Kool-Aid Redux

As Becky and I talked last night, I realized that this odd passion I’m starting to grow for the Mac world is a distant echo of a me from long ago.

In 1991, I was first introduced to OS/2, and really found it to be superior to the operating systems running around out there. It was great as a server, it was great as a desktop, and I became something of a zealot for the OS. Evangelize I did, and soon I had a lot of folks in Chattanooga running OS/2 Warp. It was good — IBM boofed the marketing, and despite some mainstream commercials, it just couldn’t capture the wind that the Microsoft sail had caught. I still think that the thing that killed ’em was no mainstream 3rd party applications. Nothing killer out there that made OS/2 “the way” to do something. It died on the vine, and I found myself moving to the only game in town — Windows 95 — and there I stayed for a decade.

Now though, I feel that same kind of evangelical, zealous, almost fiber of being sense with my new iMac. The commercials were right. A few clicks, and you’re on your way, surfing, burning, ripping, watching….. doing. And that’s cool. I want to feed the creative side of my brain, rather than the side that deals with making sure everything’s working, and trying to figure out how to make everything work together. I want a tool for my home, not another sysadmin job.

Beck sees this passion for the Mac in me, and I do too. It’s nice to have a passion again, and it’s nice to feed that part of me. The challenge of a new world, so to speak, is helping awake parts of my brain that I’ve neglected outside of the office, and it feels good.

The thing I’m the most impressed by is the interconnectivity. For example, I’m importing my CD collection into iTunes. I had gone through this exercise once before, but I have more disk space, and a desire for better sound, along with more seachable data through Spotlight. iTunes is figuring out duplicates, helping manage file replacement as needed, and making it really easy to pull my massive music collection into a cohesive unit. I’d always thought about being able to “mood” my music — play tunes from the 80s, or electronic music, or an artist — and iTunes is flat giving me the path for doing that. Cool.

My next conquest will be iPhoto. I’ve already started adding metadata through Photoshop CS2, and I expect I will be able to make a much more usable environment out of my photo archive.

My iMac is becoming the center of my digital lifestyle — I think I lifted that from some advert somewhere. But it’s so true!