Way too much for a first entry

I've been promising my friend Steven that I would start a gadget/tech blog for a while now, but haven't gotten around to it for various reasons. At this point, I have a backlog of toys to discuss, and I'm going to see how well I can stick to contributing something every few days as I use the products. Unfortunately, to get started I need a bunch of background.

First, a bit about me. I'm an enterprise architecture consultant. I won't bore you with what that means at this point, except to say that I travel quite a bit (4 days a week, more or less full time for the last 8 years) and my daily life is really focused around the technology I carry with me - my laptop(thinkpad for now), mobile phone (today a blackberry 7100t), and when I'm flying or trying to focus, my music (iPod). At home, I have a bunch of interests, and while I tend to accumulate tech toys, it's really not because I want to play with things, but instead because I want things to work without hassle. The less hassle the better, the more seamless integration between my activities and the tech I have the better. In some weird way this means I buy lots of gadgets, each generation (in theory) getting closer and closer to ubiquitous, seamless, and transparent technology and specifically - information. Again, that's the theory at least.

I got my first computer when I was 10 - a Timex Sinclair zx81 (back then it meant something) a bit after that, an Atari 800, then 800xl, then 1040st. with the 800, I got a 300 baud modem that let me run up my parent's phone bills like crazy. Compuserve bills spiked for a few months because of some of their online games, but then I shifted to BBSs, Ddials, and 'public' machines. I knew through the boards some guys who had an AT&T 3b2 Unix box in a basement someplace and they let me call in and tinker. My friends and I used to ride our bikes to an Apple store on North and Harlem in Chicago where we would play Ultima or whatever on the Apple IIs they had on the floor, which we all aspired to have. Suddenly I realize that I've been poking at computers and such (repairing washing machines, tvs, whatever had a plug) for like 23 years, that's probably why I want it all to just work already.

So anyhow, at home right now I have one homebrew PC, the latest generation of my homebuilts. I think it's a p4 2.8ghz with an asus motherboard. I know it has 750gb of storage, which is probably overkill, but it has multiple copies of everything I have ever worked on - including all emails and such and really needs to be organized before I can purge much of it. I use it when I am working from home, no laptop can ever match the screen real estate (21" crt) or speed of a proper keyboard and mouse.

I have a couple of TiVos - one SD, on HD, both of the DirecTV variety. They just work. I would never switch from DirecTv to cable because of this. Now, since they are dropping TiVo for the Turner PVR special, I may just have to switch to Comcast in a year or so.

I mentioned the iPod, I think I am on my 3rd. When I first started traveling for work, (years before my current job, so '92 or '93), I bought portable cd player. Carried that around for about 4 years, got burned out on everything I listened to, as well as lugging cds around. Then I switched to a Sony MD player. Same deal, but the discs were slightly smaller, and it was cool. At some point in '99 I got some cheesy mp3 player, then an archos 20gb jukebox in 2002, then the iPods came.

What else, I have a sonos (http://sonos.com home audio system. Again, this is just the current incarnation of my home audio systems. The first was a Sony 200 cd jukebox hooked up to a Marantz SR780 receiver. This is a nice box for lots of reasons, including multiple independent outputs. It's still the reciver I use in my media center. In my first condo, I had the secondary outputs connected to an adcom amp, with speakers and IR extenders hardwired into my bedroom. This worked very well, once you memorized the cds and tracks, which at the time I did. And, like a grumpy old man - I liked it. I moved to turtle beach audiotrons when I moved into a larger house. Put all the mp3s on the old home server and dropped a few audiotrons in various rooms. They also needed amps, so that was a pain, and they were not synchronized by any stretch, which made them very impractical for 'whole house' audio.

The sonos is very, very nice. The best remote that I've ever seen. That is to say that, just like an iPod, the interface is exactly what you need to select and play music. They have improved the iPod interface because they have more space, so you get dedicated volume and mute buttons, plus some soft keys which manage play queues and zone management. The iPod wheel is better quality than sonos, and the screens flow better, but for a near apple clone, it's damn close to the Vision. I'll write an article about using the sonos sometime soon.

I just picked up a Harmony/Logitech 880 (http://tinyurl.com/7yrmo) which replaces the Marantz (MX100?) programmable remote that I've been using for 5-6 years. The Harmony is also one of those items that is getting me closer to 'everything just works'. It's got a bunch of issues, most of them implementation problems instead of a poor design. Again, I'll give details on this thing, plus a boatload of other things which I've accumulated shortly as well.

But, the whole point of this rambling is to lead in to the main piece of tech that I am going to write about for a while on this site. A work of art from Cupertino that is a 15" powerbook. It's not my first Mac, I've had 2 before, an old classic and a G3 9500. But, like I said, I travel a lot. And the main tool of my job is my laptop. So when I took my current gig I basically signed myself up for using a Windows laptop and therefore living in a windows world. I sold the 9500, went back to homebrew PCs for a home workstation, and settled in for the long haul. With a background in Unix and 'alternative' non-PC PCs, it took be a bit to get used to windows (95 at the time, maybe NT 3.51?), but I am now deeply entrenched in the Windows world.

