Ok, so beneath the slick Art Center Alumni

designed Apple sugary design is a real computer, with real computer issues, which I shall detail in short order, but first, as required by tangential laws, I must explain a current annoyance.

I hate typing lately. My fingers are tired, to the point where the above paragraph wasn’t a comfortable one. But the reason it’s not comfortable is simple. I type 40-50wpm with my two index fingers. It’s true. I never really cared or noticed before, but quite literally, I use only index fingers when it comes to typing letters, and it’s starting to wear down my hands. Who knows how long I’ve been doing this – I learned home row typing in high school, and liked it just fine. Somewhere in the past ten years I’ve gotten lost, and have perverted those skills.

So, in an effort to save my hands, it’s all home row or nothing at all, but my typing speed has dropped while my error count has skyrocketed. It will all pay off in the end.

Back to the Mac. The 17" iMac is not a pansy machine. It has a fast processor, a ton of memory, and a rocket fast video card. With that in mind, I installed Medal of Honor: Allied Assault so I could continue my current World War II obsession, brought on by reading Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson.

Highly dissappointed. This game was only midly playable with the resolution set so the pixels were nearly the size of postage stamps, and the details set to what I’ve dubbed LegoMode. With the same video card chipset on almost any PC, this game would scream. Something about the iMac, or the way this game was ported to the Mac is seriously messed up.

Also, I love the concept of Apple’s iCal software. It provides an elegant and well designed way of viewing upcoming events and schedules and such. The problems: it seems very slow and sluggish. Entering a calendar event is very cumbersome, and feels incredibly slow. And, there’s no way of exporting the data to another program. Heck, even Microsoft Entourage makes this easy on the Mac. And, I can import from any other calender program into iCal. I suspect that iCal is a marketing vehicle for Apple, used to help sell their .Mac accounts. If you have one of these accounts, it becomes easier to share your calendar with others, but it is unknown whether having an account makes it easier to share with other programs.

I still think the new Mac in our family which has yet to earn a nick name is still hot stuff. I spent a great deal of time on it this weekend, and have learned that it could easily replace my Windows based machines.