Not even Virgil could do poetic justice to Dell Hell

I've been on a forced "Dell Hell"(TM) hiatus for the past three weeks now. My old laptop blew up (literally) while I was logged into the LLamas, and somehow screwed things up royally. (The tech people at work still don't know exactly how/why it happened, other than the standard, "Dude, you got a Dell...") My theory is that Adobe PDF reader crashed/froze the machine up right as a thunderstorm was starting to roll in, so the thing didn't shut down properly. The prima dona file got corrupted (and, it being under the age of consent, made it a statutory hack, so someone's going to jail), and that's all she wrote.

This somehow screwed with my password/ability to re-log into the LLamas. (And password restore wouldn't work which was weirder still--any moment I expected bald geek-glasses wearing Gene Hackman and his mangy cat to come squirrel me away, muttering about NSA KEY FUHCH EEEEEE)

Bad news: it died literally the day after its 3 year warranty expired.

Good news: it died literally with two days left in the fiscal year, with just enough money in the department budget left for a MacBook Pro, and just enough time for it to be delivered (overnight) to show up before the fiscl year ended.

So, I'm back in the Mac Collective.

I'm actually an old school Mac person. Getting out my walker and speaking in my best Grandpa Simpson tone of voice, I remember using an Apple I with the tape reader, and using a soldering iron installing a disk drive on our Apple II (not to mention lovingly and carefully developing intricate HPlot programs to develop 1982 versions of computer, umm, porn.) The first Mac was a 1985 512K with an external drive, that lasted me a solid workhouse six years, through undergrad and B school. The second Mac was a Mac II, which lasted an additional six years until late 1998, when I switched over because that was what we had at work and could get a laptop for home.

I think Apple people and Mac users in particular are like the French---difficult, cranky, pretensious, but if it's indeed your computing mother tongue, oh so more elegant and classy than anything else.

So I've been fooling around with the different features and stuff (Ichat and all that business), and Mr. Skinny (age 7 1/2) is completely anamoured of comic life, which is going to find its way onto the pages of the LLamas for sure (along with vlogging).

Bad news---I'm without Photoshop for now. What's the best image/photo manipulation software for Macs? (I've downloaded bootcamp, and am going to get IT Gawd Aaron at work to get it so I can boot all my old games) What other software suggestions do people have? (And I've been playing with the movie maker thing--my first project was trying to recut the Fatal Attraction trailer to be about the Deb Frisch thing)

Worse news---They recovered everything from my old hard drive except the file area where I had all my LLama stuff: going on 3 years worth of pshops and my extensive file of images and pics for future LLama gags (oh, the collection of Hillary! images alone was priceless). It's like starting over.

Absolute worse news---The LLama Lockout ended basically by Phinneas trying the subtle method of picking up a large brick, tossing it through the picture window of Stately LLama Manor, knocking all the glass edges out with a monkey wrench, climbing through and letting me back in. (Think Jake and Ellwood using their improvised aerosol blowtorch on the electric panel of the elevator). What this means is I'm in under a "new" identity, meaning that I no longer have access to Cake Eater Chronicles so that my campaign to turn Kathy's blog into the internet's one-stop-shop for everything David Hassellhoff will have to be put on hold.