Sunday, April 01, 2007

I Have No Self-Control

It finally happened. The amount of money in my savings account climbed high enough, Amazon had a deal, and the rest is history. I picked up a 15" MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo for $1850 + shipping. I had it next-day air-mailed straight to my office. 25 hour and 15 minutes later, I was ripping open the plastic wrap.

So far, I'm going through a sorta weird withdrawal. At the expense of sounding like a fanboy, everything just worked out of the box. It was easy, too easy. I marveled at the fact that pretty much everything was set up the way I'd have wanted it. With a new Windows box, I usually go through an entire ritual of setting up my folders, configuring system preferences, rearranging my start bar items, and so on. It can take many hours before I actually feel like I can be productive. With my Mac, I felt like I had accomplished most of everything in about 30 minutes, even at newbie-speed.

From a programming perspective, I am extremely excited. I want to be programming on a Unix-based OS. I have Ubuntu running on my old laptop, but the machine is just too broken down for me to spend any real time with it. I immediately jumped into Ruby, as I have been playing with Ruby for several months now. I wrote a quick Google stock quote scraper and it felt real good writing it using TextMate. It's amazing how much happier I feel without the integrated debugger, intellisense, etc., that Visual Studio has. That stuff is just so bulky that I feel like I can't breathe unless I'm running it on a super computer.

My next step is to see about joining some open source software initiatives. I always strayed away from open source collaborations because I just didn't feel right trying to participate using a Windows machine, even for open source Windows projects.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Well said.