Most people who’ve known me and/or my wife for a while know that we’ve never really felt “settled” in Ohio. From even before we were married, we both knew we definitely did NOT want to live in Dayton, Ohio for the rest of our lives. For her, it mostly had to do with weather and a general lack of much of anything interesting in Dayton at all (with the major of exception of good people…there will be a lot of people here that we’ll miss dearly). For me, its always been about being closer to family.

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Computers are so unreliable. You’d think that with as long as I’ve been working with computers that I would’ve learned my lesson by now and gotten some sort of reliable backup and recovery plan in place at home. Unfortunately, if you did think that, you’d be wrong.

I’ve said for a long time that I was going to get some sort of plan in place. As a matter of fact, I’ve been working on writing my own application for backing up data off and on for quite a while now (I’ve run into a few snags that I’ve not been able to figure out how to get working, which is why its not done yet, but that’s another story for another time). Anyway, the system disk on my server at home crashed last week, which is why Yexley.Net was down for a while.

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For what its worth to anyone that might read this, my recent experience with the purchase of my new MacBook Pro through MacMall has been fantastic. The process of ordering the computer was quick and easy. The people I’ve talked to (yes, I was actually connected directly to a human when I called, after a single level of voicemail system where I told it what I was calling for - to place an order) have been friendly and helpful. The experience has been great. I think the thing that I noticed most, that prompted me to write this at all, was the fact that I just received a phone call from the account rep that I placed my order with, in which she reminded me to not forget to fill out the mail-in-rebate forms so that I could claim the rebates that I was offered with my purchase. The thing that stands out to me about that is the fact that, in my experience in the past, the whole point of mail-in-rebates is the hope that at least a percentage of people will either be too lazy or will not remember to fill them out. For a company to make a point to call a customer to remind them to fill out and send in the rebate forms to me is remarkable enough that its worth telling people about.

So, if you’re ever in the market for any Apple products, be it a computer, an iPod or iPhone, whatever…I can personally, highly recommend MacMall.com.

So…my new toy arrived yesterday afternoon, and I got to play with it for the first time last night. Obviously, its too soon to gush too much, but I will say that, without a doubt, the out-of-box-experience was nice, and the first six hours with it were very nice…and maybe most importantly, stable. I was able to watch videos, listen to music, read documents…SCROLL…all without a single problem or crash. VERY refreshing indeed.

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Yesterday’s drama was enough to push me over the edge.

I worked from home for a few hours, and then when I was done, I had some documents in an e-mail that I needed to print out. So I downloaded the documents and tried to print them out, and nothing came out of the printer. I checked the print queue, and found the ever-so-helpful message: “Print - error”. Oh…yeah…duh…of course. There was a print error. So all I have to do is fix it, right?

Well, to make a long story short, I spent the next four hours trying to get my computer to print those documents with no luck at all. That was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me. I will deal with this Dell PC (piece of crap) no longer.

So tonight I did it. I called up MacMall and ordered a MacBook Pro. I hope to have it by the end of the week. When it gets here, I’m fairly seriously considering sending this laptop back to Dell and challenging someone there to actually use this thing for one month, and then try to tell me that there’s nothing wrong with it. I can’t remember EVER having more problems with a computer than I’ve had with this one…and I’ll NEVER deal with Dell again.

So yes…I’m flippin’ the switch. From everything I’ve heard and read in coming to the decision to do this, the grass really is greener on the other side. I can’t wait to feel it under my feet.