September 29th It's been a rough and exhausting week Ever since reaching Macrebel camp, I've felt like the world has turned upside down. Everyone here is very friendly and helpful, and the landscape is so bright and shiny and...clean. Yet it's not home. I miss my old comfortable habits and familiar ways of doing things. I never appreciated how many tasks I did automatically, without ever having to think about them. How quickly I could perform. Now I have to pause before attempting the smallest function. I still haven't located the backward delete button. Thank god I found the bathrooms...
October 4th I'm weak. I'm a sissy. I couldn't take it anymore. I put Parallels on this Mac and created an underground tunnel to sneak back home to Win Land, just to see my docs for a few hours and maybe have a toolbar or two. How I've longed for a button-filled toolbar! All-in-all Parallels was easy to install, if you don't count the 45 minutes I wasted trying to figure out why I couldn't push the F8 key. An anguished late night call to an unsuspecting Macrebel friend elicited the Systems Preferences Fn key secret. It was all I needed to complete my mission. The rest of the night I uploaded all my old Windows software, checking guiltily over my shoulder for spies and laughing maniacally. Now, not only am I a traitor, I'm a traitor to my treachery. But oh! It's so nice to be back in familiar territory. To relax and work effortlessly, without having to look up every move in an user's manual. Still have not found the backward delete key on the MacBook Pro. How could I have missed it? Where's the backward delete key, I cry out. I hear only silence. October 11th I've been creeping back home under cover of darkness almost every night lately. I'm ashamed, of course, but I can't seem to help myself. The Macrebels make so much sense to me. Their rhetoric rings true, even if some of them do sound a bit fanatic. Change is desperately needed in this land. And who best to wrest power away from the greedy and stodgy Win-ists than their natural enemy, the Macrebels? Yet I can't shake my homesickness. I've tried my best to fit in here at camp. I dress all in black now and talk about design in abstractions as much as possible. But I'm so clumsy and obviously a new recruit. All of the tools here are impossible. Compared to Homesite, BBedit is so stark and...well, bare boned. There are no toolbar buttons; everything is hidden away in dropdown menus. Next to Paintshop Pro, Photoshop is a nightmare of incomprehensible palettes. And Entourage... God, don't get me started. Scheduling a meeting through the exchange server with Entourage is only slightly less difficult than programming a space shuttle. I fear I'll never catch on. Must go now. If I move fast, I can sneak home for a quick visit to my Outlook calendar and be back before dawn. To be continued...
