day five, where do you want to go today?

If I actually succeed in quitting smoking, I might just have to credit Apple for making such a fabulous machine.

It's been, I don't know, 15 years since I used a Mac on a regular basis. (It was an Apple IIvx if that helps anyone date it.) And then I became a software engineer, which required moving to PCs and the occasional Unix machine. And I've been stuck in Windows ever since.

When the friendly guy at Geek Squad told me the cost of repairing my PC, something just snapped and I asked him how much more it would cost me to throw this Windows machine in a dumpster and buy a Mac. He laughed and then spent 15 minutes trying to talk me into doing just that. This was at Best Buy, where they don't even sell Macs, so I trusted and enjoyed his advice a bit more than I normally would.

I told him how much I missed the Apple world but that I still occasionally needed to do some database stuff, and with the exception of a cute, but horribly limited little database program called FileMaker, all other database software needs Windows. Then he told me about how easy it is to emulate a Windows environment on a Mac these days.

We happily tore up the repair ticket together. Off to the Apple store. The Windows emulation is everything the Geek Squad guy said it would be, except actually faster than a real Windows machine. So now I can occasionally slide over into a parallel dimension of Windows where people are oppressed by Microsoft and terrified of viruses, but I can always come virtually home to my hippie, happy, stable, pretty Apple world. And seriously, it's much more relaxing here. Which helps when one is trying to break free of a seriously intense addiction.

So I'm still smoke free. Awesome.