Not much been written here recently, has there? I am a bad blogger, possibly.
Anyway, what's been going on? Well, on Christmas Day my old Mac laptop died. It just refused to boot. Richard lent me a another Mac laptop so I got all the data off it, but it seems to be just dead enough to be annoying (I can get the Happy Mac but no further.) Of course, I've not been working since September, so I could hardly justify running off and buying a new Mac, but thankfully Simon who I live with had a spare-ish laptop that I've been borrowing shamelessly since then.
Hence, I've undertaken a longer foray into either Windows or Linux than I've managed for years otherwise. I found a really nice desktop manager (called further), seen KDE and Gnome for myself and been distinctly underwhelmed, learned how to use Putty, realised bootstrapping wireless drivers is a pain in the arse, and generally come to pine for Macness.
Finally, this week, I've got far enough through the jobhunting world to acquire a job offer. As a result I've gone and bought a Mac laptop so I can actually get some work done. As I was walking back from the wonderful place in Walthamstow I got it from (they're called Shaye, and it's run by some very nice Jewish people; it's a motherlode of old Apple hardware (they have the gorgeous Applevision 17" displays that are controlled via ADB, for example), gazing at the silloutte of the electricity pylons marching up the Lee Valley, I realised that I was like Cypher in the Matrix.
He's given the choice of freedom, but eventually turns it down for the comfort of his illusions. I've been wandering in the Linux world, where I'm free to choose any window manager, any text editor, any graphical file manager, any shell; in fact, it's all there for me to change. And I've turned my back on it, for home use, anyway. I like the coddled, happy world of BBEdit, of the Finder, of Airport drivers that hide all the complexity. Sure, I'll still have Linux boxes at home and at work, but if past experience is anything to go by, they'll be there as heavy lifting, not primary machines (although maybe I should give learning Emacs another go or two).
This isn't anything particularly new. But then, at some point, I do feel the need to explain stuff like this.