Apple Seems to be Leveling the Playing Field

So here we are after several day switching to the Mac, and the experience has been nothing but bothersome. What!??? How can that be? According to the "cult of Mac" and the Apple website, Macs "just work". Yeah, whatever. Here's how things have been "just working" for me over the past few days:

1. My wife has not once been able to print. I've been able to print only one time, after spending 30 minutes trying to find a driver that was actually remotely compatible with my printer (since HP doesn't make a specific Mac driver for my printer). Even so, I'm still hearing the echoes of confident Mac enthusiasts and commercials which state that all you need to do is plug it in, and it works. Maybe on their planet it does.

2. I actually found a way to accidentally delete an app without moving it to the trash. How did I do that? Well, I wanted to drag it from the app folder to my dock. Doing so, it landed in the wrong place on the dock. So I attempted to drag it to another location on the dock, only to have it dissapear in a cloud. I couldn't find it elsewhere. I even did a spotlight search for it, which yielded absolutely no results. Yep, that's right its gone. So now I need to pull it from my install disk to use it again.

3. I have yet still to be able to view pages properly on both firefox or safari. Both my wife and I are having problems viewing images, which do not show up randomly on certain sites. I've checked all the necessary settings in both browsers, and nothing has worked. The photos show up randomly on our google blogs, and any google related site where there are pictures. However this morning, I wasn't even able to view photos on Flickr.

My hunch is that these problems might be somewhat related to the new Operating System OSX Leopard. So much so, that I'm going to revert back to Tiger. If rolling back to the former OS does nothing, then perhaps Mr. Warfel will be able to see the first ever pictures of a "re-boxing" of the Mac Mini as I ship this baby back to Apple and get myself a Dell. Stupid FedEx.

First Impression of the Mac Mini

After a little over a week, we finally received the Mini. I'd have to say that I'm most impressed with the packaging. You can tell that Apple puts HUGE amounts of care into appearances, and their packaging of the unit is one of those details. The mini came in a tiny white box with a handle on top. Inside it had everything carefully wrapped in clear plastic (like a new CD). The unit itself was tiny, about the size of a CD case. Interestingly, the power brick, which was also sleekly styled, was almost half the size of the computer. Putting the thing together and initial setup was a snap. Just plug it all in. Here are my random thoughts from what I could do yesterday:

-It is hard to get used to using the copy and paste functions, which requires using the windows key, rather than the CTRL key, which I'm used to.

-The mini came with OSX 10.4 Tiger installed, but also with a Leopard install disk. I DID in fact install Leopard, and found it to be somewhat faster overall than Tiger, but the doc is kind of weird looking. I think I preferred the old doc, but its a minor quibble.

-Installing and uninstalling applications is too simple. I wish windows could be like that.

-It takes some getting used to having a fixed menu at the top of the screen per application, rather than a menu connected to the actual window of the application. I keep forgetting to look there.

-I hate that clicking the x button does not quit the application, but only hides it. I'm a performance miser, and that is something that I could easily overlook and end up with 40 apps opened at one time.

-I had to download a driver from HP's website for my printer. I also should note that HP never released an official driver for my printer, so I actually had to do some google searching to find one of the same "family" that works on the Mac. I've not officially printed anything yet, but I'll assume that the driver works.

-iPhoto was not as impressive as I had thought it would be. I'm glad that I ordered Lightroom. Photo organization and quick editing were a breeze with Picasa. Its a bit more involved with iPhoto, but I like the added control you get over image exposure. I think what I hate is the weird photo management and arrangement. I felt like Picasa did that way better.

-I'm still trying to get iMovie to work. It just hangs on me each time I launch it. I've never once had it working. Stupid FedEx.

-There is way less flexibility in tweaking the system settings than in something like Windows or even Linux. Either way, most things are eye candy anyways, so no big deal. Just something I noticed.

-Once I actually figure out the iTunes interface, I think I might like it. I'll be honest in that I've never been a fan of the iTunes GUI over the years and have avoided it on my PC, but its integration with OSX and FrontRow is probably a good reason to start learning it.

