Apple iPad

[Elizabeth Ann West]

I am a recent addition to the Mac family. I love my MacBook that I got for Christmas, despite it being white and attracting every stray piece of lint and dirt imaginable. I was eagerly anticipating the Apple announcement today, and can honestly say I'm so underwhelmed. Seriously, who WANTS to type on a touch pad? No one I know.

[Celeste Stewart]

I haven't checked it out yet. As the commercial says, "I'm a PC."

A few years back, my husband used to work on a Mac and I found that going back and forth between the two operating systems screwed me up. It's kind of like when I switched from French to Spanish. Spanish ruined my previously decent French skills and I can't speak either of the languages well. I should have stuck with French, but it didn't make sense in SoCal so I switched to espanol. Long story short, I'm sticking with Windows despite Apple's cool factor. Boring I know.

[Elizabeth Ann West]

The first computers I ever touched were all Macs. In school, and when I was in 2nd grade, my Uncle Joe lived with us and he had a Mac. I wasted LOTS and LOTS of paper with PrintShop, making every banner imaginable to a 2nd grader on a dot matrix printer. The next year, my parents bought a PC, it was a Hewlett Packard and had the very cutting edge Windows 3.1 on it. CD-ROMS were new, and I loved reading entries on Grolier and messing with the Midi Mixer. I first got "online" on a local BBC, then we had Prodigy, then AOL. From then until leaving for college I was a PC.

My parents didn't have a lot of money. I was lucky just to be going to college. Where all of my friends were getting cool new laptops, all I could afford was paying $100 for a Mac Performa with System 7 on it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Macin ... a_6300.jpg It could read CDs, write papers which is all I needed it to do. I couldn't get online with it because it only had a modem, and my college was Cat 5 trunk line. So for my freshman year, I borrowed my roommates' computer or schlepped to the library to do Internet research. It was nice, it was my first computer that was only mine. Sophomore year I used my own money and a $150 donation from my parents to buy a refurbished PC that ran Windows 98.

So 10 years from my latest Mac experience, I am again a Mac. But, even though before this I had a PC, I gave up Windows for Linux 2 years ago. Apart form my casual gaming habit (which has now returned thanks to Mac) I haven't missed Microsoft in the least.

[eek]

The learning curve of all things tech today is, well, daunting. I liked Celeste's analogy to language. In high school and college I took German (my dad grew up in a German town in TX), which after school I promptly forgot and never used again. Later, when I went through the total-immersion/in-country method of language learning, something really odd happened - German words would pop into my brain while searching for the right term in Arabic or Greek. Bah.

Congrats on the new Mac, E.

[Celeste Stewart]

To think I used to speak Japanese as a little kid. . .

[Sharion]

Elizabeth,

Welcome back to Macs! I'm a big fan. My first computer was a Mac Performa with System 7, too! Wasn't the hard drive 80 MB? Less than a zip disk today... You probably don't remember but, did yours come with GreatWorks installed? I still have GreatWorks documents and even Appleworks won't open them. BBEdit will, though.

Windows drove me totally nuts. Still does. My sweetie has Windows and we're networked. I would have never gotten past Ed without the WinMachine as my hieroglyph problem only showed up on that other computer.

Unfortunely, I had to become proficient on Windows. I have a day job and as with most companies, they have Windows. I also write shareware games for both platforms, and needed to get proficient on that WinThing in order to support the games. (Yes, I have my fingers in many different business pies.) I can tell you, the WinFolks require a LOT more tech support than the MacFolks. Windows is such a bugger!

So for all who attempt to hop back and forth, I feel your pain.

