Mac or PC?

This is a Mac.

And this, is a PC.

Yes, here's some useful pub quiz information: Apparently, according to a follow-up Mac/PC survey conducted by collective intelligence site - Hunch, riders of scooters particularly the Vespa, are more prone to use a Mac rather than a PC. Well, I don't own a Mac, not yet anyway, but I do wish that my ancient PC was a bit quicker and looked a bit cooler.


So, which one are you? A Mac or a PC? Or should that be a Vespa or a Harley...?






- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

The Good, the Bad and the Apple TV

Things were a lot simpler when I was a kid. I loved playing with my Lego and it was as simple as it could gt back then. The Lego dude in the black armour with the mean looking red dragons on its chest and shield was the baddie. The dude in the shining silver (well, actually grey) armour with golden lions on the breastplate and shield was obviously the good guy. Everything and everyone had its role or place.


So, on returning home last summer, I was delighted to discover that my mother had carefully stored away my Lego collection and was even more delighted to see my kids enjoying playing with them. My son was so impressed with his Daddy's 80's (and even some 90's) Lego that he even talks about it to this day even though I've bought him a couple of his own Lego sets. It must be the simplicity of it all. The good guys were clearly the good guys and the bad guys not only looked bad, they were clearly bad-ass.


These days, it's actually quite tough to explain things to kids. Wanting to immerse my kids in the world of Star Wars, I had planned to start from where Mr. Lucas himself intended the saga to start - from the newer Episode I but, after giving it some thought I decided on not doing so. I could only imagine WTF?!? expressions on my kids faces when I try to explain the issues going through a teenage Anakin's mind. Skywalker Senior's clearly one confused dude and his one minute good, one minute bad character and actions would certainly be too much for little children to process so, I stuck with little goody-two-shoes Luke's story first. They can watch Episodes I to III when they're bigger. Plus, I'm doing them a favour anyway by keeping them from the ultra-annoying Jar Jar Binks for as long as possible.

The same goes with cartoons on the telly these days. The good thing is there are gadgets like the Apple TV around. Having bought the thing so that I can enjoy movies in the comfort of my own home while saving a trip to the video rental store, I was pleasantly surprised by how addictive YouTube can be when viewed through the Apple device.


Not wanting to turn my YouTube watching time with the kids into a Barney fest of non-rhyming and annoying songs, I used the good experience with the Lego and thought of the cartoons that I used to watch when I was a kid. He-Man seems to be a hit with the kids and like the Lego, it was also so simple. More of the same please...

Help! Upgrade needed

I own a computer. A laptop, if I were to be more accurate. And, if I were to liken my computer to an animal, mine would be a dinosaur. Like most dinosaurs we know of today, my computer lives in that netherworld between life and death – a fossil. OK, mostly dead but occasionally popping up in some desert in the middle of nowhere just as a reminder that it was once the bee’s knees.

Yes, my computer (if you can call it that these days) is nearing the end of its life. It’s pretty much on life support at the moment. I’ve got a fan/cooler thingy plugged into it but as soon as I plug it out, it gets all asthmatic and refuses to work.

The memory modules on it have been upgraded to as much as it can take while I think I upgraded the hard drive to its now oh-so glorious 40GB capacity!

It’s not like I demand high-end usage out of it. I don’t use it for gaming nor do is use it for any fancy graphics work. It’s strictly for browsing the www and even at that, it fails horribly. Some days I could get away with a good hour or so out of it. Other days, it won’t even start up. Firefox works sometimes. Safari, even less so. I’ve not bothered installing any other browsers for fear that the thing might just implode, leaving me computer-less. And that would be a horrifying thought.

So, having endured the pain for so long, I’ve decided to end my misery and get myself an all-new computer. But which one do I go for?

Since I’ve started blogging recently, the ability to blog would be my base requirement. I know it sounds like a pretty basic requirement but if you’ve been working on the piece of fecal matter that I’ve had to work with all this while, you’d understand.

Next up would be the ability to mess around with images with relative ease. Relative ease being the key words here so, that should bring the specs up by a few notches. As a continuation of that, handling video without strange beeps and whirrs coming from the computer’s innards would be nice as well. I’d finally get to properly edit all that video footage that’s been lying around the house, collecting dust. All untouched and rarely seen again ever since they were first taken. A few of them almost a decade old at this stage.

There’s also the question whether I join the hordes of Steve Jobs converts and switch to one of the Macs. At first, my initial impression was that Macs were just for iPonces but after the good experience I’ve had with iTunes, an Airport Express and an iPod Mini, I’ve slowly warmed-up to the Macs although I still wasn’t fully sold at that stage.

That quickly changed as soon as I started messing around with a friend’s iPhone recently. After a couple of minutes on it, I was hooked. Absolutely hooked. Intuitive is a common buzz word when one is trying to sell tech-type stuff like this but, in the iPhone’s case, I personally think that all the hype is justified.

Having experienced the iPhone, I’d definitely consider having one of the iMacs on my shortlist of things to buy. When will I finally get myself that? I don’t know. With this bleeding recession going on, that shortlist is a bit of a misnomer at this stage.