Goldfish

For me, every time I encounter a new computer -- even one in a public place, or one belonging to someone else -- there are things I have to do to make myself comfortable there. It's kind of like when I won a goldfish at the St. Joseph's Catholic Church Lawn Fete back in 1974 at one of those "toss the ping-pong ball in the bowl" games. I think I annoyed Goldie no end during her year-long life, because right when she was used to her water, I'd change it. She spent all her time shitting in it, breathing it, and just when she got it the way she liked it, I'd go and dump it out and change it. Damn me.

Fast forward 30 years.

On Windows, the list of things I have to do is incredibly, stupidly long. After applying eighty billion bytes' worth of security updates, I have to set all the little stupid things that make Windows tolerable. Hide the fucking menu bar, small icons in the the Start Menu, classic Windows folder presentation, turn the indexing service off, turn off the fucking firewall, set Firefox as my default browser and tell MSIE to shove it when it objects...

On Mac, I can be comfortable within 10 minutes (download Firefox -- that does it) and I can feel completely at home within an hour.

I did that tonight... I went out, and while I was tempted by the incredibly fast and cool MacBooks with the dual-core Intel chips, ultimately, I saved eight hundred bucks and bought a faster version of my adored iBook. This one is a 1.42Ghz iBook with a DVD burner and 802.11x and Bluetooth built in, but in every other respect, it's an old friend now. I'm already friends with it.

I wish women could be like that sometimes... they get better, keeping the things you like, diminish the things you don't.

Well, they're not, but women are also much more expensive.

The new one is named Tess, for my late departed favorite kitten.

The iBook 933 was named "Kitten." I hope Melody didn't think I named the laptop after her; I acquired both about the same time. No my G4/933 was named after a little kitten I rescued in 1996, the first cat to be buried in my yard. She was so tiny.

Someone amazing wrote to me out of nowhere this afternoon; I am excited.