Sunflower is here!

I did it. I jumped the fence. I'm a turncoat. My new laptop is a Mac, a MacBook Pro, to be specific. I'm planning on ordering Parallels in order to run a few Windows-only programs, but other than that, I can work just fine with a Mac.

Okay, getting used to closing a window on the wrong side is difficult. And finding the @ and the ~on the keyboard is hard on my otherwise 10-finger typing. I also put a real mouse on the USB, one with two keys and a scroll wheel. Mac OS X works just fine with it, and it makes me feel more like home.

The installation started out real smooth, till we hit configuring the WLAN. Paranoid as I am I have both MAC addresses and WEP 128-bit enabled. That won't keep a determined hacker out, but a war driver can't be bothered.

Except I didn't have the MAC address and the Mac wouldn't tell me what it was. So I ran upstairs, disabled the MAC addressing, ran back down, still wouldn't work. It kept saying the WEP password was wrong, so I figured it was expecting a 64-bit code. Darn. Finally it seemed to sense my exasperation and asked me if I just wanted to skip this. YES! After finishing up I dug around in the WLAN configurations stuff, read (gasp!) help files, and indeed, I found the secret, hidden button for selecting 128-bit encryption. And I found the MAC address.

So whizz-bang, and we were in business, Safari worked!

Then I downloaded the essentials: Skype, Firefox, Thunderbird, in that order. Skype was trivial, what a shame the Mac beta doesn't do video, 'cause this box has a nice little camera built in. Then Firefox - no problem. Thunderbird needed some sweettalking, but it eventually behaved - I didn't realize that when I close all the windows that TB is still alive somewhere. I have to slap it down by quitting the main menu. After that, everything worked, and I had all my old unread letters, 650 new unread letters ('cause the webmail interface transferred the letters but not the information on which ones I have read and which ones I have answered) and my address book. I called it a night.

Today I was proctoring an exam and playing around. I managed to send my addressbook information via bluetooth, with a bit of trouble. A few friend's entries were just refused, and then all of the ones coming after them. If I moved the offenders off to another category, at least I could import the rest, I had to put in three by hand.

Then I started playing with "Comic Life". What a wonderful creative tool - I'm sold, hook, line and sinker, on a Mac.

Oops, battery is about to die, oh well. It's after midnight, anyway :)