I’m done. Again.

Today, I wrote the final exam of my undergraduate university degree. Two months from now, I’ll proudly don our school colors at convocation, and receive my Bachelor’s Degree in Public Administration. 

It’s been a long five years here in Ottawa. When I arrived in 1990, I was fresh out of high school—and a long long way from home. I had an Apple IIgs with an internal Applied Engineering forty megabyte Vulcan hard drive, two 3.5” drives, one 5.25”  drive and an ImageWriter II. And absolutely nothing to do with it. 

The previous year, I had taken great pleasure in producing a weekly, double-sided newsletter for my high school, titled BHS This Week. Every Monday I’d print off the final copy with the ImageWriter, speed off to school in my trusty Volkswagon Rabbit, and distribute a copy of the newsletter to every student and teacher. 

My early journalistic stint with electronic publishing had me hooked. I began to see all that was possible with technology. And I began to understand how rewarding journalism can be in its own right. But, alas…BHS This Week  would soon be nothing more than a fond high school memory. Thrust into the anonymity of a very large university, I was left without purpose or direction.

In that light, I could never have dreamed in 1990 where I’d be today. I remember innocently picking up my first Macworld magazine sometime that spring. On the sky blue cover of the May issue, there was picture of the just-announced Macintosh IIfx, sporting a 24-bit picture of a jet fighter pilot on its 13” RGB monitor. The magazine must have been a whole inch thick! I glanced through the pages, the advertisements, and articles. WOW, I thought. 

Macintosh. 

It was the future. And I had to have one. 

Within a few short months, I had a Macintosh IIsi firmly planted on my desk. I read everything I could about the Macintosh. I soon began work at the campus computer store. I learned how to sell Macintoshes. To take apart Macintoshes. To fix Macin- toshes. To use Macintoshes. For three years, I absorbed all the information I could.

And I became restless. “All this information in my head, and for what? I’m learning about public administration!” I’d often think to myself, “Do I really want to spend the rest of my life as a policy analyst?” 

And so MacSense was born.

How ironic it is. Five years after completing one chapter of my life, I close the door on another. And five years after reading my first issue, to the month, MacSense has been lauded by the very magazine that sowed the seeds of its creation. 

 

This May of 1995, I dive again into the unknown waters of the future—starting a new chapter of my life which will undoubtedly be titled “MacSense”. Though I may have written my final exam, plenty of difficult tests still lie ahead. Commercialization of MacSense, for example. You’ll no doubt have noticed our big second chapter IMPACT advertisement. I dearly love my work with MacSense, from creating colorful graphics to writing editorials. But it is very hard work. This issue, for instance, has claimed over 60 hours out of me (and this figure does not include the efforts of other contributors). I firmly believe that MacSense is a quality publication which offers a variety of interesting and useful information to a wide range of Macintosh users. And I firmly believe that the incorporation of graphic advertisements into these documents is the next necessary step for us, helping foster MacSense’s growth as a magazine.

MacSense will forever be a free publication. Never will we attempt to initiate a subscription fee for the magazine. The electronic nature of the document makes enforcing such a charge virtually impossible. With a single click, MacSense can be infinitely duplicated. 

And that’s exactly the way we like it.