Son of a Pig Farmer

For months, I’ve been trying to get Tina to warm up to the idea of making the Nishihira household one that was “Windows” free.

No, I’m not talking about sitting in a dark house; instead, I’m trying to cut the Microsoft addiction that has afflicted her ever since I took the cheap route a few years ago and bought a $600 Dell. It was adequate for what she needed– a Pentium 933 with 512MB of RAM There was no way I was gonna shell out 2 and a half grand for the machine that I really wanted. All Tina was going to do with it was surf the web and check email. Hell, I had a work laptop at the time, and didn’t see any need for me to shell out that kinda dough for a machine that just needed to do email and surf the web. In fact, the Dell that we have is still perfectly suitable for her; it’s just a little sluggish.

Taking the cheap route was a fatal blow that still haunts me to this day.

Now, Tina’s built up a bit of a dependency on the platform, and it’s the little things that are making it difficult to cut. Tina makes greeting cards using Hallmark Studio, and the girls love their Reader Rabbit games.

I started the weaning process a couple months ago by getting her to use a wireless Powerbook instead of the Dell box. Now, she can be anywhere and still have access to her stuff. She can be in the kitchen on All Recipes or hanging out at the breakfast table reading the news or hanging out on the couch on My Space (sigh). Don’t say a word. Not a single word. You can blame her cousins for that one!

Although the weaning process started a couple of months ago, the coup de grâce happened a couple of days ago when Tina left me a message, telling me that the AVG virus alert was getting in her way. After I called her back, I explained to her that you don’t want it to get out of your way, it’s trying to tell you something really important. After closing my eyes, rubbing my temples and breathing, I mumbled to myself, “they don’t make viruses for macs…why the hell did she install that My Space smiley crap spyware crap to begin with…” I just had her pull the plug, and I’d address it later.

If there was any time for me to make my move, now is that time. I’ve already gotten her pretty sweet on the idea of being wireless. Now, I have to find Macintosh solutions for the following problems

Yahoo! Music Engine
C’mon Yahoo!, you had a case a few of years ago to concentrate your development efforts on the Windows platform that made sense at the time, but you’ve had plenty of time to make an effort at supporting the (growing) Apple populace.

Yahoo! Messenger
I’ve got the Alpha version of the new Messenger client for Mac OS X installed on my box. So far, it works really well. I’m just waiting eagerly for when it supports voice (PhoneIn and PhoneOut) and video chat. Hopefully I won’t have to wait too long.

Windows Media Edition
I’ve got Tivo and XBOX Media Center. I don’t think I need it (yet). Also, I heard that Apple is toying with similar type things.

Kids’ Games
I think I might have to bite that one and buy Mac versions of them. Either that, or a majority of the things they’ve been doing lately have been in Flash.

Tina’s Greeting Cards
I found a bunch of products that do this. Print Shop for Mac comes to mind, but any suggestions would be appreciated.

In a pinch, Bootcamp lets me boot into Windows on an Intel-based Mac, and it’s free. I heard that runs Windows just as well (or better) on a Mac. In a bigger pinch, I can run them both at the same time with this product called “Parallels.”

So, aside from the plethora of viruses, worms, trojans and blue screens that I could choose from, is there any insanely obvious reason why I still need a Windows box?