TREMBLY. I just made a purchase. A big purchase. I used some of my voiceover and freelance writing money. And I just bought a Mac. I am near tears with trembly excitement. I’ve been a PC girl all my life. I’ve been Bill Gates’ beeyotch for way too long. But I’m not a big purchaser (uhm – take a look at the evidence that I had to have a DVD player basically FORCED UPON ME by a kindly guardian angel) … and so … I am freaking OUT with excitement.
I haven’t even begun to set it all up because I … I can’t focus right now on the details. I need to spread out, and, uhm, chill out … so I can calm down and set it up.
But here’s what happened.
I’ve been leaning towards a Mac for a long time. I’m sick of PCs and all the crap and all the viruses and I’m sick of that stupid little Windows song I am forced to listen to, and I’m sick of the Windows opening credits … and I just figured – it’s TIME. Especially after I joined the land of the iPod people. Using the iPod is so easy and intuitive that I decided – That’s it. I need to get a Mac. I was speaking with Bill about all of this and he said, “My PC is like an old syphilis-ridden whore.” hahahaha Which is TRUE. I felt motivated.
And yet – like I said – I’m not a big purchaser. And I’m not rich – I don’t have money to burn – but I do have this extra cash from my voiceovers and so there is no time like the present. If I didn’t spend it on something GOOD, then it would end up disappearing into orange juice bought at the deli – or soap – or pencils – stupid stuff. I needed to make a GESTURE.
But then there is also the fear. Of change. Of spending a ton of cash. Of … switching paradigms. No more PC. Was I ready? Yes, I was.
So who do I call? Cousin Kerry, who is one of those Mac FREAKS. Looking at her Mac in LA, and having her give me a little tour of it was really my first taste of … Hmmmm. I like the look of this MUCH better than my stupid Dell. Sorry to be vague, but it just FEELS better to me. My brain fits with it. I understand it. Kerry is also one of those people who, uhm, comes to your apartment for the first time and before even taking her coat off begins to rearrange your closet. And the second she starts doing so, you don’t think, “Hey, I like my closet the way it is!” You think, “Damn. She’s totally right.” She’s the person you want to have with you when you make a huge purchase. She will help. She will KNOW. I NEED her. So we made a date to meet outside the huge glass cube Apple store on the corner of 5th Avenue and 58th. Right across from the baroque wedding cake known as the Plaza Hotel. Well, soon it will be known as Condominiums Only A Saudi Prince Could Afford … but for now it is still the Plaza. We had a date tonight to meet.
The store is literally underground – and the entranceway is a huge glass cube sitting in a big open square – with an enormous Apple logo floating, as though in midair. Seriously, it is one of the coolest looking stores imaginable. You FEEL cool and futuristic just being in its vicinity. (You’ll have to forgive me. I’m worked up and really happy.)
Kerry and I sat outside in the cool (loud) dusk and caught up a bit. Then we created our plan of action. Kerry asked about my computer use. What I need. What I want. What I am prepared to spend. What my priorities are. She then made recommendations. Meanwhile, I was watching the people streaming into that glass cube and then disappearing down the stairs. Soon she said, “Okay – let’s go!” She was as excited as I was, I think! So there we were – in the Apple store. The look of the whole place, and the feeling of the salespeople, and just the general vibe made me turn my back on Dell forever. So accessible! And they’re RIGHT THERE. And the store is open 24 hours a day. I can actually speak with a PERSON right in FRONT of me as opposed to some out-sourced dude in Calcutta.
Kerry and I browsed around a bit. We looked at different things. She showed me stuff. I was beside myself. Then we got the nicest sales clerk – who is one of those Mac FREAKS as well – like: the people who work there are not just there because it’s a job and whatever. They are there because they LOVE MACS. They are zealots. Which could be intimidating or annoying if you felt it was imposed on you – like a used car salesman or something – but this dude was just excited to show me stuff, and even MORE excited when he learned that this would be my first Mac. Also, because Kerry was there – she was my translator. And also the tour guide. “Oh, show her the Dashboard.” “Tell her about iDisc.” “Can she get such and such with this?” “How about the formatting on her iPod? How will that work?” I mean, obviously I could have bought one for myself – but it was just so great to have her there with me. Telling me what I needed (warranty, procare card – free classes! etc. – I probably wouldn’t have gotten that stuff if I was by myself.)
So I chose what I wanted. And – A FREE PRINTER/SCANNER COMES WITH IT. I am joining the ranks of the scanner nutjobs!! Get ready for many walk-down-memory-lane via photos posts from now on. I’m going to go insane. It will soon level out, but for a while I have a feeling this will become “Look at Sheila, age 6” photoblog. The printer is gorgeous, too – a beautiful sleek printer. FREE. Did I mention that? FREE!!! I almost fainted. Or wept.
