Crash & Burn - Mac or PC

by Wilfred Bereswill

I intended to write a more insightful blog, but I'm running on computer life support here. My little Asus EeePC Netbook is at my day job office, my laptop monitor is flickering uncontrollably making it useless and my desktop won't power up (not sure what the hell is going on there).

I'm borrowing my daughter's Macbook to struggle through this; something I need to get used to because I've just gone from a lifetime of PC to Mac. My new Macbook Pro is on order and should be here next week. I'll still have my little Eee PC, but that is for surfing and writing only. No website maintenance, etc.

I said I was a lifetime PC. Well, that's no exageration. Actually, my first computer was an IBM 1620 with 4 megabytes, YES, MEGABYTES, of RAM. I learned to use a keypunch in high school. I graduated to an IBM System 3, then used a Cray for a while when I worked for the Government in college.

My first job (1984/85) bought me a PC and IBM 8088. Two floppy drives and no hard drive. DOS on one disk, Wordstar or Lotus 123 on the other. A few years later I had my first Windows machine an IBM 8288. 20 Meg hard drive.

So this week I'll start a new chapter in my life, a move away from Windows.

How about you? PC or Mac?

Oh and here's a tidbit. This has been reported on the internet last week. I checked Snopes to see if it was authentic or not to no avail. Either way, there's a story here, waiting to be written.

PIRATE HUNTING CRUISE

Luxury yachts in Russia are offering pirate hunting cruises in the dangerous waters off the coast of Somalia with the hope of being attacked. Passengers pay about $5,000 to patrol and can pay an extra $7.50 a day to receive an AK-47 machine gun for protection and about $10 for 100 rounds of ammo.The yachts travel from Djibouti to Mombasa in Kenya and deliberately cruise close to the coast at a speed of about five nautical miles hoping to attract pirates.