Jefke.com

right,

so for 5 days now, i have been the owner of an apple macbook. as many of you know, this is a direct reversal of years of hatred and scorn for the apple line of computers. while i’m not quite a fan boy yet, i’ll say it’s growing on me.

this is going to be a boring post for most of you, but hell, it’s my site, right.

right so as you know, i had actually pulled the trigger on a lenovo thinkpad tablet pc. my dream was to have this as a semi work, semi personal lappy, and i’d take ti to meetings and take notes using the stylus and then draw super awesome diagrams in visio and all woudl be awesome.

well a couple problems: one, they’re fucking expensive. two they were super out of stock, like 6-8 weeks out of stock, three; what, in all reality, would be the likelyhood that i’d be using this thing that way. right: pretty fucking low.

so chatting with ex-coworker don, he told me to go mac.  which i’ve actually considered doing for the main household pc, as it’s where we do all the photos and shit, and natty’s mostly on line and creating documents and there’s not real reason to be on windows to do that.

but my lappy…a mac? after some research leveraging sarge’s apple discount, the macbook was about 300 bucks cheaper than the tablet (wha? i know right) and i didn’t need to buy (techincally) any other software. so i did it. and now i have it and it’s pretty cool.

i read a fair amount of “what to expect when you’re expecting a mac”* type shit.  so most of the stuff that is mac weird to a windows person i was already aware of. so for the most part the transition has been pretty smooth. i love love love the 2 finger scrolling (sounds dirty doesn’t it) i hate hate hate that menus are always at the top of the screen.

the whole minimize/hide/dock thing is sorta bizarre. (how do i add appications to the dock? how do i remove them? i’m not gonna be using time machine anytime soon)

i’m having more trouble than i would have thought adjusting ot a wide screen. all my windows are stubby. web pages disply like 3/4’s of what i’m used to above the fold. sure the scrolling is easy enough, but still. i’m a lenght not girth kinda guy. (ick)

so that’s the pristine state: now it’s time to start fucking with shit:

Overall, i’m slightly embarrassed at how much giddy joy buying technology gives me-but anyway i have purchased parallels which of course will allow me to run XP as a virtual machine, my intent is to use it to run visio and project as i need them. which is not all that often in my personal life, but there have been times. (like the diagrams of the yard with the firetrucks–can’t live without that)

my manager at the DFTU client thinks i’m stupid/crazy to muck up osX with a windows instance and he got me thinking-what i really need is a way to check exchange for work emails, that would allow me to pretty much convert to mac for everything.

so i did some research and i could run outlook via paralelels or invest in entourage, the MS’s mac version of outlook. more money right? well wouldn’t you know that the client  has a sweet ass employee discount for MS office software, including office for MAC 2008–which has entrouage–for 20 bucks. better even is i cna get visio and project PRO-07 for 20 bucks. i just about had a geek-gasam. I have 2003 versions of these, but for 20 bucks, why not go both pro, and up to 07. fucking brilliant

so if i can get work emails on entorage, use visio/project as needed, and i suppose lean on word and excel when i have to and can’t use pages and numbers or whatever the fuck they call them. i’ve got it, i’ve got the best of both worlds.

all that said, apart for the super slow boot time. i didn’t have that many complaints on XP. my pc almost never locks up, almost never just crashes. sure it happens but not that much. as for the ‘just stick in a device and it works’, i haven not found that to be true on the mac, i’ve had to go to verizon and download drivers form their website for my super modem. on the pc, i just threw the cd in there at it worked. weird huh.

so any other mac tips.

richard and basil, you offically win. there i said it.

*the expect when expecting joke is especially appropriate, b/c we’re expecting again.  see you get a little suprise for reading the whole post.

don’t get mad natty, i’ll do a big announcement tomorrow or so. just playing around here.