-Installing OSX Leopard was so simple that Microsoft should be somewhat ashamed at the way its done in Windows. The total installation (clean install) took 45 minutes. The process can be that short in Windows, but the screens for OSX make it much less intimidating.

-Garage Band looks so awesome I'll just reserve to say that it deserves its own separate post, once I can actually start producing some music on it (yes I do play and write music sometimes).

I think I'll stop here with the thoughts. There's still a lot for me to learn and explore, so these initial thoughts might be totally bunk in another month. Either way, I'd have to say that I'm still feeling neutral on the whole thing. I don't LOVE the mac yet. Its too different from the things I've used over the years to just take it at face value. Stay tuned for more thoughts.

...

I finally got my Mac today. Stupid FedEx.

Why I hate FedEx

Okay, so I've been waiting for my Mac to be delivered for over a week now. According to the posted tracking info on the web, it was to be delivered today (Monday) at some time. So I went out to a nice breakfast with my family, only to arrive home and check the status to see that FedEx had come at 9:23AM and we weren't there (we got home an hour later). So I proceeded to call FedEx and see if they could drop it off sometime today, or if I could go pick it up.

Them: "I'm sorry, sir, but the package cannot be re-delivered until tomorrow."
Me: "So there's no way that you can call the driver and have them re-deliver it today."
Them: "Nope. I'm sorry, but we have no way of contacting the driver or even the service station."
Me: "You mean that nobody can call the driver's cell phone and let them know of anything?"
Them: "Sir, if you would like, I can put in a message, but they won't get the message until tomorrow morning."
Me: "Thanks, but I would like to have my package today. Its not even 11AM. Your guys deliver until 5pm. Can't I just arrange to have it picked up somewhere else today? I can drive and get it."
Them: "I'm sorry sir, but there's no way that anyone can contact the truck drivers once that they are on their routes. I know that it is an inconvenience, and we are working on making this process better, but there's nothing that we can do."

Apparently, FedEx drivers enjoy the freedom of being cut off from any sort of outside communication from their work. This must be a good job for the anti-social personalities out there. Nevertheless, I go yet another day of waiting. Stupid FedEx.

A link to share

Well, Its been almost a week and I'm anticipating the arrival of our new Mac Mini tomorrow sometime. Interestingly, I ordered some items from Newegg.com on the same day and they've been here for about 4 days now. Go figure. As for preparations, I've been reading some Mac info here and there trying to ready myself for the switch. I even dove into creating my own external backup drive. I made a nice discovery last night about my spare hard drive that I had. I went in to format it to FAT32 so that it would be Mac read/write compatible, when I noticed that it was not 80 GB in size, but rather, 160 GB in size (half of it was never formatted or partitioned).

Okay, since I'm going totally geeky with this post, I might as well share a funny link that a student of mine discovered for me. Its a link to a never-before released operating system by Microsoft. Check it out and see for yourself:

http://www.deanliou.com/winrg/

Thanksgiving 2007

This year we spent Thanksgiving in Waynesboro, PA. Liam got the chance to enjoy his first Thanksgiving with us, and also to meet his Uncle Jordan, Aunt Jenifer and Cousin Ashley. We had a lot of fun with some great food provided by Carol (Nona). Below are some photos:

Thanksgiving 2007

Oh The Times, they are a Changin'

It has finally transpired. We knew it eventually would. We've had our computer for almost 6 years now. Just about every component inside has been replaced or upgraded. When the CPU fan went on it a few months ago, I had a feeling that we'd be needing a replacement some day.   Finally, when Meg told me that the computer was randomly restarting on her, I knew that its days were numbered. We had over 20 GB of photos, several GB of music files, and other important docs and items that were not worth losing. So we did it. We bought a new computer. Not just any computer. This was to be a computer that matched our current lifestyle. It also had to fit our budget. So here it is: We ordered a new Mac Mini from Apple. It is now hurtling its way towards our address from California (so says the Fed Ex tracking site).  Stay tuned for futher reviews, thoughts and editorials on this new plunge into the unknown. Although, if we can base what we know on what our myriad of Mac-crazed friends tell us, we're going to be very happy with our decision. Now where's that kool-aid that Steve Jobs sent me...?

