Sunday night Lisa and I watched “Blood Diamond”. It was a great movie, and I highly recommend that you watch it. The movie falls somewhere along the lines of “Beyond Borders” or “Hotel Rawanda”, though it doesn’t come across as so political. It’s captivating, well-executed, and thoroughly convicting.

By the end of the movie, I had been pushed across a line that I believe God has been leading me to for some time now: the rejection of American consumerism. We’ve built our society around the idea of having a “better life” by obtaining more stuff—an idea which is, quite frankly, idolatrous. We spend thousands of dollars on shiny rocks which prove no purpose other than to prove that we have more than the next person and to incite covetousness. What we lack in character we try to make up for in Bling.

So there will be no new laptop for me this fall. I have a perfectly useful (albeit heavy) laptop that’s about 4 years old, and will work just fine with a little extra RAM and a new battery. The $800-$1000 that I would have spent on another hunk of superfluous silicon will be used for something better. I figure that the child we sponsor in Nicaragua can get food, clothing, and eduction for 3 years for about $1000—why should I waste that much money on such a luxury (and it is a luxury) for myself?

Apple’s products are always labeled “Designed by Apple in California.” How trendy would it be for them to state the rest of the truth? “Assembled in a sweatshop by people who will never be able to afford one.”

Go ahead, blame it on whoever you want. “It’s not my fault that this shirt was made by slave labor.” What are you doing about the injustices that Americans create with our insatiable greed to get more at lower prices? There’s a bazillion not-for-profits out there who fight for the rights of the oppressed and/or work at building sustainable, successful, and just economies in the needy places of the globe—go find one an support it. Ask for “Fair Trade Coffee” the next time you stop into Starbucks for a cup of coffee. Or maybe just decide not to buy the second home in Florida and use the money to help someone impoverished.

It’s really quite unfair to you to ask you to deny yourself and put someone else’s needs above your own selfish desires. And it’s very un-American. And really, there’s no tangible benefit at all in it for you. In fact, it will cost you.

If you’re a Christian though, your Lord demands it of you. In 1 John 3:17 we read “If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him?” In Mark 12, Jesus answers a man asking what the greatest command is:

“The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’There is no commandment greater than these.” (vv 29-31)

How do you stack up?

Today has been a great day. Well, it has since I wooted my first Bag of Crap. I’ve been desiring one of these collections of pure trash ever since I started wooting a long time ago, and now that day has finally arrived. As they say, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure!

Oh, yeah, and I watched “Stranger Than Fiction” tonight. It’s a really good show. No, really, it is. Not your typical Will Ferrell.

No one tell my wife I wrote this, because if she hears me say “more money”, I’ll end up with one of those $100 laptop-for-ever-child jobbers this fall.

My dilemma is this: I’ve been using my Mac Mini at work for over a week now, and I kind of like it. The benefits are pretty intangible, but I just feel like my computer is somehow more “refined” than ye old PC. Unfortunately, that leads me to this demise: if I get a Mac, it’s going to cost me more.

Yeah, yeah, save all the stuff about pricing being close, because the hardware side of things is pretty even. My cost comes in when you factor in software. You see, I’m headed off to seminary, and there’s a few programs that I’ll need working this fall: e-Sword (or the alternative, $350 Bible Works), and MS Office. Because e-Sword requires a PC to run, I’d have to buy a copy of Parallels ($70) and XP (~$90). So now, the extra ~$100 that I’d pay for a “better” laptop has become ~$260. Not too horrible, but remember: I’m going to seminary, not law school. I’m already going to have to buy Office 2003 ($100 student version), and this is starting to become more and more of an investment.

No, I can’t pirate the software (hello, seminary!), and no, I can’t just run Office 2004 on the Mac (well, I could, but it costs more, and I wouldn’t be able to install it on my PC as well, using their nice 3-PC license). <sigh> Why can’t things be easy? I was just starting to like OS X… Maybe that Dell Latitude D520 wouldn’t be such a bad deal after all.

Ah, each day with the Mac gets a lot smoother. It was a rough transition, but I think I’m finally starting to settle down. (Lord, help me to not turn into a fanboy…help me remember how much it sucked trying to get accustomed to this thing) It’s been really nice having the support of a few thoughtful commenters along the way, and my friend Matt from work has definitely provided some useful and much-appreciated advice–albeit, still from a perspective that makes me think he’s wearing Apple-colored glasses.

The biggest difference I’ve noted is that using OS X makes the OS seem a whole lot more apparent to the user. With XP, it’s largely transparent. You do what you do in the apps, and ignore the surrounding framework. With OS X, you’re forced to immerse yourself in a slick, (at times cartoony) animated interface at every turn. Zipping back and forth between apps isn’t a sterile Alt-Tab anymore, it’s a F9-click transition that’s smoothly animated and somewhat addicting. After three days with this thing, I find myself reaching for the F9 key even on my PC–even though I personally feel that hitting Alt-Tab was way better.

