It’s almost ten years since I left home for America. That attempt didn’t go quite so well, as you can see from looking at the archives, but aside from leading to the series of events that finds me now living in Durham, 2002 was also the year another major event happened: I bought my first Mac.

Thinking about it earlier today, I could only vaguely remember the circumstances that led to me going to the Apple Store. I remembered sitting in my small room at Carmichael with a huge PC tower in pieces, me in a full panic, but I couldn’t recall exactly what was wrong. This is why it’s a good idea to have a blog that goes back ten years. So, a problematic Athlon XP CPU and the realisation that I really needed a computer I could rely on caused me to go to the mall and fork over the money for a cute little G3 iBook.

Back in those days, you could still run Classic. And it came with IE5 and ClarisWorks. We’ve come a long way since then. Still, I was pretty enthralled by OS X. It was a system that just worked, and yet had a full suite of UNIX tools under the shell. I’d been running Linux since 1997, but this was a UNIX that didn’t need kernel recompiles, that worked with printers and cameras with no faffing about, and yet you could still run X Windows if you felt the need. It was pretty awesome.

I took the Linux tower back home to the UK, but over the next few years, it became less of a desktop machine, and more of a file server. In the end, I got a small NAS and downsized. I had become another nerd who had crossed to the shiny dark side.

There’s only one way to celebrate an anniversary like that, isn’t there? Yes, that’s right - today, I got my new laptop, a 13” i7 MacBook Air. It’s…something. Applications load with one bounce on the dock, it boots almost instantly, and my goodness, it’s so thin.

But the fancy SSD leaves me with a quandary. I got the 250GB model, which matches my old MacBook Pro’s storage. But, I only have 36GB free on that, so I was thinking of starting over from scratch on this machine. I almost did it, but I can’t. The home directory on my current Pro has been transferred from every Mac that I’ve ever owned - a direct lineage back to that day when I got back from Southpoint Mall, carried the big box up to the fifth floor, and switched it on for the first time. Every time I open my Documents folder, the top file is the first thing I did in Adobe Illustrator - a cover of a CD I made for Luke (created 2003/2/11, ISO date fans, though for obvious reasons, it doesn’t show up in my archives - song titles on blog posts during that week give the game away a little). I can’t throw all that away. Plus it’ll take ages to do it manually. Time Machine restore it is, then. Followed by deleting a whole bunch of TV AVIs and podcasts that are no longer needed…