I bought a Mac, after spending so much of my life believe that such a thing was either foolish or, well, damn foolish.  It occured to me that maybe I should rethink my outlook because of two things:

A) I’ve spent far too much time fiddling with my computers, both hardware and software.  Granted, I enjoy it to a degree.  But I’ve reached a point where I’ve had to seriously evaluate how I spend every minute of every day.  I know that “it just works” is simply effective marketing, and I’ve already experienced my first paralyzing system crash (while importing 80GB of music into iTunes and transfering many other GB from the Windows box).  However, there’s something comforting about being able to call up one support line for both hardware and software issues (as opposed to Dell support, which has on more than one occasion directed me to call Microsoft, and of course self-supporting a DIY box where I have to contact individual manufacturers and distributers.  Maybe I’m just laming out, who knows.

B) The UCSD Bookstore had a closeout sale, with the previous generation MacBook Pro for $1199.  That’s pretty damn hard to beat in a Windows laptop, and even coming close on a performance/price ratio would’ve left out the hardware quality and support that these machines are known for.

If I had to pay full price for this computer, I wouldn’t have.  As it is though I’m pretty pleased.  Plus, having a laptop this powerful will help me in my quest to ween myself off the desktop.  That thing is a soul-sucking black hole.

I can’t stress this enough: buy a pizza stone.  Jacky and I were both getting tired of the way our pizzas were coming out.  Even if we baked the dough before adding toppings, the middle of the pie would be soggy and floppy.  And if we baked long enough for the dough to cook all the way through (on a very thin pie, by the way), the bottom of the crust would be either burnt or cracker-like.  Quite simply, we were fed up.

We bought a pizza stone at Williams Sonoma.  Their stone was actually one of the cheaper ones we found, and their products can usually be depended on for quality and durability.  Its first use was in cooking up 4 pizzas, all with varying degrees of topping saturation.  A simple margherita pie, a pesto-mozzarela pie, one with two layers of total pepperoni AND cheese coverage, and one with cheese and grilled chicken breast.  The results were phenomenal: no uncooked dough, no charred crust, no soggy middles.  Absolutely amazing pizzas.