Malbela.com

further proof of my whoredom.

So… it was bound to happen. I must officially out myself as a wannabe mac user.

Really, it was bound to happen one day.

It all started that day I walked into the office at the paper and there was that larger blue thing sitting on the desk. Much like the apes in 2001, I felt the need to throw things at this bizarre strangely colored object sitting in my way.

Little did I know what would happen.

The Apple IIe. Big. Beige. Able to pick up WBTV if you had rabbit ears.

The last time I’d used an Apple product, it’d been an Apple IIe. Strangely enough, the thing I used the IIe for was to play games made by Microsoft. Does anyone else remember them? They had a huge collections of what amounted to a Game magazine. Plastic cases with a couple of 5 inch discs of games with glorious 4 color graphics (Heavy on Magenta & Cyan of course). It would have helped of course if we’d had more monitors that weren’t monochromatic.

The game strangely fails to mention underage transexual hookers in the Bangkok portion of the game.

The IIe (not the IIe Platinum in the grey case mind you, the BEIGE case) took me through my Elementary & Junior High years. Number Munchers, Carmen Sandiego, and Oregon Trail. These were all we needed. Who cared about actually using a computer to do anything. Databases? Word Processing? No.

It was all about the games.

Wow… not much has changed since then.

During High School I started to learn the other uses for computers, but this was strangely when the Apples started to disappear. Relegated to the Typing class, no one ever saw them anymore, though the Windows revolution hadn’t quite started yet. There was a single Mac though.

A little monochrome, one piece thing that sat on the desk in the office of the classroom my journalism class was in. Computers were the wave of the future and we were supposed to be learning to use them. We propped books against it and kept right on putting the paper together with exacto-knifes & lots of glue.

Between then and last fall, I’d had little exposure to Macs. Sure Annie uses a mac, but so does Xplo. I thought I’d never find a reason to love a Mac. Now I do.

I love it so much that my PC looks like a Mac now.

I’ve got Y’z Dock, StyleXP, Rainlendar to make XP more like X. Hell, I’ve even got a program that emulates Stickies! I spent a half hour recreating the Firefox & Thunderbird icons so that I could use them on the dock and they not look crappy. Add iTunes on top of all that and my PC is just like a mac.

In looks at least.