Down the Grey Brick Road

Today I learned that if you want to save an image, you can just drag it straight out of your browser into the correct place. Very cool and convenient!

This is one of those things that I had absolutely no clue would work. I thought that it might, since it is a mac, and they are supposed to be easy, so I tried it. Of course, it worked perfectly. Extremely nice for saving a bunch of small images when you want to see which ones to save and which to skip.

Then, while writing this blog post, I decided to make sure that on a PC this wouldn’t work. Turns out it does, it just slows down the OS quite a bit for a couple seconds.

I guess part of the OS X environment is being so easy, that easy things are intuitive.

The Good:

1. Nice sleek interface, pretty much what I have been seeing in screenshots all this time.
2. “Plug and play” seems to work. My mouse worked perfectly as soon as I stuck in the wireless USB dongle.
3. The thing that comes up with the remote. It’s cool.

The bad:

1. I want to be able to easily switch windows. When they are all piling up under each other, it is damn near impossible.
2. I want to be able to do something easy which mnimizes all windows, so that I can look at my nice purty desktop.
3. How do I switch Firefox profiles?

The Ugly:

1. I took a bunch of pictures when I was opening the MBP and thought to myself as I was doing it “Hey, this is perfect, a mac should be great at making all of them ready for posting on the web!” So I tranferred all the (75) pictures over to the mac, and moved them all into the Images directory. So far, so good. Open up iPhoto and they are all there. Yay. Now, how the hell do I re-size all of them? EDIT: Okay, well I finally found a good program (iResize) to resize all of them. They can all be found here(note: there are three pages).
2. Installations. I think it’s because I am coming over from a PC and used to things being overcomplicated. But I don’t get what to drag into the apps folder.

Also, recommend me some widgets!

Well, it came today, good job to Amazon for that one! I opened the box, and photo documented the whole process. I’ll have all of those re-sized and up by tomorrow. I do have a couple of questions:

1. I thought Safari had tabs.
2. What is the best FTP program to use?
3. Are there any apps that make transferring a bunch of files from my old computer onto this one extremely easy? Apple had a page about it in their /switch/ directory, but that has now been taken over by /getamac/(hilarious commercials!).
4. Could someone explain to me everything about Airport? I’m confused.
5. My airport is only getting about 30 kb/s, where (exact same location) my pc with built in wifi was getting up to 200 kb/s every now and then. Why?

This “everything is easy and uncomplicated” thing seems to be failing me a bit so far. My internet wouldn’t work because of MAC address filtering, and it only said that it “Wasn’t available.” which left me stumped for a bit. Also, it’s hard to find windows once you have opened a new one, but I assume I will get used to that soon enough.

…and I hate amazon for that! Out of the week this was probably the worst day for it to get here. To add to that, this is the most excited I’ve been for the arrival of something since the laptop I am currently typing on, a couple years ago.

Let’s all cross our fingers and hope that the laptop is completely fine with no defects. I’ll make sure to photo-document removing it from the box.

T-minus… hours.

Well, I just got the e-mail a few minutes ago, amazon has shipped it! Currently it is on track to get here on Wednesday. Hopefully I’ll be able to get some work done before then!

I’ve also been reading everything on IGN’s Mac General Board, and I feel pretty prepared. The only thing that is bugging me is the “It’ll work without you thinking about it” thought. Computers aren’t like that! Everyone knows that!

T-minus two days!

EDIT: Well, the UPS tracking page just got changed. It is now In Transit with a scheduled delivery of tomorrow. T-minus one day!

Welcome to my new blog! I just bought the computer, so I figured it would be a good time to create the blog.

As a lifelong PC user, it was pretty hard to start looking for a mac, since I knew next to nothing about them. Luckily, I had a great resource of awesome Mac users at hand, and I thank them for their help.
I decided on the 1.83 GHZ, 15.4″ MacBook Pro which sells for $1,999 on Apple’s website. I decided to poke around a bit for a good price, and it didn’t take long to find one. Amazon had a great deal, which will end up with me paying $1,819.

The laptop should arrive on Tuesday or Wednesday, and then I can dive right in and get started on enjoying computing!