Evening - and I'm sitting here tap-tap-tapping away on the new laptop.

That's right - I said new laptop. Something keeps me from keeping one in working condition for more than 3 years. I often wonder if there's some electrical charge associated with some part of me that accounts for this periodic self-destruction of portable computer equipment....

In any event - after the Sony ate part of a chapter I was writing yesterday morning (then had a nervous breakdown, rebooted itself several times, looked at me sadly and said 'it's not you, it's me...' and then displayed the Blue Screen of Death repeatedly from 3 p.m til 6 p.m....) I marched into the nearest den of computer geeks and asked for advice.

About 1/2 an hour later and minus several shekels, I walked out of the store with a MacBook Pro and into a brave new world of dashboards and docks, widgets and menulets (which sounds ever so like something I learned to dance in fourth grade...) - and hopefully - finally - some sort of binary stability.

That's right, my friends....I drank the KoolAid.

Thankfully, I've worked with different operating systems in the past. Wildly different in some ways. My first computer was a Commodore 64 with a tape drive. From there I graduated to a Commodore 128 and ran a BBS from my bedroom. I wrote my first major paper on Lexy's Mac back in the long-ago...in the before-time. Then I went kicking and screaming into the PC world for nearly 18 years. I did spend some interesting weekends pulling together the Monitor Center imagery out of our Photography Department's Macs (after a crash-course from the wonderful Sydney who ran off to Indianapolis....)

So I'm not a complete foreigner on these shores.

These beautifully, luminescent, virus-free shores...