Like I have recently said, I'm a new Mac fan - especially as of 10.3.

I will eventually need a desktop system - if not right now, certainly by the time I am back in the States (3 years or so, perhaps more, then I will be there for around 3 years).

I liked the G4 Cube when it came out the first time around, and I still like it. The thing just is a cool idea. But just the other day I found out that there are still upgrades available for it.
This has of course made me want one. You can go up to dual G4s, and soon someone will have figured out a way to put a G5 into one.
This is what I want - they are cool little things and about my level of willingness to fiddle with something.

I have a friend in the States that was willing to sell me his cheap, and there are still plenty of them on Ebay - so I will start looking into this.

I don't really have any desk space at home right now, but if we move, then I will be sure to setup an area for it and then get a screen - I could just slowly collect parts for it now.

I am going back to the States for Thanksgiving - I leave on Tuesday around 1:30 here - going into Philly and then layover there and then onto Raleigh from there where I will get a ride to Cary.
There used to be a direct flight from Bermuda into Raleigh, but that stopped and now I have to either through Philly, Athlanta, NYC, or Boston.
I'm not terribly thrilled that I will be going to the States around a holiday, but this might be the last time I see my grandmother - she is not doing well.

I will have a busy day at work tomorrow and then no work again until the next Monday.

I was hoping that during my layovers that I would have wireless access - I looked on the net and sure enough, the Philly airport installed 802.11b in all of the terminals (seems a bit odd that they would do the slowest at first).
I was thrilled to see that - but then I saw that it isn't free, it is $9.99.
That gives you access for 24 hours, and I will have to see how long my layovers are - if they are over an hour, I will most certainly want wireless access.

I have decided to join SourceForge and see if I can work on a project with this new PowerBook that I have. I haven't looked yet how to get source off of there yet - feel pretty stupid since it isn't obvious to me - I'm assuming that it must be cvs.

word.

I have 3 sidebars on the main page. Developers, Science, and Apple.

The Developer box tells me that my headline reader has been banned.
Excellent - their own reader has been banned - well done.

I installed Proteus as my chat program today - very cool - still getting used to some of it, but I like it.

I've decided to get a Sony/Ericsson T616 and if the display is that bad on it, I will upgrade just the display to one from a T630 (can just get one off EBay or something).
The T616 is better looking IMO and is cheaper.
Will still likely hold off until January to bother with that - although if I get one soon from Amazon, then I can get it for $219, which is cheaper than EBay.

This morning I woke up to find that the water in my house is... well, gone. That can't be good. So no shower for me - this reminds me of when we had the hurricane and were without power for a week. Except I do have power and it is one day.
I imagine that this is what it feels like to be French.
It does make my hair look quite trendy - Eurohawk.

I am not sure if I feel like working out tonight - I have been staying up late programming and then after that reading The Demon in the Freezer by Richard Preston and it is quite good.
But then I'm tired all day from lack of sleep, then I drink a lot of Coke, and then I pee a lot, and then I'm dehydrated - it is then hard to workout.

Going out to dinner tonight.

We are consolidating our office space and as a result there is much moving of computers and annoyances that will be going down soon - and I'm gone all next week (well, Tuesday on), so this will be interesting.

oh well - going home soon.

Okay, well, not *you* so much - but more like the new T630 Sony/Ericsson phone.
I want that. Fortunately it doesn't come out for a bit, so that explains my inability to find it on Ebay. I thought maybe it was just impossible to find.

Today one of the owners here had me show him how to download mp3s and how it worked.
He said "wait, so this is going out on the internet?"
How the fuck else would it work retard?

Safari eats major balls if you ever open a Java Applet. I tried to quit out of Safari after it was starting its death spiral after running Java and it sat there for well over 10 mins trying to quit while I went and ran errands.
I opened up the Application Monitor (becuase for some reason it was responding faster than my Terminal.app - as Safari was going down, it slowed the whole machine down - even though the CPU and RAM weren't showing as being heavily loaded in the AppMan) - and then I just force quit the Safari.

I am sleepy today.

