We may be witnessing the beginnings of a more mainstream backlash against Windows and the general frustration they inflict on average users.

I'll start by adding that I still have 2 windows installations used solely for playing World of Warcraft. My main machine dual boots to Debian Linux, where I do the occasional bit of coding in my spare time. Finally, I have my Powerbook, which gets fired up for general browsing, e-mail, and iPhoto. I've started taking it to work occasionaly, iWork's Pages is more than capable as a wrod processor as I found out this last week to write up a document for work (plus free PDF output, hard to beat that).

Last weekend, Patty's fiance Kevin heeded my advice to get himself an Apple laptop. He's been wanting a laptop to finish his dissertation and doing other school related work.I suggested an Apple since everything pretty much just works and because its based on a BSD kernel (right?) its more securely designed. Applications don't get installed without you knowing it. Saturday he got a new 12" Powerbook and seems initially pleased with it. He got MS Office and hasn't had any significant isssues with that so far. It'd be nice to hear a coment from him with his first impressions, if not I"ll try to follow up with him offline. So he switched and Patty threw out that she might "want a Mac Mini" now.

Now, the mainstream tech press seems to be picking up on the benefits of the Apple experience. In the Wall Street Journal, the CEO of Intel remarked that improving the security of the Windows platform was years away adding:

Pressed about security by Mr. Mossberg, Mr. Otellini had a startling confession: He spends an hour a weekend removing spyware from his daughter's computer. And when further pressed about whether a mainstream computer user in search of immediate safety from security woes ought to buy Apple Computer Inc.'s Macintosh instead of a Wintel PC, he said, "If you want to fix it tomorrow, maybe you should buy something else."

A columnist over at Network World has also started documenting his switch to the Mac platform, echoing many of the same reasons that my mac-savy friends used to get me to switch.

I want my computer to function every time I turn it on. I want my computer to not corrupt data when it does crash. I use a handful of applications: Microsoft Office, e-mail, browser, FTP client and some multimedia toys. Regardless of format, they should work without crashing.\ I live on the 'Net. I do not want my browser to eat up all of my memory. In the WinTel world I need an assortment of third-party tools to try to keep my PC alive. That's just crazy.

So if you read my last post you saw that my sister's now engaged! Her fiance Kevin, who she met nearly 3(?) years ago now but they didn't start dating until the beginning of last year, surprised her with the big question during a trip to New York. I won't spoil more details but will post a link as soon as her wedding site is ready.

She now gets to enjoy the wonderful experience that is planning a wedding. Luckily, since we just went through this she'll have a slightly easier time.

I haven't updated in almost a week and I haven't really put up anything significant in quite a while. It's not really because my INTP brain is getting bored with blogging, but real life and work have been pretty busy lately. As a result, I haven't had as much time to devote to writing for this site, curiously I still have time to play Warcraft every now and then. Let's recap whats going on over the last few weeks:

Work

• Finally delivered a Site-on-a-CD for a client, which had Mozilla Firefox on it for users to install.
• Trying to launch a revamped site for same client
• Re-launched the company website redesign, where we're finally starting to eat our own dog food!
• Starting on another site redesign for another client, finishing up the scoping phase so we can really build it.
• Cleaning up the code for SyntaxCMS. It runs on PHP5 now and we've made a lot of progress in eliminating error notices.

Life

• Tomorrow we close on our new house, tonight was the final walk through.
• Packing up so that we can move to said new house and lining up movers.
• Patty got engaged - whipped up a quick website for her wedding that should debut soon.
• Trying to run at least 3 times a week. I believe last weekend I agreed to run the Army 10-miler this Fall.
• Reading the Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy, and subsequent books.
• Trying to figure out if DC United's lack of form ( 2 wins in 7 games? ) is worrisome. We were worse at the beginning of last year and still won the championship.

Other Geek Pursuits

• Did I mention World of Warcraft?
• Redesign and relaunch my bolivian soccer site.
• Setting up an automated web stats system for our personal server. Any interest in me releasing these scripts?
• Maintaining said shared server - although with debian and apt-get its magnitudes easier than our old Redhat box.
• Fighting trackback spammers that have been hitting me every weekend for the last 3 weeks.
• Figuring out what I want to do with it now that I registerd soccerblogs.net. Any ideas?
• Playing with the Powerbook - Tiger is nice even though its Address Book import capabilites failed me. iWork is really good, I used Pages to write a memo for work and I've never had as easy a time working with tables. I think I need to take my laptop to work more often.

Geez, that's a lot of stuff, once the move is done things should settle down more. Anything I missed?