The cashier dude was awesome – another Mac zealot – I couldn’t believe I was almost there – that I was actually doing this – (I literally agonize over a 15 dollar pair of shoes and whether or not I should buy it or wait til next week when I get a paycheck … You see what I’m saying?? This was huge for me.) Then – there I was. With my sleek little laptop, my printer (AND SCANNER) – wrapped up in Apple bags … and then off we went, Kerry and I, giggling like little kids, SO EXCITED. She’s been a great support. I can’t wait to check in with her when I have the whole thing set up.
Then we walked across 59th to her subway stop – passing the Plaza, and the horse-drawn carriages – oh, and I saw that gladiator dude again!! – It was now 8:30, a deep blue dusk, the trees shadowy black to our right in Central Park, the streets crowded with breezy billowy summery New Yorkers – and in my arms I have this new gift I have given to myself with my hard-earned cash.
I can barely wait to set it up.
Kerry: I owe you big-time, dear woman – had a great time with you!!! And, uhm, Mardi Gras masks and all that stuff … good to talk about THAT with you as well!
Buh-bye Dell.
Buh-bye Bill Gates.
Buh-bye PC.
You’ve been great … really you have … but it’s time to say: BUH-BYE.
. . .waiting for your big-hair photos!
I never really did big hair (which is amazing considering my home state). But I did have some spritzed bangs which are quite mortifying. And definitely I’ll post prom pictures when i basically dressed as Isadora Duncan.
I also shaved my head once. It looked rather fetching. In a terrifying IRA-terrorist kind of way. I’ll post pictures of that too.
I’m going to my parents’ house for Labor Day, and I’m going to search high and low for the lone picture of me, c. 1972, in my Patridge Family outfit. It needs to be scanned and on the internets tout suite.
hahahahahaha
Speaking of lame outfits – the latest at Stitchy McYarnpants KILLED ME. The father and son duo???
I haven’t seen it. Going right now. . .
Holy shit! Was that the ancestor of the hoodie?
(And my MIL totally had one of those bag lady holder thingies. Except hers had a kitten head.)
Sheila, that was so fun. Let’s make huge purchases together more often!!! How many people congratulated you on your way home when they saw that Apple on the bag? Like you have a new baby!
And hey, where can I get me one of those Mardi Gras masks? Yowza!
Heh, reminds me of the email that was quite popular several years ago – I don’t remember seeing a renaissance when the LoTR movies hit. Forgive my memory here:
My computer had stopped working, so I called a wizard friend of mine, and he came over one morning. I explained that I couldn’t boot the computer anymore (except with my foot, but that hurt), and I couldn’t reinstall. “Show me the install CD,” he said.
I handed it over, and to my astonishment he hurled it into the microwave! I moved to retrieve it, but he said “Wait!”
After the microwave stopped, he grabbed the disk and handed it to me. To my surprise it was quite cool to the touch, but there were glowing letters along the inside margin. “I cannot read the fiery script,” I said.
“I can,” he said. “The language is Hexidecimal, which I shall not utter here; but this is how it runs in the common tongue:
One OS to load them all,
One OS to find them
One OS to run them all
And in the darkness bind them.
Enjoy your Mac! You and Lileks can trade geek stories. This is MAC we’re talking.
I am so excited for you!!! I love Macs. So much more stable than Windoze… Yay Sheila!! :)
Sheila — Holy. Moly. You are going to LOVE having a Mac!!! They’re amazing and I’m sure I don’t know half the stuff you’re going to know with cousin Kerry at your disposal. (Can I borrow her??)
Oh, and …. the SCANNNNER!! HOORAY!! We WILL be absolute scanning nutjobs and we will wear the title proudly, dammit. It makes you crazy, I’m telling you. Obsessed, messy crazy. It’s awesome.
Sheila, SUCH great news …. CONGRATULATIONS!!
What an exciting adventure! I had a lot of fun reading your post… but… but … but … after getting caught up in your exciting narrative, and holding my breath for the ending, you never said *which* mac you bought!!!!!! ACK! :lol:
My PC laptop died on me a in the spring and I bought a 15″ macbook pro to replace it. I do love this computer, but there are also some things I haven’t figured out yet. I still haven’t learned how to burn a multi-session disk for example which is really frustrating, and I know I’m not taking advantage of all the features now available to me.
Finally, I totally *get* what you mean about that intangible “feel” which is wonderful.
Congratulations on your purchase, Sheila. I’m sure you’ll have lots of fun figuring it out and playing with all the new stuff.
Nightfly – that is hilarious!!
Bella – I got a sleek little 13″ MacBook. It’s black – and absolutely perfect. But yeah – there’s so much on it I haven’t even BEGUN to explore. I have a ton of stuff I need to transfer over from my PC and I’m kind of scared (hahahaha) but I’ll figure it out.
