I've got kind of a funny story of how I got my first Mac. I moved from SLC to Portland in 2000, and had it in my head that I would join a graphic design firm a

I've got kind of a funny story of how I got my first Mac. I moved from SLC to Portland in 2000, and had it in my head that I would join a graphic design firm as their on-hand developer. (At the time, I was of the opinion that design and development should happen under the same roof, a belief that ultimately proved correct, but under the other roof.) So I spent months shopping around my resume — with a prominent link to my website — to mostly-confused graphic designers, and didn't get a single callback or even an email saying "thanks but no." After around six months I sort of gave up and became the UI guy at a shipping company. At the shipping co, I saw a bunch of "smurf" Powermac G4s in the corner. "Yeah those are for testing, but nobody uses Macs so we don't really care." I decided to take a look at my website on the latest version of MSIE just for the hell of it. Instant computer crash. A bug in MSIE's CSS engine took down the whole computer. Not just the browser, the whole thing. All graphic designers at the time were still on Mac Classic, OS X had no penetration yet. I had been walking into offices, and turning off computers with unsaved work for months. The first thing I did with some spending cash was get a "graphite" 400mhz iMac G3, installed OS X as I was becoming disenchanted with Windows, and soon found that I liked using that pathetically slow machine far more than my tricked-out 1.6ghz AMD Athlon.