Thursday, March 30, 2006

MacBook Pro, day 1

My MacBook Pro arrived yesterday morning - 2 days earlier than I expected (a nice surprise - when I left for the office Fedex's website was saying that it was in Indy, on-track for a Friday delivery. Then I got the knock on the door about an hour afterwards...). I had too much work to do to deal with it right away, so I set it up last night.

The configuration is a pimped-out MacBook Pro, with the 2.16 GHz preocessor upgrade, 2GB of RAM, and the optional 7200RPM 100GB hard drive. The setup was, for the most part, vary simple - I just copied my older PowerBook over using the Migration Assistant and let the transfer (about 60GB of data) roll while I had dinner and went out for a couple of errands. The only three things of note from using Migration Assistant: It was unable to copy over Missing Sync (my third-party Palm sync software) properly, but I just had to re-serialize it to solve that, it does not copy over the serial number from Apple Remote Desktop Admin (again, re-entered), and all my VPN configurations were left behind. To fix that last glitch I simply exported my VPN configs from the old PowerBook, then re-attached all the passwords. Not a big deal for most, but since I have about a dozen VPN configs loaded (I use VPNs to manage most of my clients' networks) it was a little painstaking.

That done, here's my early thoughts. I love MagSafe (the new connector scheme for the power adapter), though the brick is a tad bulky. It provides 85w of power, though, instead of the 65w older PowerBooks drew. Rosetta poses virtually no issues, and performance is pretty good on emulated code, too. My only real loss for now to Rosetta's limitations (no mixed mode operation) is the Flip4Mac WMV codecs - the Universal version hasn't shipped yet. Some people have noted a whine coming from the transformer on-board on MacBooks - I may have heard it (not sure), but one of the first things I did was back down the backlight a notch (reduces power use notably, and it's still brighter than my Rev. B Aluminum PowerBook G4 was). No noise issues at all accordingly.

Also? This sucker is fast. I mean, boot in 1/2 the time, launch apps that are native instantly instead of waiting, and super-quick program switches with native code. Just to give you an idea - I went from the PPC version of Missing Sync on the old PowerBook to the Universal build on the MacBook, and the first time I synced my Treo this morning I thought it had failed - because the entire sync took only about 10 seconds.

Nope. It went perfectly. It just worked about 5-6 times faster than I'm used to. I think I'm going to like this MacBook a lot.

Friday, March 24, 2006

Birthday shoutout

I almost forgot...

Happy Birthday, Mac OS X! It turned 5 today (the first public release, Mac OS X 10.0 shipped on 3/24/01). For Mac OS X's birthday, it's getting record profits and increased marketshare, along with a newly supported platform (Intel - and my MacBook Pro is on order). A new version is expected some time around year's end (10.5 - "Leopard").

Sorry about the lack of airtime

I've been putting in nutty hours for the last three weeks now. Today was supposed to be a day off - I still wound up doing some work. I counted 27 phone calls (made and received), 36 e-mails received, and 27 sent. We did, however, get to go to lunch together and do some early shopping for our maybe-to-be-remodeled kitchen.

In the last two weeks, David has had about 4 days of nightmarishly bad behavior, 4 days of angelic behavior, and 6 days of veering back and forth between the poles. He also had 2 accidents, both fortunately of the easier-to-clean type. And he was very upset about them - a good sign. And he can usually do it by himself.

Wednesday, March 15, 2006

Tuesday, March 14, 2006

More change...

In recent weeks, the folks at Fark made a minor, but crucial, change on their website to attract more mainstream advertisers. Once upon a time, Fark could be counted upon to provide "Boobies" links (and counterpart "Weeners" links as well), usually with links to NSFW sites, mixed in with their standard fare. The nice thing about them wasn't the links themselves (at least in my book) - this is the Internet, after all. Boobies pics are about a penny a dozen. What was brilliant about Fark's Boobies links was the discussion threads associated with each one. Way more entertaining than pics ever were (go to the site and read any one at random to see why). But a few weeks ago Fark moved the vast majority of the Boobies and Weeners links over to a new sister site called "Foobies.com", and it's lacking the discussion threads entirely - just links to pictures. Whoopdee-damn-do. Of course, I still read Fark regularly (it's still the funniest site on the Net), but I miss the Boobies discussions already.

Monday, March 13, 2006

Late nap again

Today was another of the days where David slept pretty well, but went way too fast all day and passed out. Meanwhile, Jane is hanging out with David's friend Harry downstairs - he came over this afternoon for a visit and to have dinner with us. How we'll work the nap around it all could be interesting. The big trigger was (I think) a meltdown he had right as I was arriving home over which DVD the boys were going to watch. After his temper blows, he pretty much always passes out afterwards.

What I'm not sure of is whether it's the meltdown that exhausts him, or if he has the meltdown because he's tired. Maybe a bit of both.

Overall a bit of a respite with work today - I did a little on-site work this morning for a Beverly client, and then headed out to Sudbury for a job. But I made it home early, and just have some remote work to do this evening (adding a bunch of hosts to a new DNS table and preparing for a move). Tomorrow gets back to the more insane pace.

Friday, March 03, 2006

Brush with greatness

This has been quite a week. First of all, I played hooky (sort of) on Monday. Had to spend a couple of hours locked in my home office working on stuff and making calls, but for the most part we all got to spend a together day. That evening we went in to Boston for the big home show (the projects under consideration are a kitchen remodeling and a heating system upgrade) - and I scored a bonus - I got to talk to both Peter Hotton (the Globe handyman columnist) and even better, I also got to talk to Rich Trethewey (of This Old House fame) about the heater. Instead of an autograph from Trethewey, I did even better - I got a sketch of how our system should be reconfigured for best results. Now that's useful!

Other than that, the week was mainly a blur of constant work. I have a client project that I will be working on over the weekend (some on-site time Sunday as part of it), and David's been sick the last couple of days as well. Not to mention that Jane's sick tonight too - we think it was something she ate, though. That kind of problem. So I'm taking care of both of them tonight.

This week's humor moment: I was at my ACN meeting this Wednesday night - I made it home around 9:45 and walked in to find the entire 1st floor of the house covered in confetti. David had found a couple of bags of the stuff that Jane had bought for a work event, and decided that it would be fun to play with.

It took about an hour and a half's vacuuming (emptying the thing four times) to get it all, and I'm still finding a little bit around the house, two days later.