I went for a run and have my runner's high going now.
I installed PithHelmet in Safari, that thing is fantastic - allows you to selectively block ads easily (without having to manuallly edit your hosts file, rerouting to your localhost - and I think it does it on a named basis, so that entirely servers aren't necessarily blocked).
Got color working in my Terminal.app for Gnu emacs - that is nice - still can't get it to work for ls, or for anything on the machine that I ssh into - but no biggie.
Just learned today or last night that M-/ will test for completion in code - didn't know that - there is a lot I don't know about emacs.
Terminal.app will let me click - I think option-click - on a spot in emacs and then it will move the cursor there - this means that my emacs is as XEmacs as I need it to be - it responds to the mouse for repositioning and does syntax coloring.

I am considering getting a P610 because of its Bluetooth and also thinking of using the camera on it to take pics for the address book as I meet people.
Going to try to see if they have them here, if not, I can get it without service from Amazon for $319 and then get $100 off with a rebate - that is cheaper than I can even find it on EBay.

I'm going to try to figure out soon how to download a project off of SourceForge and figure out XCode and how to do interface stuff for OS X.

Tonight is roast beef for dinner with the in-laws.

I love having a wireless system, it is quite nice - if only batteries would be better, then I could be truly wireless all over my apartment in terms of computing.

That said, my new 802.11g wireless router from D-Link is screaming in my ears. I know that I shouldn't be able to hear that frequency, so I assume it is some noise that is a byproduct of what it does, a side effect.
It is high pitched and piercing and I hate it - it is like having tinnitus only when I am home.

I don't know if it is due to improper shielding or not. I can hear TV tubes too - I don't know if it is the electron scan that I hear, or again some byproduct of that - perhaps the power supplys of them or something.
Usually a power supply is an easy to recognize 60 cycle beat, but these are higher pitched and not everyone can hear them (much to my surprise).

Oh well, fast wireless and a horribly high pitched sound go hand in hand in my house - if there were a bigger selection of wireless routers here, and they weren't $180 each, I'd buy a couple of other brands to see if they had equal or better performance to this one, but no sound.
But alas, I live in a technological backwater and will have to be happy with this for now.

There are a ton of them that are good for tomorrow since the market as a whole is having a good few days.

But the ones that I have most recently checked:

GAP
MIMS
IRN
CEGE
NMGC
JBX

and HEC very soon - couple of days I would imagine.

I got my laptop without ever even knowing that there was a problem of white spots on the screens of the new AlBooks. I suppose I should have spent much more time looking around to see if there were issues, specifically with the new hardware.

I then had the unit and then found out there was a white spot issue, something in the LCD screen.
I didn't notice any until today - about a week into having it.

They don't seem to get in the way of anything I do, which is good since I can't do much about getting it fixed. There are no local repair shops and for some reason Bermuda is on Apple's "oh, we won't sell to you" lists.
So if I call and tell them that I have this, they will deny any knowledge of it since I have it by purchasing it to a States address and then having it brought here.
So any repairs I do will have to be shipped to the States and considering how frequently the mail here just disappears, never to be seen again, it is unlikely that I can really do anything with this laptop.

That said, I so far (knock on wood), have no screwy pixels, and the white spots don't get in the way of anything.

Safari is nice in some ways. It is part of the Mac so it feels like it belongs. I love that there is an option that if I am in another app and I click on a link, it opens a new browser window. In Windows it would see that I had one opened and then just fill that one - I always hated that.
That said, Safari eats major hairy donkey nuts on just about everything else.
It is the only thing that ever freezes up on my machine, the infinite rainbow pinwheel.
In Windows, you can get around such things by opening multiple instances of IE. Not just multiple windows of IE from the original process, but actually multiple instances of the IE process, each with its own sub-windows. That way if one of those freezes up, you can kill it and not lose everthing that you had been doing on the web.
In the days of just reading content on the web, it was no big deal to lose what you were doing on the web - you just go back to the site and keep reading.
But in the days of web applications, it sucks enourmously for the computer to decide that it is tired of you being productive and just bail out and sit there, happily spinning a little icon while blocking you from your work.
THIS is why I have always hated Macs in the past.
Hopefully that gets fixed real fast or this will be my first AND last Mac all in one shiny little bundle of expensive broken-screeness.

I will install another browser, some Mozilla derivative or Opera and then likely the apps that have links in them will still open Safari for me, thinking they are being helpful.

