Technology in Writing

    I took the plunge yesterday, bought into the hype and drove to the Apple Store. I came out with a shiny new MacBook Air. It has an 11.6" screen, a fair amount smaller than my 13.3" MacBook, but I'd tried it out a couple of times in the store and thought it would work. It has a bigger brother with the same size 13.3" inch screen as the current MacBook Pros.

    Macs have long been my computer of choice. In fact, my first one was still in 1984, the year the first Macintosh commercial debuted during the Super Bowl earlier that year. It was a tall, foot-square box with a 9" B&W screen and 128k of RAM. It had a single floopy, but I splurged and bought the upgrade: the external floppy drive. I was a happy man with two disk drives. No hard disk.

    All computers were a challenge in 1984, but the Macintosh caught on due to its graphical user interface (GUI), which changed the way computers worked. For a few years, it was touch and go for Apple and the Mac, but the good times are rolling now.

    After the better part of two days, I've got a clean system with only the software I need installed. I even spent a little time at the Cambria library today doing some writing. All my writing files, bookmarks, mail, etc., are in place and working. And I have my backup set up.

    Let me say that again: I have my backup set up.

    After having a hard drive fail several months ago, I never take backups for granted (I'd just done a full backup the night before the failure).

    For a few posts I'll touch on technology and the MacBook Air, specifically as it pertains to writing. But first let me tell you about something I recently learned about: Dropbox (www.dropbox.com).

    Whether you use more than one computer or just need someplace to store files for backup, Dropbox is pretty cool. 2 GB free. I'm using it to hold a copy of my latest work in progress. After I close the doc, I just drag it to the Dropbox folder and it's stored locally as well as up in the cloud at my free account with Dropbox. I can get to it from any computer. Check it out.