Safari Redemption and other Browser thoughts

Recently I've been surveying the whole gambit of alternative web browsers, in an effort to see if any of the competition (besides IE and Firefox) has been doing any improvements since my last survey. Here is what I've found:

  Opera 9 just doesn't get it. They pack a ton of features, they've slimmed down their browser's default settings so that you are not bombarded with stuff, but they still run into the same site incompatibilities that they've always had with sites. Their only benefit is the speed of their browser, but fractions of a second in browsing are not an equal trade to so many site compatibility issues.

Maxthon 2, a clone to IE seemed like a viable alternative. It comes with every feature under the sun for browsing, and most of them are way too overkill. Without getting too detailed on the features, let's just say that I use a browser to surf the web and too many bells and whistles just takes up space and gets in the way. Needless to say, compatibility is great, since they run on the IE7 engine. However, before I could declare anything good, I got into a situation where I had a random error which opened up hundreds of empty tabs and gobbled up 765 MB  of system memory with no remedy to fix it (other than killing the active task). This is a major no-no for me. If its not a beta, then somebody  needs to fix their junk.

Earlier in the year, I gave a look to Apple's new release of Safari. At the time, I found it pretty decent, but had some site compatibility issues that I couldn't get around so easily. Thankfully, I found that Apple has been working on them and I found very few sites that gave me problems. The speed is rivaling of Opera, which lends it to be a better alternative. In fact, I'm writing this post on Safari for windows right now. Its doing a fine job, but I'll continue to test it throughout the week to see if I'm convinced. 

Overall, I think that Safari has the advantage for anyone considering looking for something that is not IE or Firefox. I still hesitate to give it any advantage over Firefox, when you consider the expandability of Firefox. However, some people don't have time to tinker with add-ons and such. If that is the case, you may want Safari.

Make That "Extra Cheese", Please.

Not that I should be surprised, but we've come a long way when it comes to ordering a pizza. I guess we're still using a phone, at least.

Text message your Papa John's Pizza order

Here We Go!

 

We start them young around here.

The "Valuable" Internet

Here's a roundup of stupid stuff my students showed me this week:

DVD Rewinder

World's most annoying web page

Don't shoot the puppy

...and here's a few classics you might have missed that are still around:

Zombo.com

Insanity Test

Our Sunday Expedition

Today we decided to be brave and do something adventurous as a family. After viewing some photos online of a place nearby, we thought we'd take a hike near "Chiques Rock" as it is know around here to explore. Meg, Audrey, Liam and myself braved cliffs, dark tunnels, abandoned railroad tracks, and leaf-covered trails together. It was a great experience for Audrey, who really needed the exercise and freedom to explore. I think I was probably the wimpiest person on the hike, worrying about trails being too steep, etc. Nevertheless, we kept going and so did the fun. Click on the picture below to see the photos of our mini-adventure

ChiqueRock

Photography Anyone?

I'm a little crazy when it comes to photography, which is my newfound hobby. Why do I think that am I crazy? Well, first off, I listen to photography podcasts practically every day to and from work in my car. When I'm using the internet at home or at school, I'm usually researching cameras, lenses, or reading photography blogs, tutorials, or viewing photos. I teach a digital photography class at school, and I also manage a flickr page, and a digital photography website (blog) for our newly-formed digital photography club at school. Oh, did I mention that I have my own photoblog where I post my favorite shots? I'm also saving up every little penny I have for a Digital SLR camera of my very own (right now we have a simple point-and-shoot which I feel like I've outgrown months ago). I've also completely read through B&H's 2007 Digital Photography Source Book (a catalog), as well as about 7 different books on photography in the past 6 months. Do I have reason to feel a little nuts? Maybe. However, if you see me snapping photos or hear of my untimely death at the bottom of a cliff with a shattered camera in hand, now you'll completely understand.