The biggest thing right now, or the most pressing, is the iTunes conundrum. As of now – my iPod is formatted for a PC – and my entire library is on my PC. So I have to transfer all of my songs onto CDs – then transfer them into my iTunes on my Mac – before I can do anything else. Otherwise – I could lose all my songs. If I plug the iPod into my Mac right now – it could be total and utter disaster. I have to re-format the thing for a Mac – which isn’t a big deal – but in doing so, all the songs could go away – which … the very thought of it makes me shiver with apprehension. heh heh So that’s priority one!!!
Oh and please – if anyone has any tips, reminders, warnings, cajolings, suggestions, etc. – I would totally appreciate it. I mean, it’s all new to me now – and I’m still just getting comfortable with the keyboard (No CTRL C anymore? Or CTRL V???)
Also – how do you easily get from window to window? Like if I have 3 open at the same time … You know how with a PC there’s that bottom nav, where you can see everything you have open and you can click THERE to get from window to window??
How do I do that on a Mac? I mean, I basically just move the windows around so I can get to what I want to get to – is that how one does it??
Congrats, Sheila, on making The Switch. Money well spent. I bought a PowerBook G4 about 3 years ago, and added an iMac G5 last year, and have never looked back. Windows vs. OSX: no comment necessary. Of the countless advantages you’ll continue to discover, prepare yourself for the unbridled joy that awaits you when you update software: IT WORKS FLAWLESSLY EVERY TIME. Enjoy.
“Ctrl C” and “Ctrl V” actually came from the Mac world I’m pretty sure. It’s just “Command C” and “Command V” on a Mac (The Apple key)… Now the big question is what does the “Windows” key do on a PC?
Well, there still is a “ctrl” key though on the Mac. I tried to do a CTRL-C maneuver in the book excerpt above – and wiped out a ton of text. So you can’t use that particular key – just the key with the little apple on it. Apple-C, Apple-V works. Oh yeah. I’m an old hand at this now!!
Re your question on moving from app to app: Hit F9 and it will shrink each app you’re running into little panes on the desktop. Then just click on the one you want to work on.
Bud – WOAH. Holy crap … that was awesome. Works perfectly – thanks!!
I’m gonna press F9 again just to watch the fireworks.
OOPS, should have mentioned to maximize each app one after the other, then hit F9.
Also, Apple+Tab works just like Alt+Tab so you can tab through applications that way.
Cullen – cool – so that will automatically take me through my different windows open?
You foul temptress. I want a Mac so bad, but suffer from lackamoolah. To read your excitement at the entire purchase process has further whetted my Apple appetite.
Congratulations on your great purchase, Sheila!
You sound crazily happy, which is one of the best feelings in the world… Money very well spent, I’d say!
I’m really looking forward to the walks down memory lane, it will be a lot of fun! :))
Sheila, yep. It’ll cycle though your open windows.
Have you found Photo Booth yet?
I’ve been a Mac girl for a verrry long time – spent a couple years working at Apple, even. I love their laptops – and I’m sure you will too!
What’s Photo Booth? Like – the little camera in the top of my laptop screen? is that photo booth?>
WARNING! DANGER WILL ROBINSON! Read this post, you may end up losing the ratings on your songs, the play count, and maybe a playlist or two.
The problem is the XML file containing that info contains the location of the music files in Windows, which is incompatible with the location on the Mac. It shouldn’t be too difficult for an enterprising programmer to come up with a script that can fix that, but I’m not aware of anyone that’s done that already. You may want to write down that info.
Also, it’d probably be far, far easier just to hook up your Windows computer to the new Mac, set it up as a network with a shared folder and just copy the files over directly. Someone with more networking experience could probably help you with that.
I am now filled with terror.
Begone, terror. Networking is easy. And the first thing you should learn about Apple is that their web site has EVERYTHING documented. Here’s the page you want.
Relax, you have plenty of tech support here.
Don’t panic too much. It’ll still keep artist, genre, album, etc. Hopefully they’ve fixed the issue. I just wouldn’t rush to delete the stuff from the Windows computer.
And the networking thing I don’t think is that difficult, maybe 10-15 minutes of reading the manual will save you hours of cd burning.
Hopefully that XML issue has already been fixed in the newest iTunes, but I wouldn’t bet on it. I might be able to fix it in UNIX, but I can’t make any promises. If you have a more experienced techie among your readers, they may be able to help you better. (IIRC, all that needs to be done is change all instances of “C:\Program Files\iTunes” to the Mac equivalent.)
It should be a really easy problem to fix for someone who has some experience with editing XML files, is what I’m trying to say.
