reasons number 10-12 for Why I Love Mac

12. because i love the touch, response and sound of the keyboard.

11. because yesterday i trucked the Lapple^TM between desk and conference rooms all day and where there was ethernet, i wired in and where there wasn't, the Lapple auto-reverted to backup wireless. it figured this out on its own because it knows i don't want to dick away my time configuring location-dependent net access.

i had been with windoze for so long i forgot that a good OS makes your life easier without demanding an arcane intimacy with its anatomy. that said, when the moment's right, i should still be able to dim the lights, pour a double jameson, load up some Broken and stick my hands thru the cage of this endless routine. which brings me to #10.

10. OSX i love your sleek and swooshy interface (like the transition between Preview's index sheet and individual shot views; jesus give me a cigarette right now) but i adore your unix brain even more. i love the fact that i can bypass your GUI and root through your innards with a “cd ..” here and an “ls -al” there, grep-ing and pipe-ing and man-ing [because i'm hazy on the “chmod” options and don't want to de-access my drive (more on this shortly)].

- what are you up to?? - D asked bewilderedly as he came down the stairs i was galloping up with splitting smile and lolling tongue like J-dog when he's chasing the B-A-L-L.

- i'm fetching my Unix in a Nutshell book! - i sang happily as i skipped into my office.

i am transported back to nights in grad school, when instead of gathering with my department to engage in FUN i'd spend hours huddled in front of my Mac Classic, dialed into the university's Solaris composer machines and up to my ears in C shell prompts. this is when D flashes me the L-sign because he Loves me so much.

but i digress. the point is that i can't do shit with a c-prompt but a bash shell makes me schoolgirl giggly. thank you OSX.

finally, i can't resist a big fuckyou to windoze, who's rendered most of a 250G hard drive read-only. congratulations – i can't chmod my way out of this one. and unchecking the “read only” option in windoze-properties only has me sit and wait as it chugs through each gig “resetting” permissions that are never truly reset and yet i continue unchecking the box and dumbly waiting like a lobotomised monkey pushing the shock button expecting a banana.
push push push. pzzzzt. pzzzzt. pzzzzt.

there's life beyond vista peeps. can i have a witness...