“Don’t think, just do.”

This here laptop is an Apple MacBook Pro, and I’ve been noisily told by various Windoze© PC users anything Apple is disgusting and of-the-Devil.
I started with a Windoze© PC myself, but switched to Apple when my employer, a newspaper, computerized production with Apple.
I was told at that time Apple was superior, and it seemed it was. I did a Photoshop class with Photoshop on a PC, and it was hourglass-city.
I got used to Apple, so much a Windoze© PC can be intimidating.
Apple and PC computers do pretty much the same thing, but are different.
Faced with the idiosyncrasies of the way Apple does things, PC-users slide to calling them inferior. They get exasperated.
I’ve driven Windoze© PCs myself, and can usually get by.
Libraries are usually Windoze© PC.
But I like getting back to my Apple; it’s familiar. A Windoze© PC can get complicated. —But mainly because it’s unfamiliar.
I purchased this laptop maybe four or five years ago, at the behest of a confirmed Apple-user.
It wasn’t new; it was a “refurb,” refurbished by Apple.
I was driving an old Apple tower back then, and we thought it wasn’t big enough to crunch video.
Video-files are gigantic, and my tower was only a 60-gig hard-drive with two gig of RAM; huge when I bought it maybe 15 years ago.
This laptop has a 500-gig hard-drive, big enough to swallow the entire known universe; and its RAM is four gig.
I’ve never crunched the video, so essentially this laptop is overkill, as was my tower at first.
But it doesn’t do the Photoshop shovel-bit. Go back far enough to my first Apple, and often it couldn’t crunch a photo.
That is, it had so little RAM it started shoveling to “virtual-memory” on the hard-drive.
At my newspaper we added RAM to my humble iMac, from four meg to 60 meg, so I could crunch photos for the newspaper’s website.
I’ve crunched hundreds of photos here at home, but this 500-gig hard-drive is only 25% full, and I’ve never got the “virtual-memory” bit.
This laptop came with the “Snow-Leopard” version of OS-X, and still has it. Later versions of OS-X came along, but I’ve never installed ‘em.
Recently I drove an Apple computer with “Yosemite,” the most recent version of OS-X.
It had a one-terabyte hard-drive. That’s 1,000 gig. For Heaven sake! Storage of hard-drives is going beyond my descriptions.
I think I might install “Yosemite,” but only if I can still use the apps I have.
“Snow-Leopard” is pretty good, but “Yosemite” is phenomenal.
Every version of OS-X I’ve used — I began with my tower — has what’s called “the dock.”
OS-X is Apple’s most recent computer operating-system.
“The Dock” is a small strip of display across the full width or height of the screen, perhaps a half-inch or more wide, depending on what’s in it.
Usually it’s at the bottom, but I have mine up the right side.
(My desktop picture is GG-1 #4896, the only GG-1 I’ve been through. As I’ve said hundreds of times, I consider the GG-1 the greatest railroad locomotive EVER.)
The Dock contains icons of apps you quite often use; the apps are aliases.
When I click an icon in my dock, it fires up the app, and I can add apps.
If I drag an icon out of my dock to my desktop, it disappears with a “poof.”
Since I use Apple’s “Pages,” a word-processor, quite often, I added it to my dock long ago.
But apparently the other night my mouse grabbed my “Pages” icon and “poofed” it.
So get “Pages” icon back in my dock.
First I had to find my “Pages” application.
Easier said than done.
I opened up my applications folder, which shows my icons, and it wasn’t there.
Finally, after a lot of hand-wringing, I searched “Pages,” expecting nothing.
Viola! It was in the iWork folder in my applications.
I tried moving that icon to my dock, as I’ve done before, but it wouldn’t do it; perhaps because I had a “Pages” document open.
So I began stabbing away.
I could move the “Pages” icon to my desktop, but that’s old-school. It wasn’t where I wanted it — in my dock.
I moved that desktop icon to my trash, but after that “Pages” documents wouldn’t open.
I dragged it out of my trash back into my iWorks folder.
I then fired up a “Pages”-document, and noticed it put a “Pages” icon in my dock.
I eventually quit “Pages,” but the icon remained in my dock.
Perish-the-thought, I like to understand why things are happening.
It seems to be the bane of my generation.
But understanding no longer matters. That “Pages” icon is back in my dock, so why worry?
I used to get this at the newspaper — “don’t think, just do.”

• “The newspaper” is the Canandaigua Daily-Messenger, from where I retired nine years ago. Best job I ever had — I worked there almost 10 years (over 11 if you count my time as a post-stroke unpaid intern [I had a stroke October 26, 1993, from which I recovered fairly well]). (“Canandaigua” [“cannan-DAY-gwuh”] is a small city nearby where I live in Western NY. The city is also within a rural town called “Canandaigua.” The name is Indian, and means “Chosen Spot.” —It’s about 14 miles away.)
• “Windoze” is of course Microsoft “Windows;” an Apple-user put-down. Apple people and Microsoft people are always at war.