If life were an apple.

It's been a little less than a year than I have this machine now: PowerBook G4 17". It was a graduation present from my parents, and I do love my parents, hehe.

Mmm... well, to make a long story short (not!) this the letter I wrote to the Apple Switch guys:

I recently graduated as an Electronic Systems Engineer. My parents, lovely as they are, bought me a 17" G4 PowerBook as a graduation present as they knew that I wanted one for some time. Beautiful machine, but such beauty can be intimidating and, I say this from experience from my past PC laptops, deceiving.

At first, I was little suspicious with my PowerBook, trying to see past the pretty interface to what's on the bottom. I knew there's a UNIX system there... I've heard of the Darwin Project before the MacOS X came along, being a Linux lover myself. First, I thought "If there's a UNIX system under all this, I could bring up an X11 environment and should be able to compile any linux program with a graphic interface and run it without problems". So I bring up the X11 environment that Apple already gives you out of the box, downloaded xlincity (nice simcity-like linux game) and it's appropriate libraries with fink (which I think everyone should have) and voila! Up and running with no glitch whatsoever... my saved games were even saved on my user folder.

I try (and the word "try" is very appropriate here) to challenge the Mac every day. I've spent hours trying to make it crash, or at least see it slowed a bit. Once I even came up with the idea to convert a huge home movie on ffmpegx from DV to AVI, watch a DVD on the DVD
player and do a project using Microsoft Visual Basic running on Virtual PC at the same time to see it suffer. To my satisfied despair, everything was up and running beautifully. I do in fact dare any PC user out there to do that on a Windows box and I'll tell you what you'll need: "Movie Converter" for windows, Visual Basic, and any DVD player. Now, if you want Windows to do this without crashing, you need at least 1 Gb of RAM, a 256 Mb Video Card, two processors and a whole lot of praying; you'd surely notice that I'm describing a server... a server! My PowerBook is actually more powerful than the server used at my work for Internet access and user file storage that grants service to more than 100 users.

Finally, it daunt on to me: because of my academic background, I depend very much on the architecture of the company that has hired me to implement an electronic systems project, being that Windows, UNIX and its variants or Macintosh. Now, I can do any project of any of these architectures right on one machine.

This has never happened to me before: I have a powerful, very powerful, machine that actually looks good. Before, when I had a laptop that I knew was stable, nobody would comment on it because its exterior wasn't that appealing. And when I had a pretty laptop, and people would tell me that it was nice, I would reply that it wasn't nice that it was crashing at least once a day. Now, when people say that my laptop is beautiful, I just answer "I know".

Yeah... I do love my PowerBook. =)

Actually the reason why I starteg blogging again is because this new widget called dashBlog that's just beautiful: new thought comes into my head and up it goes to my blog. So expect more from me, jeje.