#1

Are you tired of hearing about how wonderful (or crappy) Macs (or PCs) are? Have you ever felt that you are not getting an unbiased opinion about what computing platform to use? Don't you wish you could be rich and famous, or just not using a computer at all?

If your answer to the first two questions is YES then I'm talking to you (I don't particularly care about your answer to the third question. I kinda came up with it half consciously, as I just woke up in the middle of the night).

Anyway, here's the thing. Camille and Pauline are two sweet French girls I met in Cuba a few months ago who study in Canada. I saw them again yesterday (they are visiting Ottawa) and we had dinner. Being a geek and considerably older than them, the result of this dinner, instead of me falling in love and following them to France, was eating a lot of food at a nice Indian restaurant and topping that with my favourite cheesecake at Zak's, going to bed relatively early (by myself), and waking up in the middle of the night, which I mentioned before. Ironically, here is when things start to make sense. In that wonderful half-sleep state, I came up with an idea.

I recently bought my very first Apple product, a Mac Book Pro (in fact it's been shipped but I haven't received it yet). I have used Macs a little, and also Unix/Linux systems (and now-extinct SUN workstations when they were around), but I'm a PC user. I have used PCs since MS-DOS, all the way pretty much through every version of Windows (I currently have XP, Vista and Windows 7 on different computers). But I've been surrounded with a lot of Mac users and like most of you I have seen all the TV commercials where cool-acting young Mac makes fun of un-cool but lovable-in-a-geeky-way PC. So I always wanted to see what the hype is about. Are Macs really much better? So I decided to buy one and see for myself, especially because you can install Windows on it too, in case you have software with no Mac version. And of course, it fills a gap in my computer collection (I have a Linux box too) and it looks kinda cool.

Yesterday I was joking with some students of mine that I would report my comparison results. Like many other things I tell my students, I wasn't really planning on doing that (can you keep this a secret?), until I woke up about an hour ago with the brilliant idea of starting a blog.

So for the next 52 weeks (that is a year for those of you who are mathematically challenged), I am going to post once a week and tell you about my experience comparing PCs and Macs, Windows and Mac OS (and possibly other platforms and operating systems) . I will try to be as unbiased and impartial as possible. This is particularly important because I’m amazed by how closed-minded people can get when it comes to something they are used to or they like for some reason. Don’t get me wrong, Mac and PC users I know are very intelligent and open-minded people in general, but when it comes to their computers and phones (and some devices with no apparent real use, not even as any sort of pad), they can be religiously fanatic. Not exactly a good thing when you are looking for information.

I will be doing all sorts of tests, running all sorts of programs, and performing all sorts of tasks; on Mac and on PC, Mac OS and Windows on the same hardware and also on different computers. I will be open to suggestions for things to test but of course I don’t promise to follow those suggestions. This is my experiment. Do your own if you don’t like it!

This is it for now. I need to go back to sleep, but I’LL BE BACK!