Brave New World Part 2

[Writers Plot]

Posted by Lorraine (L.L.) Bartlett

Here at Casa Ivy Bend, we've been living in a computer crisis, so following Sheila's lead, I thought I'd blog about it.

My husband is self-employed as a cartographer, and his Mac G3 has been dying a slow and painful death. We really had no choice but to buy a new one, and Sunday was the day. And since I had (re)training money from my former employer, I bought one, too.

Getting a new computer is about as stressful as getting married. You do a lot of planning and research, and then one day you get the thing and you're "committed." For better or for worse.

My first couple of computers were in DOS-land (as far back as 1980 or 1981), and then I switched to Macs for 20+ years. But 2.5 years ago I decided to go to a PC because my Mac version of Word was so old I couldn't do anything with it and my publisher(s) wanted Word documents. So switch I did.

Now going back to Mac-land is difficult. Everything has changed so much since my PowerMac, and I really do not like the new skinny (streamlined) keyboard. No problem! I just got on the Internet and ordered the same keyboard I have for my PC (which hubby tells me is "big and horsey." Who cares. It's the best keyboard I've ever had--and I've had a lot of them over the years).

But buying the new computer (while I'm still using the PC) meant buying a lot of other stuff, too. New office chair; new plastic floor mat to protect my oak floor from new chair; new mouse pad (you're not supposed to need one with an optical mouse, but I'm using an old paint-stained farm table as a desk, and Mighty Mouse didn't like it). And mind you, I'd just bought a new 19" flat screen monitor for the PC a week ago.

I had hard-wired broadband, but now we've got Wifi for all three of our computers. Whoa! Kewl. But logging in with the iMac was a bit of a shock. Lots of my screens on my favorite sites look drastically different. I tried to do this post on the iMac, but everything was off-kilter. Pictures post in HTML instead of ... well, pictures. And what happened to the spell check?

Then again, one of the very best things about having the iMac is fewer plugs and wires. There's only one. Everything plugs right into the back of the monitor and doesn't hang on the floor to catch monster-sized dust bunnies. Okay, I don't yet have a printer to plug in. They didn't have any in stock because they'd sold so many computers in the last week. They're only getting x-amount in this week, and we only have 14 days to get our "free" (think rebate) printer or else we're skunked.

The learning curve on this baby is proving to be pretty steep. But at least I have another place to store my manuscripts and other important data. According to computer lure, this PC will probably explode in another 6 months and be totally useless, which is why I wanted to have some kind of back-up.

I'm now committed to an iMac...but I'm not really sure I trust it. Yet.