So Shannon and I were watching a tv movie this afternoon and a commercial for the Wendys fast food chain came on. It was a guy with MEPS, Multiple Eating Personality Syndrome.

Here's the Scene
Guy steps up to the counter at Wendys and can't decide what to order. Why you ask, well Wendy's allows you to decide which side item you'd like to accompany your sandwich. You can choose from a potato, chili, french fries, a side salad and a few other items. So once the patron gets to the counter he starts doing a bunch of different voices because he can't decide which side item to order. I don't remember all of them but I do remember him trying to order a bake potato in a southern draw... Needless to say it was pretty funny.

Then Shannon commented about how Wendys commercials have gotten funnier since Dave Thomas died. Her explanation was based on the fact that he was in the vast majority of the commercials before he died. But she said she'd bet money that the commercials featuring him had his face superimposed on a different body.

After Shannon's speculations about Dave Thomas' body doubles and thinking about how Wendys commercials are fairly funny now, I started thinking about fast food menu combinations. Most people don't know this but the art of coming up with a new item for a fast food menu is really a science.

For starters these "food inventors" have to think of a way to introduce something new to the menu using the existing ingredients used to make 80% of the items already on the menu. And then when they introduce a new item they come up with 100 different ways to use that in a host of other new menu items.

Just think about the Taco Bell Chalupa. After they introduced the flat bread to their menu they made about 5 other menu items based on it. So in order to offset the cost of this new item they have to buy they must invent a slew of new items they can charge more for.

Well, the reason I'm even talking about this is because I find it pretty interesting. Wendys has found a way to introduce new items, albeit in the form of new value meal combos, without increasing their costs by introducing new ingredients. I'd say that's definitely thinking outside the hamburger box.

Well done.

Yes it's true, I have made the switch from PC to Mac. I'm honestly a bit surprised with myself, I mean, I'm one of those guys that's more interested in getting stuff done rather than caring about what I'm using to get that stuff done. I've been a pc user as long as I can remember. Sure I can do my thing at the command prompt in Unix and I'm equally nimble with basic commands in dos [like the ipconfig -release all and ipconfig -renew commands I had to master when I'd connect to different networks] but I don't spend my life at the command prompt. When I was younger I spent my after school hours on my Amiga 500, usually playing video games and getting sucked into the storyline of adventure games but I can't say I did that much real work with it.

So, when the opportunity came to ditch Windows and start anew with a fresh 15" PowerBook, I was reluctant but went ahead and made the switch. Now, 3 weeks later, I'm glad I did. It's kind of funny, you know, I've been using Windows for development, running my businesses, staying connected with folks, all my servers, and now I'm rethinking all of it. But those of you who have been using Macs for a long time aren't surprised...That's the power of Apple!

I must confess, this PowerBook isn't my first Mac but it is the first Mac I've decided to use in a full time basis. I have a Mac Mini and it's connected to the plasma in our family room and is more of a multimedia machine than anything else at this point. In fact, last night Shannon's parents were over and we started talking about Google Maps Satellite functionality. Then BAM, we popped up all of our addresses on the 42" plasma and everyone started laughing. I had no less than 3 business plans formed in that 5 minute period of time. One goofy app idea I came up with was making a surf report based on Google Satellite imagery using their Google Maps API. No more waiting on a crappy cam to have it's lens cleaned off or for someone to update the surf report by hand. Sure it's not as good as a ground level cam but it gives you a good idea of whether or not 2nd light is breaking or if el Caseo should head out to Mavericks to take some pics of his favorite surfers. Anyway, thanks to my mini's ability to quickly awaken from sleep mode, that moment of zen was possible.

So, now I'm using my PowerBook all day every day and there have been some drawbacks but there have been enough positives that definitely make up for those drawbacks. So far I've come to love the way my mac easily connects to any wireless network I point it at without any issues. While I was at CFUnited last week I was one of the only folks that wasn't getting knocked off the wifi while I was blogging. People were getting so made and saying...

Dude, stop hogging the wifi. There's only 60 open connections available and you've been on for like 6 hours now, let some other people on.

Needless to say, the ones complaining were all windows users, haha, I'm lovin it.

Also, the mac is much less prone to crashing and locking up than my Windows laptops ever were. I think less about the machine and more about what I'm trying to do than I ever did before. If I download a pdf from the web I can open it in Preview and it doesn't take 5 minutes to view the pdf like it does on Windows, that's a big deal to me and I'm sure there are stats that would support the following hypothesis. I bet more mac users download pdf's from web sites than windows users because the mac users can open the pdfs without bringing their system to a halt and Windows users can't say the same thing. It's just a hunch but I bet the stats will back me up on it.

There are more features I like and there are a bunch I'm not too thrilled with yet but I'll go into those in a later post. For now I just wanted to let all of you know I'm not working on a Mac and am quite enjoying it. This from a guy that's been using Windows for the past 17 years... that's a big deal!