[Elizabeth Ann West]

Try hoping between 3! LOL. And really more than that as Linus varieties can be very different GUI wise (graphical user interface). We have now 8 computers in the house. The HTPC (home theatre PC hooked up to our TV with all of our movies and music loaded on it for convenience but no we do not share) has Slackware on it that was customized by my husband and optimized for XBMC (the media handling client). My laptop is a Mac Book with Leopard 10.6.2 on it. My hubby's laptop is a Toshiba Satellite with Slackware on it, but it's very temperamental as he likes to load the latest kernel and try to make it break (he gets really frustrated too when he does, why he continues to do I do not know). My stepson's laptop is my old Toshiba Satellite which is dual booting Linux Mint (a flavor of Ubuntu that is very pretty) and Windows XP (so he can play all of the casual games I paid for). The desktop in his bedroom (he *just* got my old laptop at Christmas and it mainly stays with him in Texas except he brings it here on the weekends we have him for software updates, his Mom doesn't have high speed internet, or really the internet at all) has Ubuntu on it. His favorite game is Wormux, it's free and about blowing stuff up in funny ways. Completely boy.

Then we have our server which is in the process of being changed. It currently has old music (it was how we shared music among the various systems before the HTPC) pictures and files, plus my website. It needs to be converted to Ubuntu server, but currently I think it is running Fedora 8. It isn't really used as a work station, so it is hopelessly neglected. Then we have the new (to us) computer which my husband just optimized for video editing and music editing with various parts from the closet and I think it has a flavor of Ubuntu on there, but I'm not sure because I haven't had time to play with it yet. Finally, we have the XO Laptop (part of the one laptop per child program) which runs Sugar, a very low-load unix system. That will probably be Catelynn's first computer as Vincent has outgrown it, and the keyboard is a keypad and the most toddler proof computer we have. I say that because she is already fascinated with our laptops and at 7 months knows pushing the buttons makes it do stuff. She likes to pounce when you're least suspecting it.

So yeah I bounce between Mac, Linux, and Windows, which is kinda like three romance languages at once?

[Sharion]

Have you written any articles about any of it? Bet you've got a ton of material! Just being able to write about Linux and Ubuntu and Slackware... I've never even heard of Slackware.

[Elizabeth Ann West]

When I was a Windows user (at least dual booting) I wrote quite a few computer articles, but for a different website. There were a few of us writers here in the computers area that wrote for the site (it was blessed by the owners, I believe they actually own the other site too so it was more like in-house work). I had to stop when things were getting too crazy in my life. I was trying to get pregnant, beginning fertility treatments and we were in the middle of a custody dispute.

I don't write on many computer topics related to Linux at all, even though I am a super proponent of Open Source and very involved in that community (or at least I was until baby lol) because I am a user, not a developer at all. In the Linux world, and this could be seen as a criticism, many projects lack marketing for standard users. Why? Because open source, though not always, is often low-budget and developed by volunteers. Projects that do have operating budgets like Fedora (underwritten by Red Hat), Open Office (sun Microsystems) etc spend it on infrastructure and developers. Why? They aren't *really* interested in mass adoption of their system... the best features will go into pay systems or become features in proprietary systems (yeah that Windows 7 coughbscough about the snapping windows and dynamic movement on the desktop? My Linux system was doing that 2 years ago courtesy of compiz seriously youtube it and check the dates of the videos. So no the shower guy didn't think of that.)

I know that's confusing, but it's the nature of open source. The area I would write to, not really likely web masters will pay for that content because volunteers write documentation (I used to contribute to the Fedora documentation team), and I'm not knowledgeable enough to write tot he more advanced audience. Those people have doctorates in computer science and engineering.

[Sharion]

I understand about documentation etc. being written by volunteers. There are several topics I could write about, but I am familiar with many of the websites who'd use such articles and they have free sources. Although by that standard, almost any topic has free versions available. There's not much you can't find on the internet.

Familiar with open source a wee bit. I've actually started using a couple of open source programs. Kinda scary, but those were the best options available. In one case, it was the ONLY option available.

Sometimes you can write about an advanced topic, geared toward a layman's audience. I'm a programmer, but my peers are more advanced than I am and I could never write to that audience. Never took a single programming class. Self taught. No degree. I could, however, write to an audience of folks less advanced than I.

Don't ever sell yourself short as far as what you can write about