IT'S A MAC LIFE

Macintosh has been a part of my life since they were first introduced in 1984.

I had one of the original macs. Lightweight and portable, plug in and go, "ping" and you were on your way. It was just revolutionary.

I have likewise been delighted with each subsequent Mac that I have bought; the Performa PowerPC 5200, the beige G3 desktop 266 mHz, and even my interim G3 tower with 350 mHz and 60 gig hard drive. Good, solid machines all.

But I have recently just upgraded again, and once more the Mac has changed my life.

I used to adamantly argue with my friend Mike about laptops vs. desktops. It used to be, back in the day, that for high-end graphic work you could only trust a good old-fashioned desktop monitor and not those LCD screens those crappy lap computers came with.

A-heh. Seems the world kept on spinning while I stayed in my hole. Heard of Active Matrix screens, Agent M? Newest thing. You'll love 'em.

Another thing was that I likened laptops to cell phones. Mike and other folks I'd seen using them tended to use them to hide behind rather than actually converse. Thanks, if I'm going out to a coffee shop to meet people I actually want to MEET PEOPLE, thenkyew.

That too was misleading-- Mike and Co. weren't addicted to laptops, they were using them to hide behind because of the utter and total lack of social graces of the people around them. Which is a bad situation all around, but at least it wasn't the laptop's fault.

You've all probably guessed by now that I've bought a laptop. And you're right. Mrs. M and I are now the proud owners of an iBook G4 14" laptop, 60 gig HD, 1 GIG of Mega Hertz-so-good and a combo drive that burns cd's and cd-rw's. Plays DVD's, too.

I also got a wireless card and a wireless network installed in my house. I can now surf from anywhere in the house and if I need something from either desktop machine (mine or Mrs. M's), well, I can just LOG IN from the couch.

Some of you are saying "so what?" Because yeah, it's not like this is new technology. But in a house of po' contractors, it's like a miracle conveyed on radio waves; tiny wireless angels dancing on the head of my shiny white iPin.

I named it "mmmBook." MMM for Me and Marci McAdam and "mmm" because it's delicious and all together sounds like a too-too happy pop song by a prepubescent boy band. Does the joy never end? Apparently not.

It's only been a week and I adore the iBook: The freedom, modernization and concurrently societal bliss that it represents. God. It's just a fabulosity extravaganza in a sleek, slim white case that was everything the 1970's thought the future could be.

I licked it, by the way. So it's mine. Don't even think of stealing it.

My world is different now. My one-year-old doesn't have to yowl at the back of my head for attention; I'm up in the living room with him now, we're together in the bright sunshine room instead of the dark studio hole.

Mrs. M has moved all her artstuff upstairs too, so that she can draw in the natural light and enjoy being closer to baby M. It's like we've been PROMOTED. So from now on, we're not just Agent and Mrs. M-- we're SPECIAL Agent and Mrs. M. Because life has become that cool.

Now I just have to see if the Starbucks near us has wireless. Oh FRABJOUS day.

Posted by Agent M at March 08, 2004 06:35 PM