So, I have a beautiful new 13″ MBP. I enthusiastically used the migration assistant to copy over all my data from my desktop, excited to finally be able to work efficiently with all my files handy while traveling. Everything seemed to go smoothly until I go to update my desktop wallpaper and screen saver and the system preferences pane freezes up. I force-quit and try again, restart and try again, even re-install OSX and migrate my data again, but still the Spinning Beach Ball of Death haunts me.
After much googling, I discover at the very end of this complicated thread (http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2035030&start=15&tstart=0) a suggestion to download and install the iLifeSupport update (http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/apple/application_updates/ilifesupport903.html) which worked BEAUTIFULLY.
This is only my 3rd day of MBP ownership. Hopefully this will be the last of my troubles but if not you can count on me letting you know about it. 
i’m finally mostly recovered from the week-long party that is south by southwest. i had never been to austin before (or even to texas) and i was pleasantly surprised at how friendly and comfortable the city is. i met a few amazing locals (cathy, charlotte, miranda, & the random lady who gave buster and i a ride when we were stranded at kerby lane in the rain) and met lots of awesome nerds/rockers from around the country (but mostly from san francisco): ryan, cameron, ali, kristen, buzz, jen, aubrey, willow (WANT). several of these folks work together on attacked by jackets.
i checked out a few panels during the interactive conference, most notably the LOLWUT? panel with the guys from icanhascheezburger.com, one of my favorite sites EVER. it was hilarious how they are running it like an actual company, with 9 employees and 4 full-time developers. it’s pretty consistently one of the most popular blogs on wordpress, and it makes me happy that someone’s passion can turn into their career. they also gave out burgerking cheeseburgers at the end. “I can has cheezeburger!” i exclaimed.
i also throughly enjoyed the keynote from Frank Warren of PostSecret. he’s so sweet and genuine and another example of a random passion turning into a career. his speech was inspirational and emotional, and the “questions” at the end included a marriage proposal and a teary plea for guidance in dealing with a sick family member. i’m pretty sure i teared up a bit a few times.
anyway, sxsw was a great time, and a great way to meet friends of friends of friends. i tried “networking” events but felt so awkward about making obligatory conversation i didn’t get a chance to do much of that. oh well. maybe next year i’ll have more to talk about with strangers.
over the last few days i’ve put quite a lot of thought into my new computer purchase. my one nerdy friend commented that microsoft wont be supporting XP after SP3, and with all vista’s issues i felt that took the PC out of consideration, plus all the research and time it would take to put together the ideal system would be prohibitive because i want this computer ASAP. then, my other nerdy friend remarked that the imac probably wouldnt be that much more fast than my macbook, which, in the end, would be a waste of money. two kinda fast computers don’t make one superfast computer. so, mostly through process of elimination, i settled on the mac pro tower. here are the specs:
3.00 GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon
1GB 667 DDR2 FB DIMM ECC-2×512 (to be upgraded to 5GBs after purchase from crucial.com)
ATI Radeon X1900 XT 512MB
250GB Serial ATA 3Gb/s drive
16x SuperDrive DL
Airprt Extrm & BT 2.0+EDR
WL Apple Kybd & WL Mgty Ms
Mac OS X
i’ll let you all out there on the internets know how my new mac pro works out for me. i really hope i’ll think its worth the money. if it disappoints, i think it will put a nail in the mac coffin for me.
tis the season for frivolous-yet-tax-deductible spending. i’m looking to spend less than $2000.00 on a desktop computer that is SUPERFAST, since my cute macbook has difficulty running the entire CS3 suite at once (and i MUST be able to do this – multitasking is my life). Flash in particular really bogs down my computer right now.
i’ve been trying to decide between the lesser of these two evils. if anyone out there has any related experiences or advice, particularly with the imac or some other mac desktop, please share!
1) 2.4ghz imac (20 inch)
+ looks pretty
+ compatible with my laptop
+ comes with good quality monitor
+ no viruses!
+ supports 4gbs of ram ($163 at crucial, $850 at apple.com…. where do they get off??)
-/+ OSX is a memory hog, but its kinda grown on me
- can’t tweak/upgrade like a pc
- more expensive than comparable pc
- i have no experience with it, don’t know how it handles the programs i use most
- steve jobs sucks
2) build-my-own-pc
+ hardware totally hand-picked and upgradeable (i’ve been building PCs since high school)
+ easy to tweak for best memory efficiency
+ i’m confident that XP can handle the workload
- viruses
- time-consuming to research all the parts and options
- vista BLOWS – gotta find an old copy of XP
- all the software i have now is for the mac
- i have no idea how i will manage my files between a pc and a mac
- bill gates sucks
i discovered two enhancements to firefox the other day that have made my life awesome (and consequently resulted in much more internet surfing – uh oh). the first is a build of firefox that has been optimized for intel macs. its AWESOME (i’m saying it again). no more 60+% cpu usage by the firefox-bin. i open up all the browser windows i want and it’s totally cool. now i’m just kinda mad at the firefox people for not making this update themselves. what the hell people? but thanks Neil, for doing what FF can’t.
the second browser happiness is pretty trivial but it has solved months of discontent for me. when i switched to my mac i was disappointed to find that firefox does not include the icons of websites in the bookmarks toolbar, for some bizarre reason i can’t figure out. anyway i found this plugin – mac favicons – and i have my icons back! hooray!!!
im sleepy, but not too sleepy, so here’s the latest:
I did the re-install of OSX and everything went swimmingly. I backed up firefox, thunderbird, fonts, and my itunes library. I had discs for all my software, or downloaded it again from the internet. I ran techtool 3 times since then and no weird failures. I also have 10 more GBs of free space and boot up is a whole lot faster. The only minor hiccup seems to be that I forgot to try and backup my Transmit settings, so I have to hunt down my FTP password again. All in all, it went well, and only took a few hours. I’ll say that restarting from scratch on a Mac is definitely much easier than on a PC.
I discovered a couple awesome new tools also. The first is Disk Inventory X, and its kinda like Add/Remove programs in Windows in that you can see how much memory a program is taking up. But its got a cool color coded visual representation too. The other AWESOME tool is iStumbler. It displays wireless networks in a way similar to the way Windows does… sorting them by strength and showing you which are open or protected. I am impressed that the areas where OSX had disappointedly lacked when compared to Windows seem to be made up for by these small useful tools.
Annnnnd the bad news… I had purchased a monitor 7 months ago (a Sceptre 22″ LCD) and it worked great until suddenly the DVI input stopped working. It flickered a bit and then one day just died. So, I tried bringing it back to Microcenter but of course they don’t deal with that crap after 30 days, so I have to mail it out to California to be repaired. In the meantime, since I have a friend who will take it when its repaired, I figure I’ll get myself a new monitor. I found some reviews that said the Samsung 206BW 20″ had great color depth, etc etc. so I decide to give it a go. This time I got the extra Microcenter warranty for 25 bucks. I bring it home, open the package, plug it in, turn it on, and nothing. NOTHING AT ALL. Not even a self-test or blinking power light. It’s dead . The world hates me. Now I get to go wait in the returns line AGAIN, but at least this time I know I’ll get my exchange no problem. I hope they don’t start remembering me there.
Why does everything have to be so freakin difficult??