Now that I think about it, yeah, it is fairly easy, just a slight pain in the ass. I’ve figured it out. Here’s how to get your music library into your Mac:
Set up the network (Mark’s link). Make sure iTunes is already installed on the Mac. Find out where iTunes stores the music on the Mac & write that down. (Import one song in the library and the location will show up in “Get Info”.) Now you’re going to replace that folder with the iTunes folder on the Windows machine (default location in “My Music”, named “iTunes”). Just copy it straight over. Now open iTunes and check to see if you’ve still got your ratings. If you do, you’re set. If you don’t: go into that folder on the Mac and open the “iTunes Music Library.xml” file in a text editor (TextEdit I think is the name) and do a global search and replace. You will be replacing something that looks like this:
C:\Documents and Settings\Sheila\My Documents\My Music\iTunes
with whatever you wrote down earlier for the Mac that ends in iTunes.
Save it. Delete the “iTunes Library.itl” file. Now start iTunes. (All of this is on the Mac.) iTunes should have a progress bar, then it should say the library was damaged/corrupted, would you like to rebuild? Say yes.
That should work. I just don’t know what the Mac iTunes XML file looks like.
If you want, once you get the networking set up, copy over one file, import it into the iTunes library, then e-mail me XML file that is created on the Mac. Then I should be able to tell you what you need to search and replace. But I think you should be able to see what you need to replace by looking at “Get Info”.
I think you can officially stop worrying, if this forum post is correct, they’ve fixed it. You’ll still want to follow the above directions up to the point where I said “Now open iTunes and check to see if you’ve still got your ratings.” And you probably won’t need to bother with importing one song and checking where it is. Just replace the iTunes folder in the default “Music” folder on your Mac.
Congratulations! The last Apple product I touched was back circa 1989, so I won’t be able to offer any technical help with the new toy, but I will readily admit that pretty much all Apple machines are way the hell sexier than their PC world counterparts. Hope ya have a blast with it…
Uhm – this just in:
Apple is apparently going to do a massive battery recall at any moment because of a fire hazard or something. It’s in the tickertape on cnn.com.
Ha! I just got an email from CNN about the Apple battery recall and the first thing I thought was, “Oh man…great timing Sheila.”
However, it seems to be only older model laptops. You should be okay. Check this page if you’re paranoid.
1) Battery recall – you’re safe. Only G4 laptops are affected. Since you have a camera in the top of your laptop, you are safe.
2) Photo Booth. There is an application on your machine called Photo Booth that lets you take still pics with that little camera (called an iSight) with all sorts of funky effects. Good for wasting hours of time…
Good…we don’t want any typety-typety-typety-FOOM around here.
…although I think typing 14,000 words per minute does void the warranty.
We have been using a Mac for nearly a year now and LOVE IT – the only downside is there are some things that cant be uploaded onto the machine, but the hitches are so minor you find you really dont miss them. With our Microsoft computer it got so bad that I stopped writing because the system would crash and I would lose stuff, even with backups. Now that we have the Mac, Im starting to open up to writing more.
I had Sharon’s experience with the old War Horse last year, which is why I repurchased – but since I’ve had (reasonably) good experiences with Dell (and didn’t want to replace all my Windows software) I stuck with it. But all you Mac daddies done gone made me envious… Maybe I’ll keep the desktop and grab me some portable Mac for the road. (Someday.)
You have imbibed the magical Koolade, there is no going back!
My G5 iMac (the 8th Mac I’ve owned) and I both heartily salute you!
One more thing, I’d save all your playlists on your iPod (including the iPod’s “Library” playlist) onto your Windows iTunes and copy all of that over to the Mac. Then after you reformat the iPod you can add the old iPod library to the newly reformatted iPod, and it’ll have the same songs & info.
You have imbibed the magical Koolade, there is no going back!
Actually, I’m bisexual when it comes to computers. I have both a Mac and a PC at home and hop between them seamlessly. Windows has become my bitch that I make squeal like a piggy, so I tend to avoid most major problems. Although I would love to have command-Q on Windows….
Oh yeah, I also dabble in the black art of Linux and (shudder) Amiga from time to time, so I guess that makes me a big ol’ computer slut.
Sheila — That F9 thingy is called “Expose’.” You can also hit F11 to make all your open windows disappear off to the sides revealing your desktop. Hit it again when you want them back.
Cool, huh?
Sheila – Apple key + Shift + Tab cycles through windows open in several different applications, Apple key + Tab goes back and foward between the window of the top app and the window of the first app below it and Apple Key + ~ cycles through multiple windows open in one app.
I loved your story of iPod discovery and its subsequent “halo” effect. Apple hoped this would happen with iTunes for the PC showing what software and hardware should do together. I hope you’ll share more of your MacBook experiences…….. the little black one looks so cool too.