December 16, 2004 Issue

Regular readers of this column—and I know all three of you—know that I’m rather high on Macintosh computers. The reasons are numerous, but like anyone loyal to certain products, probably the primary reason is I’ve been using the product for many years. Perhaps if my first introduction to personal computers had been the PC variety, I’d feel the same way about them, but somehow I don’t think so. I’ve used PCs and find them awkward…somewhat like walking around the block to go across the street.

Recently I found another reason to love them. My brother Eric recently acquired a digital camera and he took several pictures he thought we might want to use in the paper, and I did use them in the last issue. He took the photo of the sand snowman, the broken pavement sign and the one with a cop car splayed across two handicapped parking spaces. When he told me he had them, I said bring ‘em over and be sure to bring your connection cord.

“No way, said he. It’s a pain to disconnect the cord, aren’t the connections universal?”

“Not necessarily.” I said, “but we’ll give it a whirl.”

First of all Macintoshes allow a user to remove photos from any camera without first downloading the specific camera software which comes with the camera. Point number one. Point number two is it’s a breeze to disconnect the camera cord from the computer since Mac keyboards come equipped with two ports for plugging in external devices. As luck would have it, my cord fit his camera, so the photos were downloaded in seconds.

That exercise set me to thinking about the configuration of my computer in general. If I didn’t have a scanner, printer, modem and hub plugged in for the extras, I would literally only have one cord to unplug to move the whole machine. Gone are the days when massive pinned plugs connected everything, so taking this one in for service—which is almost never needed—would be a breeze.

It would seem the engineers at Macintosh spend some time thinking about things that might bug the average user. Having to crawl around on the floor, often going into the extremely dusty area behind the desk, to unplug and plug in things is a major hassle. So my unit has everything within reaching distance of the desk chair. The central plug is in the back of a container about half the size of a basketball, which contains the entire hard drive of the machine. No mammoth tower for me—in fact that whole tower thing reminds me of the days when most males thought speakers had to be the height of bookcases. Overcompensation. Did I mention I love Macintoshes?

Anyway this is the long way around to giving a big thank you to my brother, Eric J. Stratmann, for occasionally contributing photos. Sometimes he offers up story ideas too. Family loyalty is a wonderful thing. We don’t do photo credits here unless a photo comes in from somewhere else and a photo credit is requested. Amazingly, with the assistance of three or four digital cameras, we take all the pictures. True, they cannot be compared with those of professional photographers, but they’re not awful either. We try very hard for quality and that counts for something.

Errata: Sigh. It’s been more than a year since I’ve had to write one of these, but when I blow it, I blow it big. After giving Bay Cafe the rightfully earned five apple rating with our dining review in the last issue, I managed to mangle the phone number. I could try to elicit your sympathy and tell you one of my eyes isn’t working, which is true, but in the final analysis, I blew it. Please do visit Bay Cafe and call them to reserve a seat or wish them a happy holiday season at 244-3550.

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