My Very Own MacBook Air

I decided, partly because other co-workers who earn less than I do have laptops, but mainly because having worked on Macs for so long without owning one myself makes me look foolish, that it was time to give myself an early birthday gift: I purchased a MacBook Air: More specifically, a MacBook Air with 11″ screen, four gigabytes of memory, a 1.7 gigahertz processor and sixty-four gigabytes of memory.

I brought my credit card to work to make the purchase. The purchase was simple enough: I go to the campus Technology Store; I ask for an 11″ MacBook Air; they get one from storage in back; I charge it on my credit card. No problem there. The problem was that I also wanted a Thunderbird-to-Ethernet adapter (the only way to use the Thunderbird port on the MacBook Air, as far as I am concerned); not only did the store not have it, but some droid insisted such adapters did not exist.

Without an adapter, and with my own USB-to-Ethernet adapter at home, I had to try to use the wireless network to update Mac OS X on the laptop, as even the wireless network is faster than my own ASDL line. The problem is that the wireless network is also fickle, cutting off in the middle of a download. So, I had to buy another USB-to-Ethernet adapter in order to use the more stable wired network to download my Mac OS X updates.

The App Store would insist every so often that I set up an Apple ID. I did not do so then because that would involve using an e-mail address whose internals I have no access to at work. Besides, I did not need my Apple ID to update Mac OS X. And the program for which I did need the ID, iLife, I dropped from my MacBook as unnecessary.

At home, I set up a dedicated e-mail account for the MacBook Air, to which I associated with an Apple ID. I transfered Chocolat from the library MacBook Air to my own, and I bought was Bare Bones Software's BBEdit, which is like TextPad that it is configurable and uses clips of text.

After a few days I have gotten used to the MacBook Air and its Mac OS X (Mountain Lion). I will need awhile to figure out how to work with BBEdit, as it is the Swiss Army knife of Mac editors, being more than the equivalent to TextPad.