1) I’m studying ICT so I needed a laptop I really enjoyed watching and discovering.

2) I haven’t had a Mac for more than a decade. I used to learn Basic on my father’s Apple IIc 15 years ago, to steal my mother’s Powerbook 170 to write short stories about 12 years ago, to play MIDI files on a Macintosh Classic about a decade ago, & to run educative Arborescence software as well as Sim City on one of the first Power PC machines perhaps 9 years ago. Great memories. And since Mac hardware have recently been very appealing, I just couldn’t resist.

3) It happened that I had available cash. Well, not anymore. I had saved money to purchase a second-hand car, something I didn’t do eventually.

4) I received excellent pieces of advice on my blog. Many thanks to all those who contributed.

Apple Store “track your orders” says I should receive my Macbook Pro (17′ glossy, 2Gbytes RAM, 120 Gbytes HD) on September 28th 2006. I read many negative feedbacks (here’s one on Rodrigo Sepulveda’s blog, a French entrepreneur blogging in English) on Apple’s logistics, supposedly worse than Dell’s for instance. I’ll keep you posted on the actual final delivery date and performance of the computer.

Update 21st September 2006: the delivery date was just postponed to October 2nd 2006.

As some of you may know, I’ve started again to learn Java recently. I’m a bit lost with the herculean amount of references online, and hence have been solely focusing on Sun Tutorials and some forums. But as a blogger myself, I just couldn’t let down my peers. And more than a peer, I found a homonym. Yakov Fain is a professional Java developer, working at a Wall Street financial services company, and writing for the Java Developers Journal. I’ve been watching his blog for a few weeks, and it definitely deserves to integrate my blogroll for the diversity of the topics discussed. Check it out: Zidane, his dreaming of Jonathan Schwartz asking Yakov about his vision of the future evolutions of Java, his children teaching him new English words, recruitment, etc.

Yakov Fain and I not only share our last name: I recently spent 6 months in New York City (it’s a pity I hadn’t come over his blog when I was there), the city where Yakov is working (apparently, Yakov lives in New Jersey, basically like my family in the US!), and both of us blog in English – definitely not our native language. By the way Yakov, my father was born from a Polish mother and a father born and raised in Vilnius, Lithuania (at the time Russia, where the name Fain comes from: Fain in old Russian became “fein” in German and “fine” in English – “raffiné” in French ). Where are you from Yakov? (I guess Israel, but who knows) See you some day perhaps…Always a pleasure to meet homonyms (apart from me, there are two other Jeremy Fain in the US – I never met them either).

To all my readers interested by Java development or not, and I insist, check out Yakov Fain’s excellent blog.