Day: January 8, 2008

I’m testing some new looks for the website over at http://palmer.grumpster.com/wordpress

Let me know which ones you prefer!

When Trish and I went to the “Not Your Grandma’s Craft Sale” back in November, I picked up a bag for Vero for Christmas with this odd little creature on it.

It was made by Creation Sarcastik and you should take a look at their stuff. It’s pretty cool!

Gak! What a way to start the new year! I have an interview this coming Thursday! This is stretching the Palmer a little too thin on the study front. Especially since I have classes from 4 – 8:30 on Wednesday night.

While I wouldn’t say that I’m not looking forward for a promotion, at the same time, I am in a comfortable position of the fact that it’s not an interview for my own job. I think that’s my saving grace in these things. If I don’t pass the interview, at least I know I can try for another one at another time. Not like the time back in 2004 where it was the scenario of “Pass this, or you lose your job.” That was grueling!

Pretty well a year ago this week, I purchased a MacBook. It has not disappointed me (other than the crackling speaker last week which, this week, I can’t duplicate and my warranty is running out in a week which irks me. Time to drop the thing a few times!) and I have enjoyed the experience of using a Mac.

Vero provided the ammunition I needed to fully move over to a Mac-life and potentially turn off my old computer with Windows installed on it. She picked up a nice sleek monitor for me to connect to the laptop.

You see, the laptop is cool and all but for heavy duty workloads I preferred to jump over to my computer with a larger screen. So I never really allowed myself to get into the inner workings of the Mac…I just knew how to get by.

Those days are in the past as I have started building my Mac only station. I have the monitor on my desk and when I want to go nuts on the Mac, I put my laptop down next to me and I have a bunch of cables tie-wrapped together which easily plug into all the ports I need to make the laptop a sweet, sweet station of life.

After playing around for a few hours with the monitor and it’s setup, I started thinking about the what this scenario led me to:

– no noise: everyone knows the hum of a computer. If you work in an office building, you probably don’t notice it and think it’s just the ventilation. While partially true, it’s also all those computer power supply fans running and has the power to drown out people talking outside your cubicle. The same goes for in my office at home. When I open my door to my bedroom down the hall, I can definitely hear the fan on my computer running. Over the past 15 years, I suppose it could be considered normal.

With the laptop, it’s eerie to not hear anything compared to the hair-dryer like fan on my old computer. Sure, there are new computers out there that have silent fans so maybe I’m behind the times. So here I am clicking away on the computer and I can’t hear anything else in the room.

– Storage: Hmm…well this will take awhile to properly figure out. (Geekspeak warning!) Essentially, my whopping 80GB collection of music is on my old computer, which, in turn, syncs up to my iPod. There’s no way I can put that music onto my laptop hard drive. In the end, last night I transferred all my MP3s onto my portable hard drive which was a pain because there was not enough room to do it in one copy session so I had to time it so when I copied the MP3s onto my portable hard drive, I timed the offload of data from it back onto the old computer’s hard drive. Bah. Why can’t I just own 1TB or 2? 😉 Anyhow, this morning the transfer was complete. I think this will solve the problem of the iPod.

However, there is the question about what to do with all that data on my old hard drives? I can think of two possible solutions:

– Rip out the hard drives and put them in portable hard drive casings so they can easily plug into my laptop if need be (or get a USB hub) and then I have the ease of fast USB connectivity. Cons of this scenario leave my old computer as a shell as if I ever needed to use the old computer for whatever reason (hey, the Mac isn’t perfect here), then it would be a slight pain. Unless I left the hard drive with the operating system on it. Now there’s an idea.
– Use my old computer as a server. Just share the whack load of folders on the old computer so I can access them over the network. Cons of this scenario is that it definitely isn’t the fastest option if I want to transfer files. But it should do the trick if all I want to do is stream media from it. Hmm…I could definitely just throw it in the basement to act as a server and not have to think about it.

Other than that, I’m looking forward to a Mac-only existence and the larger monitor will persuade me to record more into GarageBand because it was a slight pain before due to the small screen on the laptop.

Over the holidays, I had a LOT of people ask me “Why a Mac?” In fact, I have had that question over the past year. People know about the Mac. But they don’t know why someone would want to purchase it?

It’s really hard to put into words…I usually fall back on the ‘it’s for the creative people‘. It’s the best platform to use to make films or music, or DVDs (in my opinion). Really, I can’t justify telling someone to fork out an extra $500 on a Mac if all they really do with a laptop is look at pictures, surf the Net and check email.

But even those simple tasks are easier to do on the Mac. It’s just more…intuitive. Maybe it’s because it’s one design and there isn’t any hardware conflicts because the hardware isn’t really an issue like it is with the regular PC where you can swap out components to the point where your computer becomes Frankenstein. I was trying to take a look at the wireless network settings on a Windows Vista computer during the holidays and it took me awhile to find it. You would think someone with experience in Windows XP would be alright around the Vista environment but it was hard! It really wasn’t intuitive at first. But on the Mac, the wireless network is pretty neat. If it finds one, it asks you if you want to connect to it. If there’s a password, it asks you for the password. Voila, done. Heck, I can’t really make any comments on Vista other than that. It does look neat visually.

In the end, I would say that it took me a month to get used to the interface of the Mac. But now I enjoy it more than the Windows system. I definitely think that if I had the choice to get my parents a PC or a Mac, I would get a Mac because in the end, there is a learning curve, but it’s much simpler to use in the end of it all. It’s just…intuitive.

If any of you are on the fence on getting a new computer and are thinking if it’s worth shelling out the extra bucks to use the Mac, find a Mac and tinker around with it for awhile. You may end up liking it. I’ll let you know how the full transference to a Mac-life works out for this chap.