Pickle Zombie

For the record, I’m none too good a this dating business, meself. To pick a word: abortive. That I can be timid times might come as a shock, but there’s a certain chemistry about a pretty lady that is neuroparalytic to me. Danielle and I met over World of Warcraft, this digital threshold allowing some actual conversation to pass between us before the inevitable eye-are-ell meeting and resulting hermit crab effect. By then we had already built a relationship on a foundation of phat lewts and "aggro" jokes. Worked out well, methinks.

I just installed Windows 7 and VMware Fusion on my Macbook Pro, and the results are startling. I was promised my Windows applications running seamlessly on my Mac desktop, and despite the fantastic nature of those absurd claims I have not been disappointed. I am one of those guys who’s used to registry diving and DLL navigation and all sorts of other arcane rituals to grease the cogs of these thinking machines, but once again the Mac disarms me with it’s simplicity of operation. Boot Camp had me a bootable Windows partition in three easy steps, and VMware allowed me to virtualize it in real-time with the same lack of unforeseen hassle. Now to be fair, the hardware I’m packing under the lid didn’t cost a dollar, and this particular project represents a software investment to the tune of three hundred ducats, but that extra money has translated directly into a certain seamlessness of technology that renders my surgical knowledge of drive mounting protocols useless. This is a good thing.

The end result is something I find rather profound. This computer can now straddle the dual worlds of Apple and Microsoft almost without compromise, making the whole Mac vs. PC argument moot. I’ve transcended platform. I can do anything, any time. All I need now is an Ubuntu partition and I can represent all three facets of desktop computing systems simultaneously. But at the same time I suppose there needs to some acknowledgement of the underlying framework of hardware and software that hosts this vergence of electronic cultures with grace, diplomacy, and the occasional brutal sanction to reassert it’s dominance over my computing experience.

Specifically, the Windows video and battery drivers are almost certainly deliberately crippled to hamper power performance in the alternate operating systems. This is a tangental issue for me as the functions Windows can perform that the native OS X cannot are all in the high-performance arena to begin with, and are thus usually only viable when the computer is tethered to the city power grid anyway. Still the obvious implication is that if one were to so desire, they could not really adopt anything but Apple’s OS X as their primary, or only operating system. Some would call that sinister, others savvy. Personally, I think it a boon that a maker of such proprietary hardware would allow this much functional to cross over into their competitor’s fields.

Besides, I love all my operating systems equally, so I don’t mind having to pick a certain one, the best one, to manage the rest.

Ja.