Over the weekend I reactivated my Facebook. I had originally decided that I was going to reactivate it, and then keep a separate account with only close family and friends on it, but apparently that’s against the Facebook rules. So my new plan was to reactivate my Facebook account… and never look at the news feed. Which worked fine for about 3 hours until I decided I wanted to read over 300 news feed stories, and of course Ben cropped up in there and I got annoyed and remembered why I wasn’t going to look at my news feed in the first place. So I’m back, but if you need my attention or want me to see an update in particular, you’ll need to let me know, as I’m not going to see it – I just go straight to my profile. 
My antivirus also expired this week. I anticipated this happening so I installed this years version of the program I use, and interestingly when I went to boot up my PC yesterday, a notification popped up telling me that my antivirus had unpinned my current browser, Internet Explorer 8, in favour of me well, picking a better one. This put me out of joint a bit as despite the stick it gets, IE8 isn’t a bad browser, and it still holds over 50% usage share of web browsers. I like using it. But since my antivirus went to all the trouble of unpinning it from my task bar for me (:|) I’d have a look at a couple of the other browsers around, and what I decided to use ended up shocking me quite a bit… Safari. The Mac browser.
Anybody that knows me well knows that I loathe and detest Mac/Apple with a reasonable passion, so now I feel I should justify not only my reasons for picking Safari, but also how I actually feel about Macs and Apple on the whole. My problem with Apple isn’t so much software based (I’ve used iTunes for some time now), or even with their products, it’s Mac users and the pretension that follows them. For a start, they call people who work in Mac stores ‘Geniuses’ – is that not pretension at it’s finest? I don’t believe these people are geniuses at all, and certainly not for choosing to own/or support Mac products. When they win Nobel prizes, I will consider them Geniuses. Until then, they are glorified shop assistants. When you break it down, a lot of Apple/Mac products are only bought because people think it’s the ‘cool’ thing to do, because they’re brainwashed into thinking they’re the best thing since sliced bread. One Mac freak (despite him claiming not to be) I know described a Mac as ‘miracle of modern engineering‘. Yeah. I know. But what exactly makes them so special? Macs are the only computers available at Uni because they are supposedly ‘industry standard’ and Adobe products, i.e. Photoshop supposedly runs better on them. Says who? If you have an older macbook, vs a shit-hot PC, of course it’s going to run better on the PC. All the programs available for the Mac are available for the PC and really the PC has a damn sight more available for it. I really hate that Mac always seems to beat down PC’s and make them sound awful (the Mac vs PC adverts) comes to mind, but if they are so awful, why do all modern day Macs come equipped with Intel chips? Surely that just makes them overpriced, when you think you can buy a laptop with the exact same specifications at the same price? The same applies with all Apple products really. Everybody runs to the iPod and the iPhone, thinking that because it is an Apple product, it must be the best. No. It’s got to a point now where Apple can bring out any product and people will fawn over it just because it’s an Apple product. iPad, anyone? Upgrades are no different really. You pay around £90 for Apple RAM (a quick google search tells me this, I may be wrong but I know it’s not cheap) and then you have to get one of the aforementioned “Geniuses” to get them to install it, in comparison to a PC where you can install the RAM yourself, and for about £20. Ridiculous.
Anyway. I’m not explaining my argument well (to grasp a better idea of what I mean, google Charlie Brooker’s ‘I hate Macs’ article. He shares pretty much the same views as me and that makes him a thousand times hotter to me.)
As for my browser choice. With Internet Explorer out of the equasion, for me it was down to Firefox, Google Chrome or Safari. Firefox was automatically ruled out, a) because I’ve already used it and I’m not that bothered by it, and b) It bothers me that everybody thinks I SHOULD use it, therefore I must. I downloaded both Google Chrome and Safari, and the reason why I decided against Google Chrome is because I don’t like the lack of Google search bar (I’m aware that it’s built into the address bar, but I don’t what my URL history to be hindered by my searches for ‘Michael Weston naked’ and ‘Megan Fox is minging’ etc.) plus I felt that the address bar was a bit too big and reminded me of Comic Sans MS. Safari, whilst I admit it’s not as quick as Google Chrome (but I’m in no rush. It’s only the internet! My life doesn’t depend on a fast website loading speed) it’s a lot neater in design and takes up less room, meaning I can optimise screen space. Can’t be bad.
I also joined up to FormSpring the other day. If anyone fancies leaving me a question, anonymous or otherwise, you can do so here.
My inductions start tomorrolo. Nervouuuus!
♥: Nervous
♪: Unreal Tournament OST – Strider
