We thought it would have taken at least a few days to kick in, but faithful viewer The Mod Imposter informs us that ZDNet's David Coursey evidently succumbed to the influence of Reality Distortion Field energy on his very first day of temporary Mac usage. You may recall that Coursey, a self-proclaimed Mac fan who, strangely enough, uses Windows exclusively and rarely has much good to say about Apple, recently decided to push aside his Wintels and spend a month purely in the Mac realm-- just as an experiment, you understand. The idea was apparently to see whether it's possible for anyone to survive on an all-Mac computing diet. (Why he didn't just ask us, we'll never know; we could have summed up the answer for him in a single resounding "duh.")

Interestingly enough, Coursey isn't using G3-based equipment as he originally stated he would; it seems that someone at Apple got word of his little field trip into Macville and chucked him a PowerBook G4 and one of those newfangled iMacs in hopes of greasing the wheels a little. And get this-- apparently Apple was taking no chances with the outcome of Coursey's grand experiment, because the company invited him into its boardroom for a few "software demos." There's no mention if Steve Jobs was present, but we figure that at the very least the guy was hiding behind the curtains and pumping Coursey so full of RDF that when he walked out of that place he would have glowed in the dark.

How do we know? Well, jeez, just look at the opening line to David's first journal entry: "On the first day of my month as a Mac user, I made a momentous decision. I made up my mind to change careers." He takes a quick trip to Apple's boardroom, looks at Final Cut Pro running on a TiBook, and suddenly the guy's ready to chuck the journalism shtick and become the next Coppola? Yeah, that sort of thing happens all the time without Jobsian intervention. But whether or not you believe that a massive infusion of RDF was responsible for Coursey's sudden career epiphany, you have to appreciate how good it looks when a stodgy Wintellian tech pundit watches Apple software at work for a few minutes and suddenly decides that his true calling is to "work with pictures and sound, not just words."

Sure, once he got home and "better sense prevailed" (read: Steve stopped zapping his brain with Happy Rays), he reconsidered his need to change careers and discovered a "few snags" as he tried to adapt his ingrained Windows workflow to the Macintosh Way. But his overall tone is still very complimentary, so this whole Mac experiment sounds like it's gotten off on the right foot-- and we wouldn't be surprised if some of Coursey's glowing comments show up in future Apple marketing materials. Thus ends Week 1 of David Coursey's plunge into Macdom; here's hoping the rest of the month is as positive.