CmdrTaco's Journal: It's OSeXy (Rob's Adventures in the world of the Mac)

As I mentioned in my last journal entry, I've made the transition to using IMAP for my email. This has had a somewhat expected side effect: I am no longer tied to my laptop like a nursing child is to its mommy. It used to be that I was unable to leave my laptop behind since it was the home of all my email. I could always administer Slashdot from any web browser. IRC was nice for communication with the rest of the team. But my email as always the weak spot.

With IMAP, I decided at long last to really give OSX a shot. I've borred Kathleen's Mac (props to her for letting me borrow it for a few days and not complaining- she thinks it's cute, me struggling with one mouse button and a new UI).

So I've basically been using OSX as my desktop for the last 2 days. All my major computing tasks (IRC, some remote admining of boxes, Web Browsing, Slashdot administration stuff, and of course, email email email). And I gotta say that I'm more than just a bit impressed by this whole thing.

I know this is old hat to many. OSX has been around for a long time and many folks have been using it, but this is a bizarre new world for me. I have never used a Mac as my primary desktop. Sure, I've used them here and there to photoshop something, or to fix someone's network (In a former life, I was the defacto sys admin for a network of a dozen computers, all but mine were macs). I've been using Linux on my desktop since 95.

There are little things I miss... virtual desktops, being able to press a keystroke and have a terminal pop up, transparent terminals, keystrokes to maximize vertically, or horizontally independantly from each other, and of course, sloppy mouse focus. Perhaps Mac Junkies out there can provide insight for me about these things.

I really want to learn how to use Perl to interact with the system. But I have Mozilla, so I can function almost as well here as I can on my normal nix boxes.

So I need to return this machine to Kathleen soon, which is just fine by me. My beloved Thinkpad running Linux has a larger hard drive, and has 7 years of accumulated shell scripts, aliases, and tweaked out desktop settings. But I think I would like to one day return to OSX land. If anyone at Apple is reading this and thinks I would make a good "Switched" commercial, send me a tiBook. I've made it 2 days... I wonder if I could make it 2 months!