My company provides me a fairly nice thinkpad, most all of the software I need, and once the lease runs out, they give me a new one. However, something about XP SP2, or some recent driver upgrade or something has made my wireless almost useless. That, combined with some hardware problems and a few shell swaps in the last few months, and my whole 'just working' thing started going out the window. A few months ago, Steven loaned me a Mac to play with (and write about...) which I did when I was home. I started getting used to it again and decided that I was going to try to do a 100% switch and see if I can do my job with a powebook as well as I can with a thinkpad, while making the whole of all my technology less intrusive and more pleasing in general, if that makes sense.

So on Friday, May 20th, I went to the Apple store on Michigan Ave in Chicago and bought a 15" powerbook w/ 800gb drive and 1.5gb ram. My goal is to finish the switch within about 2 weekends of converting and then start carrying the powerbook instead of the thinkpad. (the original goal was to do it in one weekend, but lacking some software I didn't get it done that quick)

Here are my first impressions:

The hardware itself is, really, absolutely beautiful. If you know me, I equate aesthetics with considered thinking and planning, or something like that. And this box is nearly perfect. If you have not played with one, picked it up and looked at it closely, get ye to a mac store or Compusa or something and play with one for a bit. The Dells or HPs with wide screens that sortof, kindof look like powerbooks are not powerbooks. The materials and detailed design are nowhere near the same class. Little LEDs on the battery so you can see the charge without coming out of sleep and looking at the screen - very nice. The latch and hinge on the screen, perfectly balanced. The keyboard layout is a little weird compared to the thinkpad, but that's just something to get used to. The screen itself has depth or something. I think maybe they coat the box with some euphoria-inducing drug, because I just feel better holding it and looking at the screen. The one bad hardware thing is the trackpad. I absolutely hate trackpads. I held onto a dying thinkpad for one whole lease cycle when my company switched to Dells - partially because they were pretty damn fragile - but mostly because of the trackpad. (they went back to IBM pretty quickly) I can't say that I will ever get used to the pad, will have to see.

Mac OS X Tiger. The 9500 I had was OS 9, so this is my first Mac with Unix. I did have a NeXT station in the early '90s, and I liked it a lot - Objective C was the last hardcore coding I ever did professionally. But anyhow, this is the first real opportunity I've had to play with the next NeXT. If you are a PC person OR a Mac person, you can't really appreciate how different they actually are. In a conceptual sense, it feels to me like Windows gives you lots and lots of options for most everything you need to do. It's layed out somewhat logically, and if you work at it, you can do almost everything. It probably won't be pretty, and you will likely want to slap someone, but you can do it. The big thing is, it feels like work - pushing around the cursor, moving from app to app to app, juggling things to get stuff done.

A Mac, however, seems to want to keep everything simple, isolate you from what is going on. Basically, I feel bounded into a very well organized zoo tour or something. If I keep my hands inside the car, there is no way the animals will hurt me. After one day of trying to get past pretty and down to work, that's exactly how I felt. I actually started thinking that maybe I made an expensive mistake because everything is so much slower with the trackpad and without a dozen buttons on every screen to take care of all the details.

Then, I remembered how I got everything done before - scripting and keyboard shortcuts, and then I remembered that OS X is bsd/mach/unix/whatever, and set about to treat it as such. The next day I started playing around with a shell again and getting into the Zen of using a Mac UI again. On the shell side I was able to figure out a Tiger SMB problem that I had the first day. As for the GUI, I set about to re-learn the keyboard commands. So, my first few days with a prettiest interface you can get and I'm reverting to a keyboard user. Frankly, I think that is as it is intended. At least from the Unix side of the family. I'm going to carry a multi-button bluetooth mouse for all my graphical lifting like diagrams and presentations.

It's Monday night, and I flew to my client today with the thinkpad. This is 100% due to the fact that I don't have Office 2004 for Mac or Virtual PC 7 yet. They should be at my place when I get home this week. Then I can get everything loaded and see what it can do. My current plan is to load an XP image with the PC software that I can't replace directly on the Mac - corporate Expense SW, Visio, and my favorite package - Mindmanager (http://www.mindjet.com ), move all my files to the Mac side, and see if I can get by with the Mac versions of everything else. The fallback will be to put everything inside the VPC session for a while and then convert more slowly. The fallback of last resort will be eBay.

While this was a very long 1st article, I'm hoping to do frequent short updates that detail my experiences and success or failure in switching. I'll also be writing about the rest of the technology I have at home and how I'm using it/how well it works for me.

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