To blog. To read everything interesting that I want to. To do the things I really want to do. To be the friend I wanted to be. To keep in touch with all my friends and family. To hang out with interesting people. To make a list of things that I don’t have enough time for.

I’m going to try harder to not let time pass me by. Life’s too short, as the old saying goes…

On August the 1st, at long last, I went to a place I usually avoid like the plague- Forum Mall in Bangalore, and bought my dream machine- a sexy black Macbook! It sports a vivid 13.3″ screen, 2 GB RAM, a 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, and built-in everything except an SD Card reader/ PCMCIA card slot/serial port. To add icing to the cake, and because I dislike using the track pad, I went to the Reliance iStore on MG Rd. and splurged on the Apple Mighty Mouse, a wireless, Bluetooth mouse with a laser pointer that works everywhere except on glass tables. The Imagine store was out of Mighty Mice on that day. I also purchased the slick  Apple Front Row remote control for convenient access to my music, movies and photos.

I had to return my first Mighty Mouse the very next day because it would only scroll down but not up. ll the other buttons worked as advertised. The nice folks at the iStore exchanged it for another new mouse with no hassle, and even helped me test it on my Mac to ensure that it worked. To date, this defective first mouse, and the fact that both USB ports are located too close to each other, preventing 2 devices from being connected simultaneously (if one of them has an extra-wide body like my Tata Indicom Plug2Surf CDMA modem), has been my only negative experience with Mac ownership.

The sales staff at the Imagine Store at the Forum, which is not an Apple store by any means, albeit an Authorised Reseller, were very friendly and helpful. They were puzzled by my insistence, before parting with my cash,  on seeing if the keys on the keyboard could be popped up from their standard QWERTY configuration, and rearranged in my preferred DVORAK keyboard configuration for better ergonomics and less RSI. I had read on instructables.com or some such site that a Macbook could be reconfigured this way, but wanted to be 100% sure just in case the keyboard design had changed since that article was posted. Lo and behold, not only was this configuration supported by Mac OS X (as it is in Windoze and Linux), but it took barely an hour for a busy but helpful technician to prise and rearrange the keys to my favourite configuration.

A couple of days later, after being disappointed by the meager selection of laptop bags at the Imagine Store, the Witco store and at the new-to-India Staples office-supply chain, I bought myself a Samsonite backpack from the company store on Residency Rd. There are better packs available abroad, and some of the Crumpler and Targus bags were nice too, but didn’t meet my requirements for a bag that I could tote to a clients’ offices and around town in general.

Then, to ensure added protection to my prized new machine, I bought a slick black neoprene case from Case Logic, whose CD cases have impressed me over the years with their functionality and durability. Neoprene is mostly used in diving suits, and helps repel water, though I believe it is not a fully-waterproof material.

My new MacBook worked like a dream from day 1, and I revelled in the user-friendliness of its operating system, known as OS X Leopard. Sure, many things were different in Mac World after migrating from Microsoft Windows. All windows have their minimise, maximise and close buttons on the top-left, as compared to being on the top-right for Windows. After changing any settings, there’s no “Save” button, as all changes are applied on the fly. Really slick.

I downloaded Firefox 3, my favourite browser, as well as VLC Media Player, HandBrake for DVD ripping, Adium (a neat multi-protocol chat client that lets me use Gtalk and Yahoo Messenger within one application), as well as NeoOffice, the Mac version of the popular OpenOffice free office software suite. To install apps in a Mac, you don’t double-click on the .exe installer file like in Windows. The Mac equivalent is called a Disk Image File, and you just have to drag that .dmg icon to the Applications folder to install. What I like is that OS X will ask you to enter your master password for all installations and major changes to system or user settings. This way, it’s harder for any potential Mac viruses out there to install themselves and wreak havoc.

Using a computer has become a joy now, compared to the headaches inflicted on me by Windows XP for so many years!

Like millions of other loyal FF users waiting to upgrade from FF2, I too downloaded the 7MB installation file in the first few hours of its release, and it does work a lot snappier than FF2 in every respect. The memory footprint is a bit lighter too, usually hovering around the 105MB mark, with my usual 4 to 5 tabs open.FF2 used to hog as much as 140MB and cause my WinXP PC to hang frequently!

Many of my favourite extensions like Ad-Block Plus, Safe Cache, and Down them all! didn’t work at first, but a few of them did get rapid updates within a day or two of FF3’s release. Hopefully the boffins are busy updating my favourites like ImgLikeOpera and TryAgain (both currently incompatible with FF3) and will push them out ASAP!

Not surprisingly, most of the early adopters (the Twitter and FriendFeed crowd) are already raving over FF3, with over 8 million downloads within the first 24 hours of its release! Get it! It’s that good!

May the 15th is supposed to be International Human Rights Day, and bloggers are being exhorted to blog on this topic. Too bad I only got to it at 4:10am the next day, but that’s life- work first, play later!

My take on Human Rights is that the more we have, the better. Sadly, nearly a third of the Earth’s population lives under despotic regimes, dictatorships and military juntas. Even democratic governments in several nations pay lip service to HR while mercilessly suppressing dissent and free expression thereof. As long as the masses in many of these Asian, African and Middle Eastern nations depend on their governments for handouts, poverty will render the cause of education a moot point. Poor families send their kids to work, either at home, the farm or outside. Doesn’t leave much scope for Reading, ‘Riting and ‘Rithmetic, does it?

Even “advanced democracies” like the USA have their Guantanamo Bays and other Gulag-like gaols, where one is guilty unless proved innocent- a clear contravention of their own right to a fair trial and against self-incrimination. The planet has a long way to go before all its nearly 7 billion inhabitants get the full “Human Rights” repertoire.

Here’s kudos to Amnesty International and all the other organisations fighting for a change in the status quo!

Hell no, hell no, we won’t take it any more!

I’m posting this right from my browser and not WordPress to test Scribefire. It seems to be a great idea and should make it much easier to post content to blogs for most users. It got great reviews at various sites so I thought I’d try it! I’m still recovering from the massive dinner my Mom cooked up for the 8 visiting family members (mostly Mom’s cousin and her family) today! So just a short exploratory entry via Scribefire!

PS: My RD 350’s chrome parts have all come back nice and shiny from the plating shop. Next item: repainting everything that needs to be painted!