"Hello. Again."

"When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong." - Eugene V. Debs

I received a lot of unpleasant missives over the weekend about my last Raging Pencils cartoon, the one about PC's in Hell. As I expected, the pro-PC world was a bit miffed by the low esteem in which I so obviously hold their operating system of preference.

I say "operating system" rather than "computer" because these days all computers can run Windows, even the more recent Apple computers.

Yes, you heard right, you can run Vista on a Mac if you so desire. That's because Apple switched to Intel chips several years ago and, as they say, chips is chips. So why do I prefer OS X?

It all began back in 1994 when I spent an entire month trying to get a modem card in a Hyundai 386 SX to fire up. I consulted every bit of reference material I could get my grubby mitts on before I gave up and bought a used Mac Plus. I plugged it in and was on line in a matter of minutes. Because of this I began the long, happy slog of Apple evangalizing.

My first and most satisfying success occurred shortly afterwards, involving a muy fabuloso geekette I met online (believe it or not) after which we commenced to romance one another shamelessly. She was everything a lad could want except that she used a PC. I gently urged her to reconsider abandoning Bill Gates' leaky tugboat and ride with me on the crest of the Apple wave, but she complained that she had too much money invested in software to make it economically feasible. This was the typical argument against switching cyber-horses in midstream but I didn't let up.

Then her motherboards started dying. She lost two in a row to what the technicians at the local fix-it shop blamed on a really nasty little virus. That's when I went out and scrounged up an old but serviceable PowerMac 8100 for her, 80 screaming mhz's of raw power and a 40gb hard drive just slopping-over with all the software she could possibly use. I set it up so she could switch back and forth between the repaired PC and the Mac on her little 15" monitor.

After a short while she began to prefer the Mac so I then upgraded her to a PowerPC 7500 with a 500mhz processor card. By this time the PC was a backup-backup, running a few pieces of obscure, but still vital business software. The final nail in the PC coffin occurred when she bought her first new Mac, an 800mhz G4, along with a spiffy new Apple monitor. I was ever so proud. The PC is now probably a Kia fender somewhere in Kansas City.

In all this time the Macs ran perfectly, free of the trojans and worms and viruses that clog the hearts of Windows everywhere.

I had one fellow, a Windows fanatic, suggest that all you had to do was be smart enough not to open the "kitty.jpg.exe" files one so often finds in email but, friends, any operating system that uses something like an .exe shouldn't be allowed to coexist in a world with civilized humans.

So don't be afraid, little PC-ers. We've just upgraded from Bush2.0 to Obama OSX. It's time for you to upgrade, too.

=mike=