Is this a MacBook I see before me?

Why, yes, it is. I have acquired a new toy! After working since 1982 almost exclusively with Microsoft's Windows operating system (with a few blissful years on IBM's OS/2 and a foray into Sun's Unix, Red Hat Linux and then Suse Linux, and VM and MVS just to hit the high spots) I have purchased my first Mac.

I have worked with Macs before, in the 1980s. ( Yes, I'm old, thus this blog exploring questions in my 42nd year on the planet.) Back then I found Macs extremely aggravating. It wasn't the boxy shape, it wasn't the funky clicking of the keyboard, but it was the most annoying little icon of a smiling computer that smiled out at me every time I went to the computer lab at my University that turned me off Macs. That may seem odd - it does to me - but the touchy-feely, "don't be afraid", kid-gloves approach was just too condescending for me to live with.

So now I'm exploring this new Mac - I've had it for 2 days now and no smiley faces yet, so we're doing well. Some interesting mental shifts have had to be made. Instead of picking a file and then right-mouse-button clicking to "open with" whatever program I felt like using at the time as I did on Windows I've decided to give all the native Mac applications a go. I've found I was actually getting quite manic about choosing which program to open on Windose - I was flipping back and forth between Opera and Firefox - Excel and Open Office Calc - MSWord and Open Office Writer and Notepad - it was all getting quite focussed on the application rather than what I wanted to do with it.

So I'm using TextEdit to write up a draft of this post - I didn't feel like using the blogger editing tool today. TextEdit seems to be a step up from Notepad, it does flag a word that it thinks is spelt wrong, but I don't think it has a correction facility - nope, I can't find one.

I just found out the Mac comes with a dictionary - with Canadian spellings for me Yay! (even though TextEdit thinks humour is spelt wrong, silly thing, and the dictionary gives the definition of humor for the word humour, it does still have humour there) - and it also has a thesaurus and a link to Wikipedia in the dictionary application. Now that was good thinking on someone's part! It's a giant leap from MSWord that guesses about your spelling and often "corrects" misspelling by using the wrong word - homonyms are deadly for MSWord. I like having a dictionary an easy click away, rather than a program doing guessing at which word I meant to use!

So far, so good. I like this Mac. It's not smiling, but I am, that's good. Now I'm off to explore some more applications...