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with my own money, from my very first full-time job, was a Titanium PowerBook. It was insanely beautiful, powerful, and just wow.

For my entire computer-using life until then, I’d been a die-hard Windows user. I was about as anti-Apple as you could get, talked with a faintly mocking openly scornful voice when I spoke of Macs—conveniently forgetting that the first computer I’d ever been really excited to use was the shiny new Apple IIgs in our junior high school computer lab, or even the comparatively ancient IIe that sat next to it. Exciting because they were different.

Fast-forward to about 10 years ago, and Mac OS X had just come out. Having been exposed during my college years to Unix—the first computer science class I took was learning Scheme in a lab full of gorgeous and much-missed NeXT machines—and having had a ridiculous amount of trouble with my custom-built Windows box, I was ripe for a change. But what I was really excited about was trying out a real, user-friendly consumer OS based on Unix^*.

So, the TiBook. From the moment I opened that box, I haven’t looked back. Every computer I’ve bought since has been a Mac. For the last ten years, I have spent probably more time with my various Macs and iDevices than I have interacting with humans, or doing anything else. I have worked, played, procrastinated, produced, entertained myself, connected, communicated, laughed, taken a reprieve from fear and grief, escaped, found my way, lived with one of these devices as a constant companion. And Steve Jobs made that all possible.

It’s a little crazy to think that someone you’ve never met can have such a profound impact on your life, but Steve Jobs and the work he did had that impact, for me and millions of others. So thanks, Mr. Jobs.

?!?! over iPhone 4, and I kind of am too^†, but I gotta tell ya, what’s really making me go ?!?! is Safari 5. Included:

• Safari reader, a feature that works much like Arc90′s popular Readability bookmarklet by detecting when the currently loaded web page has an article, and allowing the user to reformat the page in an easy-to-read, scrollable view that cuts the obnoxious ads out. What’s more, they actually go through every page of multi-page articles and concatenate them together for one seamless, easy reading experience. Say it with me: ?!?!

  Now, you might be thinking, “How are the content providers going to let this stand, when it could wreak havoc with their ad sales?” Well, grasshopper, its at least partly because when Safari is concatenating the pages’ content, it does a full HTTP request on each page, so the innocent kitten publishers who artificially split up short articles into 3 and 4 and more pages just to maximize ad annoyance views don’t have to worry about losing their accustomed number of ad-frame loads.

• A smarter address field, that no longer requires you to remember exact URLs; it searches within (rather than at the beginning of) the URLs and page titles in your history like Firefox has been doing for months (perhaps years) now. I’ve got two things to say to that: hallelujah, and about damn time.

• Never expected this, but sanctioned, easy to install, secure extensions, that can be developed in HTML, CSS and JavaScript. ?!?! Also, ROCK.

• Then, of course, is the improved HTML5 support and the ever more feature-packed web inspector, the icing and the cherry, respectively, on the sundae.

All in all, pretty ?!?! for me.

^† I gotta tell ya something else. Humble pie tastes terrible. Turns out my new cheapie phone doesn’t have much going for it other than its cheapness. I can at least get calls on it more reliably than the iPhone 2G, but text messages don’t work. At all. Seriously. All my friends have stopped sending me text messages, because literally more than half of their messages to me never get there. Not get there late, which sometimes happens too, but never get to me at all.

Then there are the times when I myself am trying to send a text, and the phone (a $*@#!^% Motorola i465) reports that the message was sent, though it actually wasn’t, and I’ll have no idea that the message never got out the door until I happen to reboot my phone days later, and all the recipients are asking me why they’re getting replies to their messages so late.

In fact, if I had an actual piece of crap the size of my phone, it’d be more useful, because then I could use it as fertilizer. This…thing isn’t worth the plastic it’s made of. So, well, iPhone 4. As much as I loathe and detest the idea of giving AT&T my money again, at least I’ll get a nice phone in the bargain.

That’s one way to do it. (hat tip)

In other news, the headline of the day is: “Adobe, You Brought An Advertisement To A Gun Fight.” Ha!

My 3.33 GHz, 8 GB friend. No, I am not kidding. !!! It is, for the record, awesome.

Charles Arthur is an idiot—he appears to be telling people that it’s perfectly all right to violate Apple’s EULA by upgrading straight from Tiger to Snow Leopard and still only paying the $29 upgrade-from-Leopard price, and that since you can get away with purchasing just one copy of the OS and installing it on multiple computers, that you should. No, what surprises me is that this piece of “journalism” apparently got past his editor and got published on the Guardian‘s website. Last I heard, editors are supposed to pay attention to pesky things like laws, or barring that, ethics.

No, I take that back. Maybe he’s not dumb. Maybe he’s just a charlatan. Jesus. (hat tip: George)

In these times of effectively unlimited quotas, there’s no need to ever delete email. And I don’t—all my various accounts’ inboxes combined add up to somewhere around 20,000 emails. Having all your emails is great, but accessing them quickly is at least as important as having them on hand. However, of late, I’d been experiencing some severe performance problems in Mail.app—it was taking literally on the order of minutes for Mail to start up and shut down for me. Just brutal.

Today, in an effort to alleviate some of that pain, I stumbled across a solution that worked magnificently for me: cleaning up Mail.app’s SQLite database.

Here’s how you do it:

1. Quit Mail.app.
2. Launch Terminal, then type cd ~/Library/Mail/.
3. Back up Envelope Index in whatever fashion you prefer. I did cp Envelope\ Index EnvelopeIndexBackup.
4. Open Envelope Index with SQLite: sqlite3 Envelope\ Index. At the sqlite> prompt, type: vacuum subjects;. Once the prompt returns, type Ctrl-D or .exit to quit SQLite.

This reduces the size of Mail.app’s database and cleans it up, usually to dramatic effect. I reduced my database from ~34 MB to ~22 MB, and Mail now starts up in seconds, not minutes. Boom!

References: procedure and information about the vacuum statement.

They said that “about two months ago,” Steve Jobs received a liver transplant. It is thought to have resulted from a slowly metastasizing tumor—Jobs was diagnosed with a rare form of pancreatic cancer in 2004.

Gruber has some doubts about the accuracy and the sourcing of the story, but one thing is clear: Jobs is returning to work within a few weeks. Likely his activity as Apple’s CEO will diminish a bit, but it’s great to hear that he seems to be doing well.

1. Happy St. Patrick’s Day! Make sure to celebrate your Irish heritage today by eating sugar cookies with green sugar sprinkles and drinking green beer.
2. Check out the live coverage of Apple’s iPhone OS 3.0 preview event. The list of new features reads like a most wanted list:
   • Cut, copy and paste. Hallelujah! Also: about damn time.
   • MMS. Again: about damn time.
   • Search in all applications and also across the system. OMG, IFO.
   • This is more for developers, but a Maps API that lets you embed maps into your application. HUGE.

   And they’re not even done yet.

Update 2009/03/17 11:35—Oh, no! Looks like (a) the iPhone OS upgrade is not free for original iPhone owners (i.e. me), and (b) no MMS on the original iPhone. The latter is a huge disappointment. Huge.