As many of you know, I didn't bring my Mac with me when I moved to Tokyo. My reasoning was simple: I spent too much time surfing the Internet and doodling in Photoshop back when I lived in S.F., and I didn't want to bring my bad habits with me when I came here. This was a tough decision for me, as I've had a Mac by my side every day of my life since I was 19. Let's take a trip down memory lane, shall we?

My first Macintosh was the "pizza box," a pre-PowerPC LCII which boasted 4MB of RAM and a whopping 75-meg hard drive. My second was the 8500, Apple's first PCI machine, and the only one with A/V-in ports, allowing it to serve as an extremely primitive video-editing machine. Thanks to numerous hardware upgrades, the 8500 lasted an impressive five years, from the beginning of my CalArts period in 1995 through the end of my Novo period in 2000. I had great fun keeping the rickety thing going, but after MacOS X came out I knew I'd need a new machine. One eBay impulse-buy later, and I was the proud owner of a G4 Cube—later upgraded to 1Ghz:#151;which I'd still be using today if I hadn't moved to Japan. Thus, these last two months of Maclessness have been a unique experiment for me.

Well, the experiment is over. Last week, in frustration over not being able to use the Japanese language-learning software I brought with me, I marched down to Akihabara and bought a used iBook. It's the tiny white kind, so I have the option of installing an Airport card and MacOS X should the need arise. For now, though, it's just a three-year-old laptop running a Japanese-language MacOS 9.1, so I'm not all that concerned that I'll sink back into carpal-tunnel-land.

In the last week, I have indeed been using my newest Mac to study Japanese, so mission accomplished, as far as I'm concerned.