You all know that saying that says if you hang around a barber’s shop for long enough, sooner or later you’ll get a haircut? Or, as Nick Cave so eloquently put it, if you dine with the cannibals, sooner or later, darling, you’re gonna get eaten!

My point? I’m a dyed-in-the-wool Windows guy and a power user. I cut my teeth on Windows 95, onto Windows 98 (not SE), Windows 2000 and I’ve been using Windows XP Pro since Service Pack 1. Along comes Security Now (the first podcast I ever subscribed to) then TWiT, This Week in Media and then, pretty much down to the fact that I enjoy listening to the TWiT-casters, I found myself subscribing to MacBreak, then MacBreak Weekly and now even the iLifeZone. This was rather strange, as I’ve never owned a Mac in my life. Most of the TWiT-casters are Mac guys, some even openly admit to being fanboys. So listening to the TWiT-casts was the equivalent of hanging around the barber’s shop. It was just a matter of time.

So, Apple switches to Intel chips and now Windows can go on a Mac. Now there’s a thought. My wife’s Sony Vaio (P266 MMX with a whopping 32MB of RAM) is looking rather long in the tooth and so it seems only right that we upgrade the notebook. So, that decided, I said I was going to wait and see if Apple would ever put the Core 2 Duo chips into the MacBooks, which of course they did. So, I placed my order for a my first ever Mac on Saturday 11 November: a white MacBook with 2 GB of RAM. Being a little concerned about the switch, I decided to add a copy of Parallels and Windows XP Home to the order. I’ll see how much I can get by without Windows, but I’m pretty sure I’ll end up installing it at some point.

And, joy of joys, I just got a call from the shop to say that my MacBook has arrived and is there waiting for me to go and pick it up! Of course, it would come on a Tuesday, when the only day I can easily get to the shop is a Saturday. Still, it could be worse, it could be Monday! But I’m fairly sure that I’m going to try and bunk off tomorrow morning so I can go and collect it – I can always get up a couple of hours earlier to work and then nip into town for my MacBook.

Exciting times!