I have a confession to make.
Our family is Mixed.
Yep. Half of us (two out of four kids, my first husband and his wife) support the Dark Side.**
The rest of us (the other two kids, BH, & me) choose to live in The Light.
Two additional family members- my ex’s stepson Alex (who considers himself to be my nephew once or twice removed) and Steve (who is practically a son-in-law) – have been making bold steps out of the Darkness and into the Light of Macdom, the Light of Computers That Don’t Crash (hardly ever), the Light of Goodness.
Got that? (Yes, it is a complex family. We are thinking of having trading cards made up so we can keep us straight.)
Daughter Number Three, aka Meredith, aka adastraperasper is the Goddess of the Good. She’s a Mac tech at her college, and helps me out whenever I get confused. (Which is rare, because Macs rock.) All of this is to explain why Mer and Steve lined up in the King of Prussia mall last night to buy a family version (five licenses) for the new version of the Mac OS X operating system called Leopard.
Veeeery long line waiting for the launch.
Line continued in the store.
Happy Steve, almost 100% converted, at the after-party.
Leopard joins the family!
edited to add Meredith’s comments
“so yes, we did get tshirts! yay! a family license ends up, after tax, $210.
I did run into one, slightly major issue. I used file vault on os 10.4 (Tiger) to protect my files. It was a way of scrambling all of the files on my drive so the without passwords and such they could not crack my drive. I began using it to get in the habit for when I will be a teacher and dealing with confidential information. Anyway, I did not turn off file vault before I installed 10.5(Leopard), which meant that when Leopard was fully installed it was trying to read encrypted files created in a past OS. Well, this didn’t work so well. After some googling, I found out that many people were having this same issue. Luckily, I know a good bit about macs and how to find errors and fix them. So I started to poke around and eventually got to a point that I didn’t know what else to do. I was running into permissions errors everywhere. So I called up the wonderful people in Apple Care, and even though I had to be on the phone with them for awhile they eventually helped me. I ended up just backing up my most important files and deleting everything and installing a fresh OS. It is something that I had been wanting to do for awhile, because over the course of three years you end up with lots of little stuff that needs to be deleting. So the only downside to this is I am going to have to reinstall all of my applications, but in the end I have Leopard on my computer so it is totally worth it!!!”
** Despite their allegiance to Windows, we forgive the aforementioned relatives for their trespasses and honor their choices. All families need breathing room for diversity and tolerance.
We leave you with this classic Apple commercial from 1984. All hail the revolution. Enjoy.