You get accustomed to things though, and use your desktop a lot more, especially given the one-key access to all the stuff on your desktop. In XP, you have to hunt for that little “Show Desktop” icon. Vista did the right thing in including the desktop as a window in their little Flip-3D thing, and I’m sure if I ever go the Vista route, my desktop will take on an entirely new role. (My XP philosophy is that desktops are meant to be neat, clean, and sparse)

I’m still not that big a fan of the Finder, and my RAM situation has forced me to just give up on attempting to use Fireworks on my Mac, but that’s OK. I’ve still got a PC on the KVM switch that needs to be there for some pretty expensive analytics software, so I can co-exist. I just hate switching back and forth though, and I must admit that I’m liking switching “back” to OS X more and more each time.

I must say, though, that while I’ll probably end up loving this OS, I don’t ever want to forget what the transition was like. I don’t want to turn into some zombie that walks around making people feel inferior for using a Microsoft operating system. I’d hate to have to teach my mom to use a Mac, and I can’t imagine the nightmares that would happen if work tried moving everyone to a Mac. If it took some people a month to figure out how to print, what would it be like trying to teach them different habits?

Score:
PC: 3
Mac: 1

I kicked around on the new mac mini all day today, getting much more work done than yesterday. It only took me an hour or so to hack together a printer solution using Gutenprint and a mismatched PPD–at least it prints now.

Some stuff I’m starting to like: Spotlight was useful in a case or two, I’m getting used to hitting the [Windows] key instead of control, and the F9 reflex is starting to set in. I got some networked folders to show up every time I boot (something that’s more involved than it is on a PC), used Terminal for the first time, and and installed FireFox. I also hit the menu button on the remote, and that’s pretty dang slick. Of course, I have no media on that beast to use it with, but it’s a pretty slick implementation nonetheless.

I still had trouble on the following:

• Safari froze up multiple times. (I guess 512MB of RAM and a dual-core proc isn’t enough for 5 apps at a time in OS X after all)
• Fireworks 8 is slow as crud if I try to use it with anything else running
• I still keep sacrificing system resources to apps that continue running even after I’ve closed all the windows
• Mail bogs down horribly every time I try to read an email with big images attached
• I realized that my “60GB” Hard drive already had 20GB of space used up. (Even Vista, with its gobs of legacy code, uses only about 12)
• All the anti-aliasing doesn’t look so great on my LCD, and gives me a headache. (yes, I tried adjusting it in Sys Prefs) Switching to my windows box is like a breath of fresh, crisp, clean, air.

Other than all that, OS X does have a very polished, schnazzy feel to it, for lack of a better word. I’ll at least take it out of the negative for the relatively painless day I had with it today.

Score:
PC: 3
Mac: 0

Prior to printing with my new Mac Mini, my Mac experience had been frustrating (Monitor didn’t work) and slightly disappointing (my mac isn’t all it’s cracked up to be). Nevertheless, I still maintained some high hopes for this guy. After all, I hate to admit I’m wrong, and I was beginning to believe that OSX was possibly superior, and I had definitely spent a lot of time in hopeful anticipation of the Mini after I ordered it. After successfully connecting to some shared folders and even printers on a Windows network, I was beginning to think that most of the old Mac incompatibilities were history. (Excepting, of course, the fact that my LCD monitor does not work with my mac!)

I had made it through an entire day with the Mini, getting some work done, getting OpenOffice installed, and squinting at my 2″-smaller replacement monitor. It was nearing time to leave, and I just had to print out a 1-page .pdf file. The networked printer (a pretty fancy multipurpose copier with all the options) had been “installed”, and so I let ‘er rip.

I make it to the copy room, and some jerk has this huge job printing out… I wait for it to finish, but my .pdf doesn’t show. Hmm…I examine the huge job a little more closely. It appears that it’s one page with some gibberish about Adobe-pdf-something-or-other, and about 35 blank pages. Wait a minute, that’s my PDF! (A little devil pops into my head, saying “Hi, I’m a Mac!” and laughing)

I trek back to my computer, remembering how easy it was to make that printer work with my PC when I installed it, and headed off to the manufacturer’s website. They’ve got some file there that’s a psuedo-driver for OSX, and so I download it, and go to install it.

Hmm, that’s odd, this weird .hqx file doesn’t seem to have a file association. Wait, OSX doesn’t include an extraction utility for zipped (bin-hexed, if you want to be precise) files! Even Windows XP does that! So much for out-of-the-box usefullness. Now I’ve got to go to some other website and download and install Stuffit Expander. By this time I’m cursing the day Steve Jobs was born–but wait, then Bill Gates wouldn’t have had all those great ideas to steal and make practical.

So I install Stuffit Expander, install the PPD or PDD or whatever file it is, and reconfigure my printer. Finally, some productivity will occur! I hit “print”, and run over to the copy room.

You guessed it, more gibberish, and 35 more blank sheets. <sigh> No wonder no one in the corporate world outside of artists uses OSX. I finish my day by opening the .pdf on my PC and printing it out.

Score:
PC:3
Mac:-1