I'm over Macs. Mac users tend to like their machines a lot, and rave about the excellent service and such. Blah blah blah. My personal experience with Macs is that they aren't so great. The service isn't stellar either. I spent hours on the phone with a tech help guy who refused to acknowledge that my hard drive was down, and made me spend hours over the phone before agreeing to let me ship it back for repairs (this was about a year after I got the computer). It took them another 3 weeks of replacing everything single part to finally get to my hard drive (written on the report sheet). My labmate was able to tell me that my hard drive was down minutes after looking at it.

Most recently, I received further confirmation that lemons do exist in the land of Macs. The dear computer (hard drive down a year ago) mysteriously stopped working. Things were whirling, but the screen wouldn't show anything. Using an external screen didn't solve the problem. Trying to boot my computer in Target mode didn't work either (can't read the hard drive as an external drive). Unfortunately, the department messed up and didn't get me the 3-year Applecare plan, so instead of having slightly questionable repair people working on it, I have highly questionable people working on it instead. It's been 2 months, and I've given up on the Mac ever returning.

To be fair, it's important to share what I found good and bad about Macs, not just rave about the good things. It makes no difference, Mac or PC. It doesn't matter to most users who just want to read their e-mails and various websites and write word documents. On the other hand, if your hardware fails and you want a cheap replaceable part, PC is the way to go.

Anyway, the highlight of my day: One thing PC users can do that Mac users can't.

Limitations of my thought experiment

Shortly after I described my "Eat what you can kill" diet, I went to dinner with a couple of concerned labmates and had a serious discussion about my dietary philosophy. They rightly pointed out that my idea of killing was limited to me with a knife in hand, and a huge animal in front of me.

There are many ways to kill an animal. For instance, I could shoot it. I have to agree that shooting a beast is as impersonal as it can get, especially when it's 50 or more feet away. I actually don't have problems with hacking the carcass up so I am actually capable of killing and eating an animal.

I could also ram a car or some equally large vehicle into a poor beast. It's a waste to not consume road kill. Another easy possibility is seafood -- if I can take it out of water, it's mine to feast upon. That said, I am not sure about tuna.

I finally saw a tuna 2 years ago. It wasn't a tiny fish; it was huge. It didn't look as cute as a dolphin though. Is that why people worry about dolphin-friendly tuna, but not about the tuna? Anyway.

We then discussed other even more philosophical and scientific ideas. For instance, instead of Schrodinger's cat, I could have a Schrodinger's cow. If the cow happens to die due to reasons I can't control, I could eat it.

So yeah, I have to admit that it's a poorly defined criteria for determining what I can consume. There are too many impersonal ways to kill an animal, and it disturbs me to think that the same methods can be applied to a human being. I don't like this thought experiment too much. It's depressing, and I've gotten nothing done.

A thought experiment

I was reading the New Yorker (as usual) the other day, an article about a guy with a private navy who hunts down illegal fishing ships. It somehow got me thinking about the food I eat (again).

Can I kill the animal that I eat? If I can't go to the grocery store to get nicely cut beef, can I go to my hypothetical barnyard and kill the cow? If I can do that, then I'll eat it. So far, I figure I can probably kill a chicken so I could eat that. I'm not so sure about other types of meat though.

I'm one meal into this new "Eat only what you can kill" diet, not counting breakfast since I never have meat for breakfast. I'm not sure how long I'll last.

I've been eating way more meat since I moved to Cambridge, mostly because I can't get excited over the sparse variety of vegetables I find at my grocery store. I wonder if it's possible to go back to the way I was.

woohoo!

My computer died on the last Thursday of September, and finally today I have a new computer of my own. I've been borrowing a department laptop for over a month, and while it was helpful, it was also annoying that I couldn't install anything. It was an older computer so everything was a little out of date, including virus protection. It was slightly disturbing.

I've gone back to a PC. It was a hard decision to make until the tech guy in the department told me that if I were to buy a Mac, I really should go for a MacBook Pro, coz the MacBooks have inferior hardware. It was a hardware problem that sank the last notebook, and while I know I probably got a lemon, I can't face a Mac again for now. That pretty much settled it.

So hurray! I can use hyperlinks in my posts again, and the first article I'm linking is The Economic Consequences of Mr Bush. I know it's great -- a Vanity Fair magazine article by a Nobel laureate.