My fiancee's birthday is the 10th. She left Sat morning to go to Toronto with her mother to celebrate her birthday. That leaves me alone in the house to do whatever I want.
Apparently "whatever I want" involves watching DVDs, sleeping, and not eating.
If left to my own accord I will just forget to eat.

I watched Donnie Darko again... twice. The more times one watches a movie, the less it is a fun experience and more one notices how they actually made the movie. At least I do.
Also watched... wow, already forgot what I watched. Some other DVD that I own. Snatch I think.

I need to go out and get more groceries, but I'm lazy. The place is less than a mile away from here, but it was raining all weekend and I am just on my Vespa.

I was supposed to go for a 10 mile run this morning, but I stayed up too late last night and slept through the alarm this morning.

Fortunately I just have tomorrow and then a day off on Tuesday. I am not sure what holiday that is, but it is something here. not a holiday in the States, so I will still be trading for whom I trade their money. (Which is going very well).

My laptop is getting hotter than I had hoped. I put a book between my laptop and my lap. Same thing I did with my other laptop.
I still haven't transferred over my files from that one to this one. I think I will need to burn a CD to do it, and I don't know if that other one will not crash long enough to burn 100 megs or so of a zip file to a disc. I would do it over a network, but I don't know if it will stay alive long enough to transfer a 100 megs or so of a zip file over the net.
The main files I wish I had are my Outlook adresses and one Excel file that I had on there.

I have gotten used to my laptop enough now that I think I am down to just a few current annoyances:
1) the heat - this thing gets hot if I do anything with it. Nothing too major, I am just bummed because I had gotten my hopes up too high I think that it would be better than my other laptop in that respect. That said, it doesn't seem too unhappy about its own heat, so as long as it doesn't care, I will deal with it.

2) This is probably my number one issue right now - the Ctrl button - well, just the keyboard layout in general. I know there are people out there that want to swap the ctrl button and the caps lock, and then they want the ctrl on the right instead of the enter button.
I really don't care about that at all - I just want the ctrl in the lower left of the keyboard - where the current fn key is. I would much prefer the fn key be where the eject key is and then just map the eject key to be with some function combo - don't know, I never use the thing. I am constantly hitting the fn instead of the ctrl and it is a very unnatural movement for me to dodge the fn and go one button in with my pinky to get the ctrl - it basically forces me to slow down and type totally unnaturally - so it is very annoying.
I also miss that I used to be able to hold down ctrl and shift and then move the arrow keys left or right and it would highlight whole words, allowing me to quickly select things to delete. It behaves differently on the Mac, and worse yet, it seems to behave differently in different apps.
A HUGE annoyance that I must be missing something on since this is a very very very big deal to me - in text editing, if I highlight a block of text and press tab, it should indent the text - especially in a program that involves writing code. But instead, the program treats it as if I pressed the space bar and just erases the text. This is INCREDIBLY annoying. Especially when writing code that you want to quickly format.
That said - the keyboard hardware itself is great - I just disagree with the layout of the special keys.

3) I really really really want a graphical IDE for Perl that allows me to do code completion. Komodo 2.5 on the Windows system would allow me to write out my code, and then in mid word I could hit ctrl and space and it would go back through my code and autocomplete the word with the next word it finds like that - press the key combo again and it will change the word to something else that is a near fit until you are happy.
XCode has Perl syntax highlighting, but it doesn't have code folding, tabbing selected text just erases it, and there is no keyboard shortcut for autocomplete and no autocomplete at all for Perl.

I had a 4th, but I seem to have forgotten it.

In all, I am pleased with this laptop and constantly finding new things that I love, and occasionally finding things that I hate.
Fortunately the list of things that I love is longer than the hates at this point.

Stocks to watch tomorrow, should move a significant amount (long):
MIMS
HH
ECA
MRK

I'm enjoying listening to music again, had gotten away from that since the other guys in my office tend to play their own horrible taste in music all day.
After watching Donnie Darko, I got the Mad World on mp3 and some variants of it.
Good song.

I had read something about Xcode not being Perl friendly and had just assumed that it wasn't going to do Perl at all.

I tried to install XEmacs, had issues. Komodo - my IDE of choice for Perl on Windows - isn't out of Mac OS X yet. I installed Wing IDE and it is awful. I tried Mi and it wasn't too good either. I installed Perlidex which was absolutely worthless and they want money for that worthlessness.

