Am I a Mac or PC? Part 2 of 3: Apple gets its foot in the door

Throughout college, including a 5 year stint working at Best Buy, I amassed several PCs - three desktops and three laptops. The 366MHz desktop was pushed to the wayside by a newer HP which was also pushed aside by an HP Athlon64, which was ultimately replaced by a dual core 2 beast of a custom build with 8GB of DDR2. On the laptop side there was a Celeron Toshiba Satellite usurped by an AMD HP Pavilion which failed to live longer than 3 years and was ultimately replaced by a Dell Studio XPS which rivaled the processing power of the custom built desktop and had a nice leather accent to boot ;) My house was in PC harmony as it should have been. Fully networked. Directories shared. Remote desktops enabled. I had no idea nor was I prepared for the dynamic shift that was going to be subtly introduced into my computing life.

A month and a half ago I was invited to a local Apple demonstration for corporate developers to showcase how the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad can work in the corporate world. Apparently a division of my company has been itching to be able to leverage the Apple technology for its "coolness" and ease of use appeal with its employees. From a development perspective it's tasty from a technological "coolness" factor. In any case some gears started turning and foreign wheels were put in motion amongst the developer team that was strongly suited and fluent in the PC world like myself. Personally I have obviously never owned a Mac, haven't used one since the first Gulf War in middle school, and have definitely never programmed in Objective-C or even knew where to start.

Fast forward about a month - I'm researching Mac Minis versus Mac Books versus whatever is out there in the Apple world and lightning strikes in the form of my wife picking up the 6 year old Toshiba Satellite, the screen going black, and never powering on again. Wasn't the hard drive, wasn't the RAM, wouldn't even post. It was like the Little Engine Who Could had suddenly run out of water, cracked his block and his tiny Celeron processor was suddenly silenced forever. Suddenly a personal Apple purchase was in play and surprisingly I had spousal approval for the venture. It may have had something to do with the fact that my wife would be getting a gigantic computing upgrade, inheriting the 1 year old Studio XPS with its dual core 2 processing, 4GB of RAM and 1GB of Nvidia love amongst other little bells and whistles.

Going along with the "custody agreement" decided for the Dell and taking into consideration that a laptop was being replaced a quick internal decision was made that a Mac Mini was eliminated from the runnings. The solid body aluminum chassis of the Mac Book Pro was much too alluring to pass up versus its non-Pro counterpart as I like a solid feel to anything I purchase whether it be power tools, laptops, or even a pen. It has to hold up to its eventual beating and not feel like it's going to fall apart. Size does matter as well - going from a 16" Studio XPS to a 13" MBP was easily out of the running officially putting me in the category of spending money I didn't necessarily have and possibly chopping off a limb to the 2" upgrade.

At this point I was in well over my head and was well into the $2200 range so I decided to say "screw it". Give me the i7, the full 8GB of DDR3, the 512MB Nvidia, and the 7200rpm hard drive. Oh, and don't forget the high resolution graphics. If I was going to dive into the Apple pool I was going to dive in head first.... with my wallet close behind it.

I bit the bullet, placed the order, and $2700 later I was transformed into FedEx tracking junkie watching my new Mac Book Pro being built and shipped from... China...? I can't say it surprised me but it caught me slightly off guard. I figured my configuration was somewhat common since Apple's choices were mostly vanilla but so be it. China it is and all I could do was wait.....

Am I a Mac or PC? Part 1 of 3: A History of Me

I'm your prototypical Microsoft guy - started exploring DOS when I was 4 (yes 4) back in 1983 on the original dual 5 1/2" floppy, no hard drive, 8 color, now in the Smithsonian original IBM Personal Computer.

This beast of a machine lasted me through 1994 learning BASIC and Turbo Pascal, scouring local BBS systems on an external Hayes 300baud modem

While the IBM was still in working condition we eventually leaped into the future in the form of a blazing Packard Bell Pentium 1 desktop, Windows for Workgroups 3.11, a single speed CDROM, 256 color monitor and probably an unheard of 20MB of hard drive space. This opened me up to the world of the internet and AOL, the leader in getting people online (my how the times have changed). Porn in the form of images that could be fetched from AOL chat rooms in torrent style fashion. Games like Myst and Doom2 on CD that simply blew the mind, especially since my shiny new 14.4kbps internal modem could call my friend Paul's PC and we could play Doom2 against each other LIVE head to head (id software always had the right idea) hoping that no family member at either house would pick up the phone and taint our modem session.

One of my "fondest" memories was when Windows 95 was released and a classmate had been given a beta copy of it who passed it on to me to install on our now 3 month old Packard Bell. This was my first introduction into the Blue Screen of Death and learning the ins and outs of Windows. After a very intense night of trying to get Win95 to successfully boot on what I then considered a "broken" PC I threw in the towel late that night and attempted to get some sleep trying not to panic that I had completely hosed our $2000 investment. Thankfully the first thing I had done before attempting the upgrade was back up the entire PC on 25 to 30 some floppy disks. Needless to say I spent that Saturday nervously re-installing Windows 3.11 and no one in the house had a clue as to what I had done or what I had gone through in order to get the Packard Bell back in working condition. I seriously never saw Win95 again.

College saw me continuing my PC background in 1998 with the purchase of a generic barebones 366MHz Windows 98 box that I actively tinkered with. 56kbps modem, 8MB graphics card with 16million color graphics, 32x CDROM (still no CD burner), 100-something MB hard drive, and eventual broadband internet. Napster, Lime Wire, Bear Share, IRC and Kazaa lead the pack for downloading music, warez (which introduced me to Visual Studio) and God knows what else before they all became victims to viruses, worms, the RIAA, and the ever-reaching government (again - how the times have changed). I was a PC through and through and simply scoffed at Apple and its Macs which I hadn't used since middle school to type reports and play games during my free period. I had actually dual booted the PC for some time with Red Hat Linux. Apple as a foreign, dirty word that had no place in my little expanding PC world that had become old hat and was obsolete unless you were deep into photo and video editing.

Exiting Facebook: The Big Brother of "Social Networking"

Below was my last post on Big Brother Facebook.....

http://mattmckeon.com/facebook-privacy/

Dear Facebook,
This link says it all. Your motive has steeply steered away from actual social networking and shifted directly to data mining with the intent to sell. I was always hesitant to sign up (and held off until mid 2009) because you seemed to be a boring waste of time and ultimately you turned out to be just that... a boring waste of time. While it was sometimes neat to read about friends of the past it is not an *actual* interaction. Close friends that I used to talk to all the time have now had their lives turned into one line blurbs and snapshots, snapshots that can only contain so much feeling but stops right there. No excitement in your voices, no real pain to sympathize with... just a blurb. For that, you have become a one trick pony who's trick became not only quickly old but broken as well when you started selling out your users for the almighty dollar. For that, you, Facebook, and Mark Zuckerberg can go fuck yourselves. Peace.

...and that's about all of Facebook I could take. I remember a couple of years ago when analysts were wondering how Facebook and other social networking sites planned on making money. "Open" Graph and data mining has become their outlet and I want no part of it.