late yesterday afternoon, we pulled into the driveway in berkeley, ending a two-week car and ferry road trip from fairbanks, alaska. the journey was chock full of staggering scenery, immense emptiness, and cultural oddities. and no phone calls, few newspapers, no need to get up early. our seven-year old honda, 135,000 miles on the odometer, chugged along without problems. ah, simplicity. bliss. travel is a great way to savor life.
My God, the oysters! we drove through Fanny Bay (east coast of Vancouver Island) and by Willapa Bay (Washington coast near Oregon border). South Bend had a sign out: “World’s Best Oysters.” we stopped at a seafood store where I sampled smoked oysters, mid-sized Willapas, smoked albacore, and some tiny Willapa yearlings. I bought a shooter of six yearlings to go. down the road a bit we saw a sign in front of a dilapidated diner: Fresh Grilled Oysters. an oil-drum smoker out front was belching smoke. had to stop. I had a dozen grilled oysters after chatting with the griller at some length. pure heaven. the shooter yearlings were dessert. at another stop, i downed a half dozen Fannies and a bucket of clams; f-r-e-s-h. I ordered another half dozen oysters for dessert. at other stops i devoured razor clams (gigantic things; think paillard of clam), “steamer clams” (what the locals call Manila clams), halibut, salmon, and petrale.
once back in berkeley, i slipped my thinkpad into the docking station and flipped the switch. time to reconnect with the world. error 0000. cannot read boot sector. a few hours later, i still could not get beyond the error messages. i thought back on recent blog posts by mark oehlert and david weinberger. why do i torture myself with this pandora’s box bloatware operating system? windows is starting to feel like a humongous, dilapidated RV (we saw lots of those on the trip); it’s klutzy and inelegant; it stomps my work with a huge complexity footprint.
in 1982 when i bought my first in a long line of IBM PCs, the PC was the hot ticket. it was, as the name says, a business machine. today the action has moved from the desktop to the web. web connectivity may flake out, but it’s not going to disappear forever as did my PC’s hard drive. relationships (the web) trump nodes (the desktop).
i plan to buy a mac to use as a terminal and to make the web my primary platform.
mac users are a classic community of practice. they take pride in belonging to the apple club; they go nuts when steve jobs is on stage; they view the rest of the computing community as clueless. i hope the mac-heads will welcome my into the club. i know i will have a lot of questions.
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
Dang, if I knew you were going down to the Washington State Long Beach Penninsula I would have pointed you to my haunts. You found a few! But it is a rich seafood area.
Sorry to hear about your computer problems. Best of luck with the Mac transition … it has gone great for me.
M.
Jay, I welcomed you into the club when you got your mini! You and anyone else are always welcome as far as I’m concerned. (I’m surprised/dismayed that Marc Rosenberg and Bob Mosher both reported that they’d had bad experiences going to buy Macs?!?)
I believe we’re seeing more and more folks eschewing convention and going for the superior user interface, and I’d expect the elearning community, concerned as it is with people and familiar with technology, to lead the charge. If you have any trouble at all, just give me a call.
It’s about time. Welcome to the club. We’re here if you have any questions.
But, be forewarned: A lot of those free Mac apps will tempt you to NOT use the Web as your platform. They’re pretty.
E
Boy, you folks are confirming my hypothesis that Mac users are a community of practice. I’m happy to join the group. Everything is now going through the Mac Mini.
My computer woes were probably a blessing in disguise.
Yesterday I carted my ThinkPad x60s, dock, and a variety of related junk down to the basement.
If memory serves, that was my sixth ThinkPad. I’ve also owned portables from Toshiba, Dell, Gateway, Sony (2) and Compaq; and owned desktops from Gateway (3), Sony, an original IBM-PC, and others. These are all on my own nickel. I’ve been good about pruning my software collection so I’ve only got four or five cartons of CDs and manuals to recycle. This is like going on a diet that really works!
Sorry to hear you’re becoming a Mac zealot again. Perhaps after going through a couple of overpriced MacBooks, you’ll head back to a PC.
Personally, despite being online twenty four hours a day, I’d hate to use the web as a primary platform. Particularly when the connection goes down for a few hours and everything is inaccessible.
austin, zealotry is fun. you’re correct about the web as platform; i envision a mixed approach.
Welcome back. I gotta go see my brother in Alaska soon, so your experience is wonderful – saw some of the photos. I will fly, of course. He flys there from Maine every 2 weeks.
Brave to tackle the Alaska Highway. I would need a load o podcasts to listen to on the radio for the boring stretches.
WELCOME to MAC. I’ve been Mac, of course, since 1984, so as a grand-daddy of the clan I will be happy to help you out with almost anything. Have you noticed that in any creative group meeting these days there are about 2/3 Macs in the crowd?
We’ve been using GOogle Docs with WONDERFUL success over the past few months. For folks who are almost always online this is a wonderful way to collaborate on documents without having to ship DOC files around and get confused. It eliminates confusion, makes things simple, and exports to usable formats when you’re done writing your group document.
Welcome back, man!
{ 2 trackbacks }