A Geek, Observed

“When you get past the schoolyard mentality and the stupid, ignorant prejudices,” you have heard people say, “what we have are two different operating systems that each work very, very well. Really, it’s not a matter of good or bad. It’s just a matter of personal preference.”

Those are very wise words. I have said much the same thing. But what I’ve endured over the past few months is the equivalent of a weeklong road trip with someone [you’ve] enjoyed, but never really known as a true friend. Windows has propped its bare smelly feet up on my dashboard and told me the story about how he was so hung over during his aunt’s funeral that he threw up into the coffin a little. His greasy hair has left smears on the inside of the window that no solvent can shift. He just sort of assumed that he could use my iPod, and during the one time he took a turn at the wheel, the battery was completely flat and I had to listen the story about the funeral a second time.

U.S. Senator Ted Stevens Explains How the Internet Works

Hard to tell how much to attribute to his being stupid, and how much to his being a nut-job.

Aslan is what Jesus would have been if the Bible had been written by an American. After his "sacrifice", he comes back with a huge army and bites his enemy's fucking head off. Much cooler.

My Boot Camp experience went like this:

After the interminable Windows installation which stops several times during the 40 min installation to ask inane questions instead of waiting until the end, I spent the next 20 mins dismissing 150 repeating speech bubbles which “plop” onto the screen asking inane things like…

“Do you want to activate now, go on, you know you want to, because if you don’t I’ll just remind you another 132 times… per day”

and, “Found new hardware but I’ll wait for you to install it because I can’t so it was a bit pointless mentioning it wasn’t it”

and, “Your computer might be at risk because with 96% of the market we’re targetted left right and center with viruses, spyware, trojans, and more nasty stuff than a nightclub full of teenage goths, just thought you’d like to know”

and, “I’ve found a wireless connection so I’ll use it, even though you already had a perfectly good cable Ethernet connection which was much faster, but hey, that’s what speech bubbles are for isn’t it!”

And then there’s the Start Menu prompts, “You’ve got new software! I’m sure you wanted to know that, since you just installed it yourself and would already know, but hey, I’m being a helpful little OS today.” And program prompts, “I know you’ve just installed Firefox and made it your default browser, but IE is lonely and wants some friends, so please make it your default browser again, please!”

And, “Your desktop has unused icons, would you like me to move them to the Recycle Bin, because I’m good at that, it’s not like you actually put them there for a reason is it, or maybe it is, but go on, let me do it anyway”

...

The only sane part of the experience I found was the great new Control Panel which I hadn’t seen before which said “Startup Disk… Mac OS X.” I clicked it and sanity returned.