A Dollar Late And A Day Short

In terms of Systems/OS’s I’ve used to some degree or another, I think the list goes…As an adolescent I was warmed by the black and green glow of an Apple IIc, then the family packed up, loaded the covered wagon, headed for the open prairie, transitioned to IBM based systems and moved on to DOS Shell.  As I grew older I met such irritable interfaces as Win 3.x.  In elementary school we had Macs.  Fuzzybear and Mavis Beacon taught me with their dispassionate logic of gently correcting when you made a mistake and beating you with a rubber hose if you typed too slowly.  When visiting friends grandparents we would play with a toy named Tandy.  Like all visits to grandparents the toys are awesome, yet woefully out of date so that awesomeness is missed in the eyes of youth.

As I grew into a teenager the family used Windows 95 and then 98, yes I was even introduced to their creepy uncle Bob.  Many a Social Studies project was directly and wholly sourced from Encarta.  In school we had continued exposure to various iterations of Macs.  Since much like STD’s and illicit drugs, Apple believed firmly in the hook um young and keep them as a customer for life philosophy.

Then I went off to college and in the fecundity of morally ambiguous choices freshman year hooked up with a sultry copy of Windows XP from this dude who was “totally” a Microsoft Software Rep or something.  Then as I grew wiser and wanted to broaden my horizons, and test my paitence, I entered my experiemental period where I dipped my toe into the seedy dank, oh so dank, backroom world of Linux and fell in with the Red Hat crowd.  At somepoint in college I met the blacksheep of the Windows family ME.  As I watched it sitting in the corner chewing on paste I thought it best to not hang out with it a whole lot.

As I grew and saw my academic career winding to a close, I entered into my student teaching .  Here I met with this candy corn shaped oddity called the iMac.  Much like true candy corn I still believe that the iMac can rot your teeth, stomach and soul.  It was without a doubt the most broken, faulty, crash ridden computer I’ve ever had the misfortune of using.  Much like teachers once they get tenure, this computer which entered the school with dreams and hopes of being a conduit of knowledge to it’s pupils was beaten and broken by the rarely washed, hormonal hordes of 8th Graders that stormed the halls.

Then I entered my mid twenties and found that sultry copy of Windows XP had ditched the skin tight pleather of those heady college years for sweat pants that were still form fitted enough to remind of the goods underneath, but you could get comfortable with and just settled down and watch a DVD on.

As life goes, I settled into a career and much like the red head you smile at a little too much at the bar, I hooked up Win XP 64bit.  It was safe, same economic group, it cleans up well and you and introduce it to your parents, but you’re thinking maybe this is the OS that still puts the pleather on from time to time and goes out to the bars.  Then I found out that XP 64 held some very elitist views and wouldn’t associate with most of my trusty old friends.  Won’t play Warcraft 2, it can eat my ass.  Oh like all redheads, the hopes were high, the install was crazy, and then you learned that sparkle of excitement in its eye was actually the crazy trying to break out.

As I sit here closer to 30 than 20 with XP 64 on my desktop, since I have too much pride to admit some form fitting sweat pants are a pretty good thing; and Win 7 Ultimate, I’m a pig I know I hooked up with the hotter younger OS, on my laptop.  I knew that Vista the middle sister got passed around like a party favor by that crowd in college, so I stayed away completely.  I look back and have to admit I’ve dabbled around with a good bit of the modern mainstream operating systems.  In my personal opinion the best thing you can do is find the operating system that works for you.

There are fanboys in all the camps, and the simple truth is, that is all they are, fan boys.  With a desperate need to justify their personal choices they nerd rage against the world.  Personally I think, buying a cutting edge Mac is like dating the head cheerleader, it’ll get you status with the people who think that’s important and it’ll cost you an arm and a leg.  If you invest the same amount in an IBM based system you’ll have a computer you know inside and out and can really love for years to come. You mistreat any system and it won’t support you, give it a little love and it’ll stay there with you until it’s hard drives seize and heat sinks fail.

Just stay away from the redheads and Vista, and you’ll do alright.