I had written a long entry about my new 1.5ghz/1.5gig ram/80gig hd
powerbook and my various thoughts on it. But then safari crashed and
took my post with it. So here goes version 2.1

It’s ok.

Anyway, its a computer. And therefore subject to the law of
conservation of misery. The interface is pretty, but is difficult
to adjust to. There is lots of software available, but it costs.
The apps are well integrated with each other, but poorly
integrated with anything else.

I’m still getting used to it.

I’ve been thinking about what kind of personal laptop
I wanted for a while. It came down to a powerbook
or a thinkpad. Costwise, they were going to be within
about 20% for equilavent spec hardware.

But I wanted two things that eventually led to the purchase
of the mac. I wanted audio/music apps. And I wanted something
that worked well on the move (power management, wireless,
profiles, etc). Oh, and not Windows.

That pretty much only left one option.

I ordered last sunday, and got it this wednesday. I’ve
already spent way too much money on accessories, and
have more in sight (a nice audio interface and a firewire drive).

It’s kind of odd using a computer and not having a clue how
to do stuff. I had forgotten how much hidden knowledge is
required to become proficient with a computer. In a weird sort
of way, I’m enjoying having to learn the basics and rudiments.
It’s a slightly different feeling being a unexperienced user[1]
after being a poweruser/dumbdeveloper on linux boxes for
about 7 or 8 years.

So far, there are things I love and things I hate. The more
I use it, the more I find faults with the things I love, and
workarounds/etc for the things I hate. [2]

I’ve been taking notes on some of the stuff mentioned
above. I’ll post them at some point. If nothing else,
it might be useful for the next time badger
writes an OS X book.

[1] I _hate_ the term “newbie”. Even dumber variations like
“noob” or “newb” or “N00b” should have their usage punished with
death.
[2] If anyone knows how to kill the startup sound you
get when you boot up, I would be grateful. I want computers
to make horrible noises, but only when I ask them to.

Paranoia XP

/me stares at deviant_

What happens when I have a long boring meeting and I’ve left my
notebook at home.

Touched up a bit more than typical (removed some of the rule lines from the paper,
made the drawn bits match the color of the printed stuff more, etc).

How To Be Creative

evil thought of the day…

a virus/worm/exploit/whatever that breaks email servers so
they can no longer send email. Unless the email has
“test” in the subject or body

random thought of the day…

web forums should export their content is some sort of standard form (rss/xml/whatever…)
so that I can read them all from the same place with the same interface instead
of going to a dozen websites with all slightly different forum systems.

aka, a web forum aggregator.

And yes, that is getting really close to reinventing newsgroups over http.

I hate computers.

Updated work machine to fedora core 3. The user interface
seems to be getting worse and worse. Now every gtk app
has the horrible new file selector widget. It’s almost
as if someone took a list of the things I liked about
the old and intentionally removed all of them and added
some stuff I never use. The only nice feature that
seems to have been added is ability to list files
by last modified. Unfortunately thats only useful
because all the other file filtering abilities
of the old one seem to be gone. Theres no
text entry for a filename unless you hit the
magic key combo (when it works, it seems to
not do anything about half the time I try it, and
I’m not sure why yet). The tab completion is
weak, and “*.mp3” doesnt work anymore.
It doesnt understand “~/” anymore. On
my home dir it takes about 20s for it to
build the list of files. Then when you click
a file the dialog resizes. A good
30% of the dialog is to show me a couple
of options I never use. There is also no
way to tell a directory from a file. Not
even a trailing slash on dir names.

I now have a menu entry called “Edutainment”
filled with KDE garbage. Ugh.

Sometimes I hate “progress”.

I decided to look into getting a mac for music
stuff again. A quick browsing of the laptop
and software I want puts the total around the
$5000 mark. Ugh.

Play 20 Questions

That site is kind of addictive.

Finally got a new computer at work. The ~700mhz/~300Meg/16gig dell laptop
was getting a bit annoying.

New machine is a dual opteron with two gigs of ram and a 210 gig harddrive.
Also managed to scheme my way into a better monitor, this time a 21 inch
monitor. Yay! I can finally crank the resolution higher than 1024×768!

That said, I forgot what a pain it is to tweak a box to work
the way I want it to. Biggest thing missing now is a decent
web browser. Mozilla and epiphany suck. Firefox is almost
usable, aside from ui weirdness and no session support. Working
on getting a galeon-1.3.16 built for x86_64. That way I don’t
have to redo my somewhat insane bookmarks/smart tool bar/etc
stuff that none of the other browsers seem to do very well
at importing.