Getting My MBA

I’m going to be a rebel. Yep. I’m normally a pretty straight-laced, follow the rules kind of guy. But this time, they’ve gone too far. They’ve pushed me beyond what any reaonsable human being should be forced to endure.

My grad school is telling me to buy a Windows PC. bleech, as Mad Magazine would say. What a waste! I’m going to get a free laptop, but it’s going to run Windows?

Well, actually, yes. I’m going to get a MacBook Pro. If I absolutely, positively have to torture myself by running the abomination from Redmond, at least I can do it in a closable window in Mac OSX.

In the bad old days, there used to be a program called Virtual PC. This let you run Windows on a Mac. It was slow and painful, but it worked. You could have Mac goodness most of the time and jump into the slime-encrusted pit of that other thing only when necessary. Did I mention that it was slow?

But now, Macs run on Intel chips. Not only are they seriously fast and competitively priced (for what you get, no stripper models here), but they’ve got all the right stuff to run, well, you know. Apple provides one solution called Boot Camp. This works really well and fast but you have to stop running OSX when you need to go slumming. The better solution, for me, is something called Parallels Workstation. It uses some tricky goodness baked into the Intel processor so Windows thinks it has the computer all to itself. It does what Virtual PC used to do, except it’s way faster. Did I mention that Virtual PC was really slow?

So, being a rebel doesn’t involve a motorcycle, a leather jacket, or flower power anymore. Maybe the punk kids’ll even think I’m cool! Naaaah.