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…to have friends who have been married twenty eighteen years. And yet, twenty eighteen years ago on July 22, 1990, Shawn and Colleen were married. So obviously something is wrong with my calendar.
Seriously, though… happiest of anniversaries to you both.
This is part 2 in a theoretically infinite series.
Two weeks in and I am finding myself really happy with the Mac, with OS X and with life in general. OS X’s Unix-y roots means it’s very hackable and its popularity means there is lots of good open-source or otherwise community-supported software out there, plus it seems most of the software I used in Windows has Mac versions. Just a short list of the third-party (i.e. not Apple) software I’m using so far:
(“w” means used on Windows, otherwise it’s new to me)
I’ve just installed and am trying out VMWare Fusion, which pulls the Boot Camp Windows XP partition into a virtual instance running inside OS X. It seems that the only way to install some software onto the Windows Mobile device is by running an installer in Windows, and I don’t want to have to reboot into XP via Boot Camp just to do that.
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I found a cheap LCD inverter and keyboard for the Dell on eBay and just now finished replacing them. The backlight now works, as does the keyboard. I’m going to run some unattended diagnostics to see if anything else is damaged and then start transferring applications and data over to the Mac. After that, I’ll wipe the Dell and reinstall XP; it’ll either go in the living room, connected to the TV, or to Jen (or both).
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This is part 1 of a theoretically infinite series.
As noted last week, upon the sad, premature soup-induced demise of my four-year-old Dell Inspiron 600m, I purchased a new 15″ MacBook Pro. I justified this to myself by noting that the MacBook Pro has been called the “best Windows notebook“, but, and here’s the first confession, after setting up Boot Camp and installing Windows XP on the first day… I haven’t touched Windows on the machine since. It’s been all OS X all the time. And I haven’t had to reboot once.
To be fair, there are still a couple of Windows applications for which I’m looking for alternatives: Picasa, Paint.NET, ActiveSync (to sync my Windows Mobile phone, which I will not be replacing with an iPhone). I know about iPhoto for the first and Missing Sync for the last; I plan to copy some of my very large photo library over and let iPhoto convince me, but I’m turned off by the nearly $40 price tag for Missing Sync. Meanwhile, I’ve set up Bluetooth file transfer between the Mac and the phone — something that never worked on the Dell — and have managed to do backups of a sort for the time being.
I really don’t know where to begin for a good Mac OS alternative to Paint.NET. OS X doesn’t appear to come with an image editor and I don’t need anything as complex as Photoshop or the GIMP. Suggestions welcome!
As a longtime, dedicated Opera fan and user I’m rather surprised at how quickly I’ve taken to Safari. I had the Windows version of Safari on the Dell as a backup and testing browser, so I was familiar with it, and I do have the Mac OS version of Opera on the Mac but it’s sitting, forlorn, unused in the Dock. I found a HOWTO on getting iChat to work with Yahoo (it already works with AIM and other Jabber services); I’ve set up Mail with my email accounts and RSS feeds; I’ve imported most of my music into iTunes; I’ve recorded three podcast segments in GarageBand so far.
To use an over-used cliche, everything — or at least almost everything — just works. Want to wake up the machine? Open the lid, it wakes up. It doesn’t click and buzz and hum and whir for a while before deciding whether this will be one of the approximately 25% of times when, like the Dell, it will refuse to wake up. It connects to WiFi almost instantly. Bluetooth, mentioned above, works the way it should; in fact, I’ve been able to pair a set of Bluetooth headphones I bought to use with the phone to the Mac, and that never worked on the Dell (or even my company laptop, a Lenovo ThinkPad).
Things work the way I instinctively think they ought to work.
The point here is that I’m really quite happy with the Mac and, contrary to my expectations, I’m having very little trouble in learning to be comfortable with OS X.
Edit to add: I think I have my first downline. I’ve been bringing the Mac to work (I always brought the Dell to work) and a couple of the other engineers have been admiring it. One in particular just spent ten minutes asking me very specific questions about “how to do stuff” on the Mac, Web browsing, email, the usual. He seemed interested.
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And it actually does seem to work.
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I let the domain registration for seeotters.com lapse — deliberately — because I wasn’t putting any effort into keeping it updated. On the other hand, I’m going to commit to three BoxOfKittens.com posts per week.
Q: What do you get if you spill chicken ramen soup into a Dell Inspiron 600m?
A: I wish there was a punchline, but there isn’t really. You get a soupy computer. I pulled this gaffe on Thursday afternoon and spent the rest of the day plus several hours more on Saturday night disassembling and cleaning the innards. Unfortunately, the LCD backlight has died and the keyboard is in very bad shape. The machine does work when external monitors and keyboards are connected, so I’ll probably keep it around. But it won’t work as a laptop. So, on Sunday we went to the Apple store in Palo Alto and I bought a new MacBook Pro. It’s awfully pretty. I have named it GJETOST (yeh-tosst) which is a fine Norwegian cheese that goes well with apples.
We spent Friday afternoon/evening and all of Saturday in SF with Alex & Lani. Stayed at the Fairmont San Francisco, which is completely lovely but does charge $50/day + tax for parking. We walked down to Fisherman’s Wharf for the July 4th fireworks and found out what fireworks look like when launched into heavy fog (it looks like glowy fog). Saturday we did a lot of walking, starting at Sutro Baths and the Cliff House, then Crissy Field and Fort Point and finally to Japantown for dinner. Probably six or eight miles on Friday and Saturday combined.
That was the news for Wombats. Now, the news for Parrots.
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