There are tons of web sites out there with serious, weighty technical stuff about computers and the like. This isn't one of them. My purpose here is just to talk about what I use, how I do things, and so forth.

On the right here you see the two computers I use--both Macintoshes. The desktop is a PowerMac G5, dual 2.7 GHz processors. It has a huge hard drive, tons of memory, and is a wonderful computer.

The laptop is a MacBook Pro model with a 17" screen, truly a desktop replacement which I use not only for presentations, but also as my main computer at SFCM. It is a pip of a laptop; you just can't beat the MacBook Pros for thoughtful, useful design. Not only that, but they can also run Windows, Linux, OS/2, whatever -- since they have Intel processors nowadays.

I'm not any kind of fanatic for one computer system over another--my computer life has encompassed MS-DOS, Unix, Linux, Windows from 3.0 onwards (including all the NT versions) and the Macintosh OS from System 6 onwards. I tend to buy computers often; it's a luxury to be sure but one that I enjoy.

That said, these days I'm almost exclusively a Macintosh person, with a strong preference for the Mac. I'm a "returner" rather than a "switcher", having been mostly Mac-based up until 1995 or so, then moving over to the PC side for a while, and now having come back to Macworld (with a sigh of relief...) When I need to access any Windows apps, I run Windows on my MacBook Pro, using the virtualization software Parallels. I still have a Dell Dimension 8300, but these days I run Ubuntu Linux on it, and not Windows.