Back to work.

I had a nice long winter holiday. I was very busy and did lots of interesting things. But I'm not going to write about what I did. Why? Because I've already spent a few hours writing about what I did, only to have my computer finally kick the bucket. I have a feeling that my holiday blog is still safely stored on the hard disk of my dead laptop, so once I get around to removing the disk and getting the data off it then you'll hear about my winter vacation. For now, I'll write about something else.

I guess the most appropriate thing to write about is my lovely new computer. I'd been putting aside a little money over the last few months to by myself a nice Christmas present. When Christmas came, I couldn't decide what I wanted, so the money went unspent. Lucky for me that I didn't spend it, as life here would be a hell of a lot harder without a computer. So, last weekend I took my hard earned cash down to Sapporo and bought a brand spanking new Apple Macbook. Until now I'd always used a PC, so getting a Mac was a pretty big step. Over the last two years (sine my laptop started showing signs that it was getting sick), I've spent quite a while weighing up the pros and cons of various machines, and for various reasons I decided that the time was right to switch to Mac. Among the biggest reasons for my change were:

- Basically, Mac doesn't have viruses and other nasties like that
- An Intel CPU means that performance wise its on par with PC laptops
- With programs like Boot Camp and Parallels you can run windows on it if you want to
- It looks sexy
- No installing millions of drivers and having a hard disk cluttered with crapola
- I just wanted to try something different

I've been using it for a few days now and it's been great. In fact, the only problem I have with it is that it's not compatible with my Sony MP3 player (that's Sony's fault, not Apple's, with their stupid proprietary software). Everything is very user friendly, programs are nicely integrated into the OS, everything looks magnificent, and (best of all) it's all so simple. Take the mouse issue, for example. The laptop doesn't come packaged with a mouse and it's not much fun using the trackpad all day. So, I took my Microsoft Optical mouse from my dead laptop, plugged it into the USB port, and half a second later I was using the mouse (with all of its functions working perfectly). No slow loading, no download of drivers, no blue screen of death, just simple functionality. The same went for my printer. I just plugged it in and was away.
Sweet. Overall, I have no complaints yet, though I've still barely probed the surface of what the machine can do.

To finish, here are a few photos I took over winter. This is my town, as taken from the top of the ski hill. Hopefully they will give you a good idea of the kind of place I'm living (small town in the mountains, isolated, but always fun!). Click to enlarge!