Finally I found something on MacNN that said XCode would do Perl syntax highlighting. Sure enough, it does.
It won't let you debug it and it won't do autocomplete on it, but it does syntax hilighting and the interface recognizes emacs style key bindings from what I can see.

I started poking around in XCode some more and it has great documentation and looks like it will be a good thing to work with for developing projects for the Mac.

I have been playing a lot of games of Scrabble using Quixotic - an open source program. It has a few bugs in it that I think I might try to fix and submit as my way of learning how to use XCode to program for the Mac.
The icon for that for some reason has changed away from what it should be and is now the same as the HD icon.
Haven't tried restarting to see if that would fix it.

Just today (maybe last night) I noticed that the battery has a button right on it that when pressed, it shows via little green LEDs how full the battery is.

I updated to the new Poisoned client and its sidebar search menu thing is broken now - if you click on it, it repositions all weird.

My typing doesn't show up as quickly in here as it did before - I don't know if it is because I have too much going on, or if some setting in here has changed... of course now that I just typed that, it seems to be fine again.

The speakers on this laptop aren't fantastic, but I haven't tried out headphones on it yet or any output to anything else. Haven't watched a DVD on it yet either - but I did watch a QuickTime video and was very impressed with the quality (likely depends on the source of the QT I would guess).

I am going to try to get up tomorrow morning and meet up with some other runners to run 10 miles. I'm not looking forward to it - not the distance, but the fact that it is in the morning - I usually don't get up before noon on the weekends.

As with all new things in my life, I tend to obsess over them and try to learn as much as possible about them as fast as possible.

I'm still early in that curve on the Mac, so perhaps some of my wishes have long since been met, but I just haven't figured out that part yet.

1) Mail.app - this thing is fantastic. That said, there is one little thing that I don't like about it so far and that is the Junk Mail - or rather on part of it.
If I get mail in my Inbox and I click on the "Junk" button, it moves my mail to the Junk folder (and presumably does Bayesian learning on it - I hope).
But if I look in the Junk folder and see a message was moved there and it shouldn't have been - I click on "Not Junk" and it then it changes the button to "Junk" - again it presumably them makes note in the Bayes data structure that this isn't junk - either forgetting what it learned or adding it to a "this is okay" list.
BUT - it just leaves the mail sitting there. It should move the mail back to my Inbox and then let me sort it out from there if need be.
I have looked through the menus and haven't seen anything that would allow me to do this that I have unchecked.

2) Safari. I have stated in the past on here that I wish the Google add-in behaved more like the real Google Toolbar (allowed you to click on a different button right there to go to the type of Google search that you want instead of having to do a search and then do it again on the Google page - this makes a big difference on a slow connection and you want limit your times).
Other things that I have decided:
A) a throbber. This is the same issue I have with Mozilla stuff, and I think Safari is based on that. The throbber being the symbol that you can see and if it is moving, then the page is still loading. Now I have to look at the url bar and see that fill up, and/or see that it is doing something in the status bar at the bottom.
B) less of a wish and more of a bafflement - I usually have a lot of web pages open at once - 10 or so. Last night I felt that the laptop was overly warm even though I wasn't doing anything more than just being on web pages and writing e-mail.
I looked at the Activity Monitor and saw that Safari was using 50%+ of the processor, and it wasn't doing anything at all. No Java in the pages, maybe some animated gifs, and no pages were loading or downloading anything. It was using 126M RAM, which was less bothersome to me than the processor time.

3) Activity Monitor - along the lines of what was mentioned above - it would be nice if the Activity Manager would allow you to drill down more. I could see that Safari as a whole was using 50%+ of my processor, but I couldn't narrow it down as to which window.

4) Terminal window - right now mine is black text on a white background. I like having white or green text on a black background - haven't seen a way to configure that.

5) Fire - I tried to install Gaim, but couldn't get it to install with Fink - it wasn't happy about my OS X X11 installation, even though I was doing what it said - I'm assuming that it is something to do with that Panther is new and does something different and the code needs updates. Don't know.
So I went with Fire, which was easy to install.
My friends have problems sometimes with AIM or else I would have just stuck with iChat which was cool looking.
Fire on the other hand does what I want (connect to Yahoo and AIM), but it is ugly.
Close enough though.

I haven't had a chance to really use Xcode yet, but I know off the top of my head that it would recognize and work with Perl as one of its language options - even as an add-on.

