Year: 2002

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Okay, enough is enough. Jonathon Delacour has been flirting with the idea of getting a Mac, teasing us, coyly, with this will he or won’t he like a 16 year old on a hot date.

Time for this man to buy a Mac.

As I lay here on my bed, lightweight PowerBook on my lap, I decided to start a list of reasons why Jonathon should either s**t or get off the pot and buy that PBook.

• Weight: Carrying around a PowerBook doesn’t feel that much different than carrying around my purse or a notepad. Actually, it weighs much less than my purse. My Dell laptop — the infamous mobile desktop — weights 19 pounds. My TiBook weights, what? Five pounds? Six? What would you rather lug around on a trip? A load of bricks or a load of feathers?
• Ease of Use: I have an older TiBook, which is a 15 inch and plenty big enough for me. The keyboard is very comfortable and the touchpad is very responsive. I like the wide wrist supports.
• Monitor: My TiBook is great for watching DVD movies in bed.
• Neat Apple stuff: There isn’t fun stuff for Windows. That’s what I found out when I finally gave in and bought the TiBook, my first Mac. And the great thing with all this stuff is that people don’t assume Mac users are mega-geeks, and the software actually installs without tweaking. Amazing.
• OS Support: In my OS 10.2 machine, I have the traditional Mac, the Darwin BSD Unix that forms the kernel of the OS, and I have Virtual PC installed running Windows 2000. I can literally have three operating systems running at once. Better — I can run X Windows on top of the Aqua interface and access all that cool X Windows software, including OpenOffice.All the power in the universe in an itty bitty titanium shell.
• Portability: With my wireless router and my Airport, and a battery with a decent lifespan, I can carry my Mac everywhere — to bed, downstairs, in my office, the deck, the bathroom. Well, maybe not the bathroom. But you can take it to the kitchen.Just think, Jonathon — there’s you at the sink, washing your dishes with your Dismatique, your Mac quietly humming on the counter, playing music, or maybe a movie. Or soccer clips.
• Cats: Cats prefer PowerBooks 2 to 1 over comparable PC-based laptops. No, really.
• Compatibility: How can someone like Jonathon not have a Mac? Here’s a man who is very careful with his web site design; yet he’s not able to test it against the OS and machines that many of his readers use. What Jonathon has to do, then, is ask his Mac users questions, such as does this font look okay?Next time Jonathon asks me to check out a page, I’m going to tell him, “Oh God, Jonathon. What did you do to your site!?! It looks awful. I mean, it really looks scary. Are you not feeling well or something?”
• Coolness: No matter how powerful a PC laptop, you won’t have the coolness factor of carrying around a PowerBook, particulary a TiBook. It used to be geeks wouldn’t be caught dead with a Mac, but that was before Darwin. Now, geeks flock around that glowing Apple symbol, like moths to a flame.
• sex: TiBooks are still the sexiest computers in the world. I mean, my Dell looks like something that should be taken out into a field and detonated. Or like something I would take to Havard law school. Functional.Tell me, which would you rather be? Sexy? Or functional?

And the final and best reason of all — PowerBooks are the official laptop of Alpha Males.

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

An important utility for the weblogging world is the World Time Server – click on a country or region and it tells you the current time.

With the World Time Server, I know that at this moment, in San Francisco it’s 10:50pm, Sunday, but it’s 11:50pm in Colorado for Rageboy; 12:50am, Monday for Texas Meryl; 1:50am for Sharon in North Carolina and NJ Meryl; 6:50am, Monday for Wibbly Weblog in London; 7:50am for Gaspar in Italy; 4:50pm for Chris in Korea; and finally, 5:50pm for Jonathon in Sydney, NSW, Australia.

Round and round we go, and where we’ll stop, no one will know. This deserves a song!