Mac vs PC

Now that Snow Leopard has been out for a while, I have a few comments. First, by way of full disclosure, I have been a Mac user since 1989. I became a real estate agent and had to use a computer. The first one I used was a windows machine using DOS. A real pain and more user unfriendly than anything windows now. But then I got a Mac, an SE, which worked and was fun to use.

In 2001 with the advent of OS X 10.0 the computing world changed radically. The original OS X was Cheetah in January 2001, followed in September 2001 by Puma, followed in August 2002 by Jaguar, followed by Panther in October 2003, followed by Tiger in April 2005, followed by Leopard in October 2007 and Snow Leopard in August 2009.

All the various iterations worked well with each succeeding iteration working better than the last one.

During this time Microsoft was plodding along with XP (which admittedly was better than Windows 98) and promising year after year that they would have a new wonderful version codenamed Longhorn. When Steve Jobs introduced Tiger he commented that you know what happens when a Tiger goes up against a Longhorn. Shortly thereafter, Microsoft announced the new name was Vista. After five years in production it came out in January 2007 with much fanfare and a thudding response. Many corporations refused to update to Vista because of its many problems. Eventually Microsoft stopped selling XP to force adoption of Vista. Now they are coming out with Windows 7 (basically lipstick on the Vista pig) which is meant to fix all the things wrong with Vista.

Installing Snow Leopard was easy and quick. I put the DVD in, clicked a few times, and 45 minutes later I had a new computer. It made my computer (an iMac that I bought in 2006) faster in many areas and gave me back 11 gigabytes in disk space. Snow Leopard was meant to be a refinement of Leopard. So Apple charged only $30 for the upgrade. A great deal for a small price. I keep finding little enjoyable surprises about how things work--it is like being on an extended Easter egg hunt.

I don't have Windows 7 and won't go there ( I use XP that I run on Parallels for the few Windows applications that I need to run) but I have heard that it is very difficult to install. From Microsoft's website Windows 7 will cost $119.99,or $199.99, or $219.99 depending on the version you use. (Apple has one price for Snow Leopard--$30.00) If you would like to pay a lot and have a difficult time installing and an inferior OS once installed, then go for Windows 7.

However, that is not my choice.

So long from Grants Pass Real Estate.

chuck

Harvest Time!

Hello from Grants Pass Real Estate. This is a wonderful time of year in the garden. Just take a look at what God grew for us.

We have sweet corn, lots of juicy tomatoes, sweet red, yellow, and orange peppers, cucumbers, hot red cayenne peppers and still some honeydews getting ripe.

Everything is organic, bug free and full of taste that you cannot get from food in the store. Fertilizing with compost makes the plants strong and bug resistant. The one pest that we have problems with is ground squirrels. They take one or two bites out of a tomato or cucumber or melon and then move on. The only thing to do is to cut off the bite area and eat the rest. Not that big of a deal.

It is a joy to go to the garden to see what is new today. Beautiful colors, great smells, fresh air, sunshine, and God's bounty. What more could you want? A great use of real estate.

One of my daughters will not eat tomatoes from the store since they taste somewhere between a piece of cardboard and a piece of plastic. But a couple of years ago when she was six, we went to the garden and I gave her a yellow cherry tomato which she ate and then said, "Now that is a good tomato!"

So long for now from Grants Pass Real Estate.

chuck