About a year and a half ago I used the glorious medium of the crappy personal webpage to vent my frustration with my shit-tastic Mac computer in a particularly short but hostile update where I detailed the numerous reasons why the six year-old G3 I had been set up with at my new job was rapidly sucking the life force out of my body like I was Vincent Gallo and it was Chloë Sevigny.  Well I quickly learned that nothing pisses off pretentious cocks like writing inflammatory shit against Macs, for only a few days later I received an eloquently-written email informing me that "Macs own you faggot".  Of course, I immediately wrote this off as being the unfocused ramblings of a poor delusional flame-troll who had been driven insane by many maddening years attempting to operate a Macintosh Computer, and was thus unworthy even of a spot in my hate mail section.  Surely he could not mean that Macs owned anything other than my complete utter fucking contempt and maybe a +8 rating on the Evan Harvey Cock Suckability Scale.

But then Tuesday rolled around.

In it's boundless generosity, the soul-sucking, top-heavy, insanely-corrupt company I work for finally came to the momentous realization that it was virtually impossible for me to accomplish any meaningful amount of work on my outdated half-broken electronic abacus and managed to pull enough pennies out of its ass to afford to order me something that was at least remotely functional.  Whether this gesture was simply out of the goodness of their hearts or the fact that they were growing tired of receiving "official memos" from me in the form of hand-written chicken-scratch scrawled on crumpled-up notebook paper is debatable, but on Tuesday morning I received a brand-spanking-new Intel-based iMac and let me tell you that it is the single greatest thing that has happened in my office since that time I "accidentally" stapled my boss' hand to the desk.  So this is going to be the week that I actually take back all the awful things I've ever said about Macs and provide you with a pretty comprehensive list of all the reasons why this new machine kicks the balls off the piece of shit I was using before.

Uh, I'm not sure what's going on here,
but I don't think it has anything to do with my new computer.

The first thing that I noticed when opening up the package is that this thing is about 1/1000th the size of my old computer.  It's basically like a flat-panel monitor with a CD drive built in, which is pretty rad considering that it took a work crew of about fifteen ex-NFL linebackers to carry that old 3-ton piece of plastic shit out of here and load it into an air-tight vacuum-sealed metal box so that it could be exorcised, sand-blasted and sunk in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean in a vain effort save the rest of humanity from it's haunted evil mankind-hating non-functional demon circuitry.

On top of the fact that it weighs roughly the same as an unladen European swallow, a key feature of the new iMac is that it can actually read and eject compact discs (CDs) without destroying them or catching on fire.  While I'm well aware of the fact that computers have been able to read CDs since some time in about the mid-90s, my old machine was a virtual black hole from which no media or light could escape.  Any CDs inserted into the disc drive were immediately consumed by the CPU, converted to Scientology, imprinted with the Mark of The Beast and then locked for ages inside an unforgiving silicon prison.  No attempts by any computer technician, Catholic priest or screwdriver were successful in making the contents of the CD readable or extracting the captive media from it's foul dungeon.  Once penance was served and the disc had been completely brainwashed, reformatted and indoctrinated by the G3 Re-Education Camp the tower would launch the disc back in my face in a manner not dissimilar to the way the Predator shoots those buzzsaws out of his hands at like ninety miles an hour and decapitates people.  My cat-like reflexes were the only thing between me and a humiliating death on numerous occasions in the past year.  When the computer realized it had failed to kill me it would resort to taunting me by flashing a message across the screen in giant eye-searing fuscia letters that read "MACS OWN YOU FAGGOT".

This is sort of what my old computer was like.

The peripherals are a major improvement over the previous model as well.  While I know this isn't really a compliment because I'm pretty sure an Atari 2600 joystick and a TI-83 calculator would be a dramatic improvement over the crapstastic useless junk previously attached to my old system, I have to say that I really don't despise the new keyboard and mouse they've set me up with here.

First off, the keyboard has enough keys that it actually now allows me to accurately spell EVERY word in the English language.  Before I was pretty much restricted to anything that didn't contain the letters Q, G, L and O (because along with the "home", "end" and "page down" keys they didn't appear on the keyboard) and even then I had to really hammer the keyboard with all of my rage to get some of the other letters to pop up on the screen.  Basically it was a total crapshoot because I would have to type out the entire sentence and wait about fifteen seconds before anything actually appeared on the screen.  Simple crap like composing email and editing HTML in TextEdit were Herculean feats of patience, determination and stamina.  God I hated that piece of shit.  Plus, a good number of the keys on the old keyboard I was using had some sort of strange unidentifiable translucent gunk stuck to them that was difficult to scrape off, even with a paperclip, so I generally had to try and avoid those like George Bush avoids discussing the civil unrest in Iraq.  ZING!  Having the whole keyboard available to me is a completely foreign concept.  My rote muscle memory still has me pounding the shit out of it, but hopefully that will pass before I break something (like my fingers).

Thank Jeebus I am finally rid of that hellish hockey puck of a mouse as well.  That thing belonged in a freaking used sporting goods store where obnoxious hyperactive sugar-laden kids could bash it repeatedly with sticks.  The joy I derived from pounding that physical embodiment of frustration into dust with a hammer and then flushing it down the toilet is rivaled only by the excitement of finally being able to spend my nights without suffering crippling mouse-related hand-cramping.  That piece of plastic shit was only suitable for two things;  swinging it around like a bola and winging it at people or putting a funny hat on it and using it in a retarded puppet show.

The whole one-button thing, like OS X, is growing on me.  Once I got the hang of all that crazy crap it became like second-nature, so I guess I'm not going to talk shit about either anymore.  Does this make me a Mac convert?  Damn, there's a scary thought.

I can finally use the mouse without giving myself arthritis.

Loading video doesn't cause my computer to seize up like an epileptic chihuahua trying to watch Tron after eating an entire sheet of acid and washing it down with a case of JOLT! Cola and crystal meth.  This is huge.  I can also now visit websites that contain Flash without the entire system locking up like a dead person with rigor-mortis.  This basically increases my website viewing options exponentially, as I can now go places other than just Wikipedia without having to worry about restarting Firefox and slashing my wrists with a broken staple remover.

Another unforeseen benefit of this new computer is the fact that when I hit the mute button, the machine actually mutes.  I no longer have to stick my hand into the back of the tower and yank out wires to try and make music stop blasting out of my speakers at eight million decibels.  This is going to be a major benefit since now none of my co-workers will know that I'm looking at porn when I should be writing purchase orders.

In conclusion, this is the dawning of a new era.  Once I get everything set up on this computer the way that I want it and completely fucking destroying the old piece of crap I was stuck with before, I can see this being the beginning of a beautiful relationship.

An apple (macintosh).