Strange

Friday, Mandy and I went out to dinner with a couple friends. At a cooking party last weekend I noticed that they had a copy of a "Born Into Brothels" a supposedly stirring documentary about children in India who are, evidently, born into brothels. I left the copy at their house, so we met up to pick it up. At dinner we were discussing religion and the topic of people going door-to-door to witness to strangers came up. There was much discussion about how to deal with these people. I brought up the fact that I had never once, in my life, had one of these people come to my door. Ever. No one believed me, but it was true. I had never seen them before.

The next morning two guys from a local Baptist church dropped by our apartment inquiring about
the status of our souls. I politely declined their advances and returned to the breakfast table where we discussed how it odd it was that we had just been discussing the same thing the night before.

This is my long, protracted way of explaining much purchase of a Mac. I've spent most of my life dissing the Mac. Mac's are for people who don't understand computers and want a simple / expensive path to digital enlightenment. It figured that if you had to spend 30% more to not have to know anything about IRQs, IDE Channels, and how hack your registry to get a program to work, you didn't deserve the computer. I still stand by this argument. The only difference is, I've discovered a cadre of Mac users who are quite adept as IT professionals. Many, like myself, are lapsed Microsoft people--people who have become so fed up with MS's desire to destroy the enabling forces of the internet, privacy, and self-determination, that they've gone to the only real competitor there is. The many people I know who use Macs as their primary computer also have version of Linux or Windows running on other drives, they're also primarily IT professionals who are sick of their computers crashing, data getting lost, and configuration problems.

While I doubt I'll be running Linux on my Mac anytime soon, I will be running the Final Cut Pro Production suite. This is a professional video editing and compositing suite built to take advantage of the dual 64-bit processors the new Intel Macs (Mac Pro Series) are sporting. I may go into more detail about the frustrations I've had trying to get MPEG2, Quicktime, and MP4 codecs to convert correctly in another post. The main point is, I need a machine that will edit and edit well. This will do that.

Alas, I have a Mac heading my way. I've joined the cult. The only difference between this cult and others is instead of shaving my head, I have to buy hair gel.

(P.S. I will post pictures of me buying the Mac as soon as I can get the memory card to work.)