Welcome to the “Dark Side”

What’s this?  A blog update?

One of my friends recently purchased an Alienware pc, so last Sunday, not to be left out, I went and purchased an Apple Mac-Mini.  I’d been longing for an Apple to play around with ever since my wife got her iMac a few years ago.  Well my bonus check was in and the time was right…

Roughly the size of 5 cds stacked on top of each other, this thing kicks some  serious butt…so much so that I’ll be darned if this little box hasn’t become my “computer of choice” for darn near everything.

The model I picked up has an 80gig hard disk, 512meg of memory, wireless, and bluetooth.  It’s also running Apple’s latest version of OSX, code-named “Tiger” (See lengthy technical review here.)  When I got it home I plugged it into a KVM switch so it could share my 22-inch NEC Monitor with my XP gaming machine. 

That XP machine has been booted exactly once since Sunday.

Apple’s email is better than Thunderbird – and I love Thunderbird.  The spam filtering is so far and away superior that it’s not even funny.  I get a lot of spam…300-400 emails a day…and Thunderbird would routinely miss a couple hundred of that.  The 20 or so real emails that I get a day would be intermingled amongst that garbage and it became a daily grind that I loathed.  In the two days I’ve been using it as my primary mail client, Apple Mail has missed at most 4 emails a day.

That’s simply phenomenal, but it’s only part of the story.  Apple Mail has a feature that you can use to set up “smart folders”.  When mail hits your inbox, it scurries off per your directions.  Newsletters sift into a folder, mail from family and friends automatically goes into another.  It’s clean, fast, and totally configurable in less than 5 minutes.  This is the way mail is supposed to work. 

There’s more…the Dashboard and Spotlight and all of the “iTools”, I could go on for hours.  Suffice it to say that I’m using PC for World of Warcraft, and the Mac for everything else.  I’m a convert.

In other news, I played paintball again last weekend.  I spent most of the morning getting my Shocker set up, but after I got it squared away I got a good amount of play in.  My buddy Joel joined me and we did some damage despite the early rain.  Finishing the Sunday on the deck with a couple of beers was just about perfect.

Time for some links:

A worthwhile rant about healthcare…

Cheap Cooking

Stuff confiscated at airport security – now for sale on Ebay

Seven Deadly (gummy) Sins

One Man Safari

Well that’s it for now…I’ll close by saying:  My computer has a Hula Girl.  Does yours?