became a vexing point for me. The breaking point of my relationship with the windows world and it’s vendors happened late in 2007 when I was trying to capture hundreds of hours in digital home video using best of breed Pinnacle Digital Studio.

Life was good for me as a developer on linux until a co-worker put his used MacBook Pro up for sale. I snatched it up since the price was right at 1K and the machine was fully loaded. I was willing to try the MacBook on the unhindered successes I had been seeing in the designers and engineers I worked with. Apple’s Intel MacBooks seemed to have sparked a lot of excitement in general and I decided to give it a go. Looking back, the thing I most despised on my new Mac was the trackpad. I had become religiously fond of my ThinkPad’s accu-point device, but I gave Apple’s implementation of a trackpad fair opportunity and it won me over with wonderful gesture features. After Passing the hurdle of pointing device hatred I settled into my MacBook very easily. I like the command window interface as much if not more than the konsole in linux, and spotlight pretty much made me fall in love with the Mac because I no longer have to “click through” the program list or hunt down the right quick start icon for a program. With spotlight as my best friend I hid my program dock because I almost never need it. After cashing in on MUPromo and MacHeist bundles my Mac was pretty much set up for anything I needed to do.

A good deal on the MacBook Pro and some quick hits on bundled software from MUPromo and MacHeist gave me a great start on the best year of computing I’ve ever had.