There’s got to be some name for this behavior…a better name than “being crappy at keeping promises.” By which I mean, I make all sorts of big talk about the great things to come in my blog, and for that matter, in every different project I’ve got going in (there are lots of them, trust me). And then, I never really get where I’m going. Which, hey, it’s fine. But it’s crazy—I don’t have a job or anything right now, and yet somehow I still don’t have enough time to physically log on to blogger and just update the dang thing. I even have posts full of crap written—two week’s worth from when I thought I was going to be updating this thing three times a week. So, I’ll post one of those when I’m back downstairs.

Back downstairs because I’ve got a laptop now. And it’s a Mac, which is funny. But I need to know how to use Macs, man. If I want a publishing job, they’re probably going to want me to be comfortable with at least the general interface of a Mac. I’d hate to have my dreams of steady employment and health insurance to be crushed under a learning curve of all things. So far, I’ve learned a fair amount, but the most resounding thing I’ve learned is that the guys who write Mac “how to” books are a lot like the Mac users I’ve run into: they were each helpful in different ways, but out of the three I picked up, one of them spent most of its time aggrandizing OSX and knocking Microsoft whenever it got a chance, even though a lot of the “awesome” and “new” things Panther can do, Windows does, too. They’re just either kind of esoteric (so most windows and/or Mac users don’t necessarily need them) or are, or at least ought to be, standard features of an OS—and I can’t believe they were missing from OS9. I know there are plenty of little enhancements in OSX, don’t get me wrong. I just wish people would stop pretending that one of these companies was hands-down better than the other.

Anyway, I’m not an authority on this and I’m not trying to be, but to boil down my simile into a single sentence, Mac self help books, like Mac users, can be helpful. But one out of three is going to be overly proud of itself and piss you off while it’s trying to help you.