Let me introduce you to...

Bert!

Bert is my new (and first) MacBook, who joined Einstein (my not so old Fujitsu Siemes desktop) on Friday. He's replacing Lila, my old Sony Vaio notebook.

I sometimes have the impression that computers, or more generally technology, and I don't get along very well. Lila started out wonderfully and I enjoyed working with her for the first year or so. Then she started freezing on me, sometimes even blue-screening. That was shortly before Service Pack 2 for Windows XP came out. I installed it and Lila started to behave again. Then I went to France for a year where I had to write lots of essays and other assignments. That's when Lila started to misbehave again. She constantly froze on me and when I had to restart an essay 6 (!) times - not even telling Word to save my document every 2 minutes helped - and ended up in tears, I knew things couldn't continue like this. So I got Einstein. Einstein has been very dependable, except that he is very, very noisy. But I've heard from several people with Fujitsu Siemens computers that they're having the same problem. He's mostly doing his work, but in times when you have to work at the computer for a couple of hours, the noise can become very annoying and even deafening.

Meanwhile, Lila had been converted to Linux and has been working nicely ever since. But since she is pretty old (I got her in 2002), heavy and the battery has a durability of approximately 10 minutes, I can't take her anywhere. And that comes in the way of researching and writing in the library (well, not in the narrow sense of the word, but since many of the books I'll need in order to prepare my finals and probably my thesis cannot be borrowed from the library I'll need to read and write on the spot). Which means that I had to buy a new laptop. And since more and more friends of mine are getting MacBooks or iMacs and are extremely satisfied with these (and other) Apple prducts, I decided to opt for a MacBook myself.

Now I have Bert, and he appears to be working excellently. And he's white and beautiful, quiet and slim, and Mac OS X is very easy to get used to. Let's hope that this time I have a couple of years until I need to start worrying about him... My dad will be taking over custody for Lila.

Being happy with Bert does not mean though that I don't have any more technological problems. My PDA (a HP iPAQ Pocket PC) decided not to read my SD cards anymore, which means that I can't listen to music or use my mobile navigation system. I'll try and contact HP later this week to ask them if this is a problem that I can fix myself, or if I'll have to send my poor little PDA (which, come to think of it, I never named...) to HP...

Yep...technology and I really aren't best friends...