Evening all!
Long time no hear, but you know what it's like: travel, travel,
travel....
As I am sitting here with my trusty old 500 MHz iBook in the Servisair
Lounge at London Heathrow. Surrounded by Dells, Gateways, and HPs, I
can't help but noticing that I am the only Apple user sitting in this
rather busy lounge.
How many of you portable Apple geeks feel the same way, I find
myself asking. These days finding two Apple users in the same room
creates the same sort of response Citroen 2CV drivers were used to in
the eighties - happy and gleeful waving, knowing one drives a superior
but almost extinct car.
Additionally to that, I seem to be eyeing Pentiums and AMDs these
days, running OpenBSD and SuSe 8.2 very successfully on two fairly old
desktop PCs, always thinking how wonderful the KDE desktop would be if
I would run it at 4 GHz instead of 200 kHz.
Yes, I admit it, I have been led astray by the *nixes and BSDs,
which are cheap, seem to work on cheap hardware, and run pretty well
these days. Over are the days when you had to have a PhD in informatics
and hardware design to install a Linux machine, as my SuSe OS installed
itself on my old Siemens Scenic M5 in one hour inclusive PPPoe and DSL
interface without me breaking into a sweat once.
Even my mother (who has a G3 upgraded 9600 running Mac OS 9.2) would be
able to install that, so we are already thinking about switching my
dad's old Pentium running Win 95 (he's the least computer literate in
our family) to a PII running Suse 8.2 and OpenOffice.
Additionally to all these temptations form the Linux/AMD people, my
Apple hardware has been falling apart: My 1 year old iPod seems to have
acquired the HD's click of death (clicking noises when connected to the
iBook, including crashing of the iBook's Finder), and my iBook's CD-ROM
drive is broken. I admittedly travel with these two items about 80,000
miles a year, and they receive a fair bashing by me and airline staff,
but still....
Then again, looking at the new G5s made me drool, but then, there
are some good looking small footprint MiniATX machines out these
days....
Anyway, these are petty thoughts about computers and little
lifestyle tidbits, when our thoughts should be with the Iraqi people
and the UN Staff in Baghdad, which seems to be suffering much more than
a clicking iPod.
Peace and out. 
