Two weeks ago, after eighteen solid years of PC use, I bought a Mac, and embarked on what I hope will be (to borrow a phrase from I Heart Tech’s Adriana Linares a productive and happy bi-OS relationship. But don’t get the wrong idea. I’m not a new Mac user; to the contrary, I’m a very old one. For me, buying a Mac wasn’t about embarking on a road to new technology, instead, it’s nostalgia, a trip back to a place in time when I first opened my eyes to the power and possibility of technology.
I started using Macs (or back the, the Mac SE) when I entered law school in 1985. (In my senior year in college, I’d dabbled with word processing systems, but they were too complicated, so at the end of the day, I resorted to my trusty electric typewriter). During my first year of law school, I’d trek over to the computer center on campus and wait my turn for a computer so that I could type up my assignment. In the early days, I’d simply type up a draft that I’d written by hand, but as I grew more adept, I learned to think and compose my documents as I sat by the screen.
At the end of my first year of law school, I was angered that the law school student newspaper wouldn’t publish what was considered a “controversial article” (I had criticized the quality of my law school’s pass-fail legal writing program after twenty percent of the class (not me) flunked the test and had to retake the course). So I turned to the Mac to start my own competing paper. I painstakingly typeset articles on a Mac at the local Kinkos and cut and paste them to resemble newspaper columns. My little underground newspaper, the Dissent, was hardly radical (imagine, articles on adding clinical programs or basing grades on more than just one exam or increasing the diversity of law review!), but it enraged the faculty. Each time a professor sent me a nasty note or called the paper a “rag” (no lie), I realized that I had the power to affect people with just my words and a means of production – the Mac.
Technology blogger Amit Agarwal has posted the mysterious keyboard shortcut for deleting messages in Gmail:
I do so love Google Calendar. It gets so much done, it’s so elegant, and it keeps me away from the dreaded Microsoft Exchange Server. But it doesn’t sync to my Treo.
I’m notoriously difficult to get through to on the phone. Someone calls my office when I’m on the road, they call the cell phone when I’m at home and don’t have the phone on my hip, the home phone rings and I’m getting coffee.
