Me-bits: Geekdom

Here's the thing, I'm a geek. Girl geek. I belong to a wonderful guild on Warcraft called SELECT Geeks FROM WoW. I celebrate my geekiness and have for years and years.

Just now I was at Starbucks getting my fav hyperdrink - venti dark roast with 3 sugars. yummmm. Well I'm sure it will be yummy as soon as it cools down enough for me to drink. Damn that stuff is served hot!

Some geeky caffeine stats: Starbucks rocks my world with it's 56% more caffeine than your local 7-11 brew. http://www.click2houston.com/health/3005271/detail.html Did you know that their regular coffee has more caffeine than their espresso drinks? A 16 ounce cup of Starbucks Grande Caffe Mocha contains 116 milligrams of caffeine while a 16 ounce cup of Starbucks Grande Coffee contains 372 milligrams of caffeine. http://www.energyfiend.com/the-caffeine-database/. I sit here today with my VENTI dark roast at about 500mg of caffeine and I am a happy happy girl.

Ok, back to my original story. The sweet young barista and I talked about the weather while waiting for my brew to be ready. If you live in Minnesota then you'll understand that the weather is all important and must be discussed daily. Hourly. She said "I checked the weather on my Mac this morning and it's supposed to get near 80 this week!" I answered with some of the more usual patter about a few more swimming days before winter. But my mind kind of stopped when she said the word Mac.

I can't HELP IT! When someone says they use a Mac I kind of shudder in distaste.

Before you all try to find me and lynch me, let me explain. My first computer was a Mac. It was a 512k "fat mac" - 2nd generation.
I LOVED THIS MACHINE! My boyfriend and I were about the only people we knew with a home computer (his parents had the first version! The 128k) I could actually type my college papers at HOME without using a gallon of White-Out. We played text games like Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by the great Douglas Adams and Infocom.


I stayed with the Mac through college until I got my first job. There I had to use a PC with black screen and orange text. I had to learn DOS and I was totally hooked. Being able to manipulate documents with some a few memorized commands, file trees, the whole works. It felt SO much more powerful! Around 1992 or 1993 we got some of the first access to the INTERNET! I worked in International Programs for the University and it was suddenly so easy to communicate with our colleagues in Japan, France, Australia, etc.! I'm sure I was one of the first secretaries to use it.

Ok this is getting long. The point of my story is this: PC = power and intelligence. MAC = artsy fartsy folksy. That has been my subconscious point of view since 1989. I don't dislike Mac users! I just bought a new iMac for my Mom and since I pay her bills online I was pleasantly surprised and impressed with the video and photograph abilities. I made a little video of us and took some photos, she thought that was pretty cool and so did I.

Firefox works great on it but actually starting Firefox takes two more steps than it should. If it's not on that bar at the bottom then you have to go into the HD to ADD it to the bar. Then and only then can you use it. Oh and it comes with this totally lame program called iWorks which also takes too much work to load.

I want to like Macs again. I just wonder when Mac will catch up on the cool factor for geeks like me?