AssFace's Journal: Nearing a week with my new Mac

I hadn't heard about white spots on the screen of the 15" PowerBooks... of course now that I have heard about them, I'm paranoid and on the lookout for them.

The trackpad and more specifically the button for it are driving me nuts. Might look into outside utilities for it as someone suggested in a thread.
The Bluetooth mouse that is out sounds fantastic, but about 75% of my time is in an area where I use the laptop as a true laptop and not as a desktop station - so no mouse surface.

I have noticed it getting very hot - but I have also been trying to do things that crank up the processor too - under normal use it is just fine on my lap.

I am trying to get Fink working. Fink itself seems to work, but the fact that I installed the new X11 from Apple seems to have thrown it off.
I have found things on the web that say how to rememdy that, and then when I do it... doesn't work.
Perhaps the X11 that I downloaded is too new or something, don't know.

I mainly want it so that I can use Xemacs and Gaim - but the latter is less important and I can just break down and buy something off of version tracker.
When trying to download/compile these via Fink, that was when the processor was really cranking and got the whole thing so hot.

I found Cyberduck as my ftp client - I can't tell if it is slow, or just my connection here at work is embarrassing.

I haven't found a straight up text editor yet - I see that there is something called "TextEdit" that sure sounds like what I need, but it still seems like a bit more. Good enough for now.

Haven't had a chance yet to play with XCode - I am looking for something that will play nicely with Perl and also allow me to use a mouse. Syntax hilighting and code completion, line numbers, and ideally code folding and debugging - basically just like ActiveState's Komodo. They say that they are working on a Mac OS X version, but we shall see I guess.

I am in the process now of trying to benchmark my system to see how it compares to other computers that I have.

The built in calculator is really slow (in starting, not in calculation) and with the trackpad it is VERY frustrating to use.

I am looking into what sort of Office replacement I have options for - worst case scenerio I will just buy Office I guess.

If I had to list my top two annoyances right now with the system, it is the trackpad and button (not the fact that there is the one button, but the fact that the button doesn't consistently respond to being pressed), and then the fact that I have to buy all new software for it... I'm trying to find and use the free versions, but they aren't installing.

Love the system and Expose still makes me smile each time I use it (about 5000 times a day).

Getting more used to the keyboard and shortcuts now.

I'm sure I'll have more later.

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UPDATE
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I have some Perl code that I had written and run on an Athlon XP 2200+. I downloaded that top my laptop and ran it and it benchmarked in at 4 seconds.
The Athon 2200+ runs it in one second.

Not sure what if anything that means, but at least it is good to keep in mind for future things that I write - that I can get a very nice speed-up by moving it up to the server.