12:52 AM

Today was one of those tough, fast, hard days at work: everything seems okay until it really, really isn’t. And then? Shit → Fan. Not pretty.

So, in response, after losing myself in my family when I came home, it’s now time to kvetch about computers. It’s either that or move furniture around, and there’s a sleeping baby to consider there.

I got a lot of responses to my switch to a Mac, mostly positive. I think it’s worth making the point that once you’ve switched off Windows for Linux, you’ve already gone through the cognitive gauntlet of a foreign OS. That Windows → Linux transition is missing all the nice pretty shiny parts that OS X brings to the table. Aqua is definitely a step up from KDE or Gnome.

That said, I still have some issues with the Mac. (Why are you not surprised, dear reader?)

• My only hardware-related complaint is that the trackpad on the G4 Powerbook isn’t 100% reliable. Occasionally it decides to take a break. Following a tip on the net, placing your palm across the pad surface resets it and gets it going again. Unfortunately, the wrist angle is all wrong on that move for it to ever be comfortable.

• I’m having a damnable time getting the OAR/Address Book sync to work, so I can share contacts between work (Exchange) and home (Address Book). I suspect there may be something disabled on our server.

• I don’t even want to talk about the iCal/Exchange integration woes. iCal looks beautiful and easy to use. But without Outlook syncing, ploink.

• Passwordless ssh. I’ve spent hours trying to set up passwordless ssh between the Powerbook and my Linux server. I can go to my webhost without a problem, but for some reason the SuSE 10.0 box won’t allow it in that direction. (The other direction - server to laptop - is perfectly fine, so I just need to switch backups from push to pull.)

• iPhoto. Okay, I’m seduced by the square footage and photobooks, but not only is iPhoto doing bad things to my photo organization, it’s slow. That may be its death knell. I think my previous folder-based organization was actually better than trusting some big scary database. I’m not ready for Photoshop CS2 - yet - but I wouldn’t mind giving it a test drive.

• Adium wins the chat battle hands down after Trillian hosed my carefully-annotated contact list. The best part? Address Book integration. Rename once, apply the alias everywhere. Now when I work from home I leave Adium running and don’t bother with IM on the Windows boxes. That said, it still sucks when trying to actually remove people from your list. I just want to get my contact list below 500 people, people! Is it so much to ask that I not have multiple accounts on a single provider just so I can see who’s online?

And now for the heresy:

• I like Safari and Mail.app better than Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird. Much better, in fact. The RSS features in Safari have changed how I read online, and I no longer read all my email in pine. Perhaps it’s the punk rock reaction to popularity (I knew those apps when they were cool and outside the mainstream and buggier than a bayou, and now you young whippersnappers get all your fancy extensions and a million downloads!), but it’s more that I just don’t care anymore. Mozilla used to be miles ahead of the pack, but it’s lost ground again, and on the Mac it’s not quite the same experience, and hey! I have other things to think about these days.

See? Much better than talking about work.