Drinking the Kool-aid*

I didn’t think much about owning a Mac myself… until now. I had the chance to play with a co-worker’s powerbook and was dumbstruck by OSX- the gorgeous interface and a familiar Unix system underneath. My old laptop crapped out so I bought a decently-equipped Pismo off ebay and the retail box of Panther (OS 10.3) through our employee discount offer.

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OSX is smooth, even the install is smooth. Updates are, as expected, smooth. I had a moment of irritation when a software update "lost" my internal airport card in the first reboot (driver incompatibilty). A second reboot restored the airport to working but I wonder if it is a known bug or something I introduced. It’s been otherwise flawless.

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Spent a few days tweaking settings and playing with the included software. Xcode is quite cool (and would be more cool if I could get emacs key bindings), so it looks like I’ll have to get a few books on Cocoa and brush up on Objective-C. Loaded on Firebird, OpenOffice, xemacs, fugu, macMAME and a handful of open source command line tools I use. It’s the proving to be the best of everything.

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* As a point of accuracy, I do know that the Jonestown tragedy involved "Flavor-aid" not the Kraft product but the phrase is in our lexicon.