The Dark Side

As I sit here re-re-uploading images to a site where I'm hoping to order some prints, I'm just realizing how tired I sometimes get of being a Mac guy and being incompatible with simply everything. These people evidently don't want my files. I've tried three different browsers and two FTP clients, and finally got one of the FTP clients to work, but then *poof!* the files disappeared, along with the album that contained them, so I get to spend another 45 minutes or so uploading them AGAIN to see if they'll "take" this time. And the galling thing is they're not even MY pictures... doing someone a favor, and as the saying goes, "no good deed goes unpunished."

So, is it time to go over to the dark side and get a "Windows" machine of some sort? Seems some can be had ridiculously cheap, so maybe it would be worth getting one just for times like this when there's something I want to do, but a PC would make it much easier. Or the times when someone is asking ME questions about how to do someting on their PC, at least I'd have a way of looking at the same menus and shit they're looking at.

"Oh, but Gary, the NEW Intel Macs can run Windows, too!" -- I highly doubt it, honestly. I messed around with "Virtual PC" and those other emulation things back in the day, and they were virtual useless. I have a hard time believing it's going to be any better now, plus I'd have to buy the emulation software AND a copy of Windows (Not Vista), and for that I can practically get a cheap Dell with it's own monitor and everything.

My so-called state-of-the-art Mac's performance has been less than impressive over the past 11 months. Sometimes, the beach ball of doom just will NOT go away. Who knows? Maybe I'm unwittingly hosting dodgy websites which is using all my CPUs and DSL bandwidth, but Apple doesn't acknowledget that problems can occur, therefore there are no decent diagnostic tools to determine just WTF is going on under the hood. Read this week that someone has written one of the first "Trojan Horse" malware programs that will target Macs, too... maybe it's just the first one they've found.

And to top it off, Apple stock has dropped 10% or so in the past couple days, along with the rest of the collapsing market...

The dark can sometimes be good, though, as evidenced by Lynz and Penny, yet again.