Michael McDaniel’s Dawning Awareness

Andy is “ranting about Microsoft”:http://blog.aharbick.com/archives/000090.html and his frustrations about incompatibilities and mistakes.

From time to time, I start yearning for simpler days, my engineer’s propeller spinning furiously at the notion of a clean, unix-like OS with a UI that borders on art running on hardware with industrial design second to none. After all, I’m writing this entry on Bonnie’s iBook because Ian’s sleeping on me and I just don’t like my TabletPC.

But part of it is certainly that I’m just susceptible to peer pressure. I bought the “Microsoft phone” before “coming to my senses”:http://www.themcdaniels.net/michael/2005/03/28/smartphone-treo-650/, and I got this iBook just after “Ben”:http://randomlyhumming.com and “Andrej”:http://andrej.mobileduo.com got their new mac laptops. I’m sure I’d have a G5 tower by now if I were still working in the big room at Amazon.

But there are really good reasons to use Windows as well. I’ve yet to find a program to match Microsoft’s own Digital Image Library (with easy tagging and meta info stored _in the file_ so it moves with the files). And Microsoft Money (at least 2004 and earlier) is hands down better than Quicken. (I had thought about using Money via VirtualPC, but that wouldn’t solve my Digital Image Library problem). I’m also rather used to Outlook, though I haven’t really looked at Entourage yet.

Anyway, my PC is getting unstable again, which has given rise to another bout of Mac lust. I’m going to try and ride it out, though. I’d get a Mac Mini to tide me over, but I don’t think it would have the power to run much of anything.