All in all I am really pleased with this Mac. I like the way things are so easy to install/uninstall (excluding the Fink stuff since that doesn't seem to be working well for me, likely something I'm doing wrong).
I like that everything looks fantastic - MovieOS style (the idea that all TV shows and Movies have cool looking OSes in them that don't really exist).
It isn't blazing fast, and it still gets warmer than I would like. The trackpad and especially the button on it are still driving me nuts. My fingers feel weird after typing a lot on the keyboard...
But all in all, I love it.

On a side note and really only related to this discussion in that I am spewing out wishlists stuff - I drive a Vespa as my main mode of transportation here in Bermuda. One of the new ones. The old ones were made using the same manufacturing techniques of airplanes at the time - the war was just finishing up and so the machinery that was used to get the planes made could be used to make the bikes.
Well, the new ones are far more advanced than that, but they are still using steel.
It weighs and absolute ton (over 300lbs once there is fuel and cargo in there, not to mention the rider on top of that).
If they would switch to aluminum or titanium (depending on the day, one costs more than the other when buying in bulk, but they aren't that far off), then they would have a stiffer, stronger, and lighter bike.
It would be easier to handle, get better gas mileage, and not rust.
Another option - which most all other bike companies have gone to - is plastic. A metal frame with a plastic shell around it. The obvious downside to that is that it is ugly, and it also breaks easily.
It is cheaper, but it also looks cheaper.
I would gladly pay more for the same quality and design, but with an alum or ti structure instead.
If only I had the kind of pull to get that done.

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.

******
UPDATE
******

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.

I am just really taken aback by how great this laptop is.

My only complaints so far, and these are likely largely due to what I am used to and also my lack of knowledge at this point of how to customise and or find things.

Complaints:
1) The whole machine is aluminum - it feels fantastic to the touch and looks great - light too. The downside is that I am coming to notice that I hit the space bar and the mouse button with the side of my thumb and largely the fingernail. The feeling of this on the aluminum is the same of running your fingernails down a chalkboard. I'm hoping I get used to this - I have already bitten off a bit of my thumbnail (will cut it when I get home and have access to clippers) so as to avoid this.

2) Safari - the Google toolbar client doesn't allow me to do a search specifically for images/discussions, and when I search a web page for words, it doesn't give me buttons to press and search for those words in the document - all things that I love about the regular Google toolbar.

3) I don't know how to do and/or find a lot of things. Basic keyboard shortcuts that I used to do don't work now - and the keyboard layout of the laptop is annoying to quickly select text or to page up/down - I'm getting better with it though and suspect that this will get better quickly as I adjust to it.

4) Mail - it shows me what I have spelled wrong, but I can't click on it and get a short list of the words that it might be instead - instead I had to go to a menu and then try to figure out the keyboard shortcut - which isn't an easy shape to quickly do while typing and then that just brings up a window that stays open instead of a quick menu... oh well - just getting used to new things.

I'm sure a few more things will come up soon - but so far I am finding more things that I love about it than things I dislike.

I am still trying to figure out totally how to use this thing. But I am very impressed with this laptop. The trackpad is a bit annoying - not as responsive as my other laptop and the one large button doesn't respond well unless you press directly in the center.

But the graphics and how things are setup are just fantastic.

It is like I have MovieOS :)

I still don't have all of the keyboard shortcuts down yet either, so I'm a bit slower than I'd like to be on this - in time will be better of course.

I'm officially a Mac fag now.

I was out at the computer store that we use for the office and saw that they had Panther in stock.

I could either use my laptop as is and then later have to overwrite that and reset the settings when I upgraded to Panther (Everything I read says that one has to overwrite), or I could upgrade to Panther now.

Doing it later would mean that I could get it for $20 on the website and then have it sent to my mom's and then I could get it when I went there for Thanksgiving.
Doing it now meant that I got it for $200 here locally.

10 times as much, but I get it this instant. That was what I went for - not economically sensible - but instant gratification. The American in me.

Bummer - I sold out of GAP at 6.19 for 500 shares - now it is at 6.64 - a new high. Oh well, it isn't my money - but I would have much preferred to have hit that.
(I got in at 6.00, so there was no real loss at all in any of my trades, but missed highs are always frustrating to see)