Paolo's Mac
Don't ask me why, but I read Paolo's Italian Weblog. No, the answer is, I don't speak Italian, but my Spanish is good enough to get the gist of the Italian, and if the post seems interesting, I Google it to get a better idea.
Here's Paolo's latest about the anniversary of his family getting their first Mac 19 years ago. He reminisces about how you had to take the OS disk out of the drive in order to use the included apps. I actually don't remember that bad boy. My first Mac was the MacPlus that I used in College in 1990, six years or so after it was launched. I spent several years as a Mac head while I was working in the publishing industry. But still, I remember that disk drive sound still quite clearly.
Ieri era il diciannovesimo anniversario della presentazione del primo Macintosh. Ricordo come mio padre, all'epoca uno dei primi dealer Apple, torn� a casa con questo strano oggettino (venne presentato contemporaneamene in tutto il mondo). Non si poteva aspettare il giorno successivo, c'era molto entusiasmo e lo installammo sul tavolo del soggiorno di casa.
Il sistema operativo era su un floppy da 400K, gi� questa una novit�. Poi c'erano due programmi: MacPaint e MacWrite, ognuno con il proprio dischetto. Per lanciare un programma si doveva espellere il dischetto del sistema operativo, inserire quello del programma e vare doppio click con il mouse. A quel punto si doveva cambiare dischetti un po' di volte prima di poter usare il programma. Era bellissimo e credo abbia avuto una notevole influenza su cosa ho fatto da allora.
If you hadn't noticed, Paolo doesn't blog the same in both languages. And I think to me, many times his Italian weblog is more interesting and natural. This could just be my imagination, but I think his English weblog is more a "public face" weblog for all you monoglots ("he says with nose slightly inclined upwards..."). I tried weblogging once in Spanish and quickly stopped because my Spanish is horrible and it's a real effort for me to write in the language with any speed or clarity. Plus, anything I would want to write in my blog I would want to write in English first. Plus it's really hard to be funny in another language and the first time I tried, no one got it, so I stopped. I wish I could delete the posts from existance since Google still finds them, bleh.
Italian's a neat language... I like its history a lot. I'd like to take a class or two in it some day. I wonder how hard it would be for me to pick up. My sister-in-law is working for a subsidiary for an Italian Telecom and a year or so ago when she started, they sent her to Rome for a month for Italian classes. Just a month and she came back semi-literate. Incredible... the languages are so similar.
-Russ