The Blog is dead, long live the Blog. The Blog is Changed, The Blog remains the same.
What a long strange trip this blog has been— I mean who the hell is still blogging now in 2024?? Are there any actual humans still out there in a world of AI Robots?
The Blog went away for a little while as you regular readers know, but I never planned on REALLY being away long— I simply had to figure out a problem which I won’t bore you with. Problem solved. Blog is Alive and well.
So what’ll we do? I’m going to re-run some stuff that’s still pertinent like Convention Reports and experiences I’ve had with purchasing things like Car Starters— but everything is freshly updated with new information.
The blog is changed the blog remains the same.
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THE HELP DESK
A recent conversation with a good friend brought up the conversation about Macs Vs PCs in the world of art. She is considering switching over from PCs to the vastly superior Mac options and when I say vastly superior I’m not exaggerating— it turns out that among succesful graphic design and artists who use a computer in their work 99% use Macs.
It brought back two memories I’ll never forget. The first was a very early interview I had with an art director. He liked my work. I don’t remember how or why but the subject of my digital work came up and he asked why I didn’t work on a Mac. I said I wasnt sure. He replied that since I was just starting out I probably couldn’t afford the much more expensive Macs. Not knowing what I was talking about I argued that Macs were roughly the same price as a PC— and I argued this like I do whenever I have no idea what I’m talking about— with a level of certainty that was beyond the level of ridiculous.
I didn’t get the gig, and I left and went home to my Dell or HP or whatever other crappy PC I was running— I felt sincerely that whatever monkeys they got to put this great machine together in the middle of the Amazon rainforest they were the best damn monkeys around. About a month later, still strugglign to find work I took a teaching job at my local museum. Digital Art was the subject, I was an expert— this would be a no brainer. I popped in to the classroom the weekend before my class would start to arrange my classroom and discovered they were all Macs.
How hard could the switch from PCs to Macs be? They’re both just personal computers right? Well it turns out they are extremely different. I spent the better part of the entire weekend figuring out how to use it.
About a dozen years later I was teaching at Emerson College— and since that school is not an art school they ran PCs— and boy I had forgotten how lousy PCs are. They are bogged down with extra software you don’t want or need, they freeze, shut down and are incredibly slow.
Emerson had a deparment which all Professors called the (NO) Help Desk— when something didn’t work you called up to their perch at the top of the main building and they would send some snotty kid down to tell you how stupid you were while they pulled out the wires and used a bit of duck tape to put the pile of blinking lights back together.
I asked them once why they didn’t just switch to Macs— the kid looked at me like I was suggesting going to a tin can and a wire for communications.
“Because Macs suck.” he said.
Why? Because they work?
I laugh because this friend uses her brother as her IT guy— and when she asked him about it he said he was anti-Mac— I told her you know what we call Mac IT Guys? Non-existent— because we don’t need them, Macs work.