So my buddy Hiland and I decided we'd try to learn how use Ruby on Rails. We picked a harmless enough looking tutorial on OnLamp.com by the kind folks at O'Reilly, and away we went. I was happily making my way through things, and then we started needing software. Ah, first it was the text editor because I didn't really know Unix and the world of Vi, etc... Then it was the Rails application servers (at least that what I currently envision them to actually be), like Locomotive. Then there was the need to update everything on my Intel Mac because apparently what it came with wasn't suitable for this task. Then came Ruby, RubyGems, Rails, LightTpd, PCRE (which I've read may be one of the culprits), and again, MySql... Eventually I got the application built from the tutorial, and the last 10 hours have been devoted to learning how to configure a webserver on my Macbook. Low and behold Hiland ditched this one and left it up to me to sufer through this as he's gone to developing some more tutorial driven application efforts on Windows of all things because alas alack it only takes 10 minutes get through the equivalent of 15 (and counting) hours of the equivalent on the Mac. Now, how's this lending itself to adoption of the preferred platform? Don't get me wrong, I'm not going near my Parallels or my Bootcamp login just because it would have been resolved sooner than I could have written this post. I'm in it for the long haul (for now)...