Tuesday, December 31, 2002 I had so much fun organizing and reviewing my photo library that I decided to go ahead and buy a new digital camera (I'd been considering this and reading reviews for a while). My old Olympus D400Z is really a bit long in the tooth, and doesn't work directly with my Mac. I finally decided on (drumroll, please) a Canon G3. The funny thing is, up until the last few hours, the Canon wasn't a front-runner. Hell, it wasn't even a runner, although I'd kind of liked it when I saw it in person. No, I was vascillating between the Sony DSC-F717 and the Nikon Coolpix 5700. I had read tons of reviews, and had finally decided upon the Nikon (the Sony had lost out narrowly due to the proprietary memory card and the size/weight). But then today I tripped across some reviews that mentioned that the 5700 is quite slow-handling. It also doesn't take filters easily. At roughly the same time, I tripped across Canon G3 reviews that essentially had nothing bad to say. I was still somewhat unsure of whether I wanted an electronic viewfinder anyway (which both the Nikon and Sony have). The fact that the Canon has a normal optical finder, plus the very nice swinging/flipping LCD panel (yes, I know the Nikon has it, too), and has all these great reviews and is hundreds cheaper - well I couldn't resist. It's a 4 megapixel camera, which should suffice for my needs. Hell, I shot a majority of my digital pictures at 640x480 with my Olympus, due to the wimpy 8M SmartMedia cards that I own. Since I rarely print anything, I should be perfectly happy with 4MP. muttered around 4:17 PM

I've finally imported all of my digital photos from my laptop into iPhoto on my Mac. I currently have a staggering 1,283 photos in iPhoto. I didn't realize I'd taken so many pix over time. I've had a ball organizing and indexing them (somewhat). Funny how simple software can sometimes confuse even us software developers. iPhoto has had that effect on me. Luckily I found a good book by O'Reilly: iPhoto: the Missing Manual. I normally hate consumer software manuals, but this one is very good and has immediately made itself useful to me. muttered around 4:06 PM

Sunday, December 29, 2002 I'm enjoying the new Mac, but it's not a complete love connection just yet. I've had the machine lock up completely, requiring a hard boot, Internet Exploder has gone down a couple of times, and iPhoto has done the same. I'm not in love with the cursor controls in documents, since they vary from CUA controls by that just a little bit that is so cruicial to fluid editing. I know, the Mac folks will say that the Mac way is the right way, but I'm used to CUA, so it's still hard. On the other hand, I've had me some fun, too. I published pictures from the International Motorcycle Show to my .Mac account. After installing the free Apple Developer Tools package (which includes gcc), I downloaded, compiled, and installed the generic Unix version of the Vim editor with no problems whatsoever. I reestablished the backup script, as well as the uptime-generation scripts that publish to my This Old Sparc subsite, which involved getting NFS mounts up and working on the Mac (no problem). I had a ball (and spent hours) importing my photo library from my aging Dell 266 laptop, and arranging photo albums from them (this is where iPhoto crashed a few times). muttered around 1:31 PM

Thursday, December 26, 2002 I fixed the monitor problems I mentioned in the previous post. It was indeed the cable I had bought at CompUSA. That particular cable wasn't up to the task of serving up 1600x1200. I ended up buying a "serious" cable at, get this, House of Cables. It's real purty now! My Mac experience has been pretty nice so far. OS X is just plain beautiful, and so far it's been solid as a rock. The machine is not quite as snappy as I was expecting, but it's definitely nicer than my Sun Ultra 10 (and it better be: dual 867mhz vs. single 440mhz). I have noticed a few quirks, however: In Internet Explorer text boxes, the cursor movement keys don't seem to want to work as they should. I can't seem to use Home, End, or word-at-a-time movement keys with any success. So, when I'm editing something long like this blog entry, I basically have to use the mouse if I want to move the cursor any considerable distance. The .Mac service is kind of cool, I think. However, it was pretty dog-slow when I recently posted pictures to my .Mac Homepage. I can't print to a printer on my Windows box as I expected to be able to do. I thought full Windows networking compatibility was supposed to be there. Maybe I just need to do a bit more research. Game performance is good, but not awe-inspiring. I've been playing Return to Castle Wolfenstein, and while it's very playable, there is noticeable lag here and there. I'd expect better of a dual 867mhz machine with a 64M Radeon graphics card, given that our 700mhz Dell seems to do very well with the same game. Again, maybe I should do research and play with settings a bit before I complain too much. All I can say is this thing better let me play Doom III when it comes out!! On the plus side: Word and Excel have proven to open Windows-based Office documents just fine. My giant "fitness.xls" spreadsheet, packed with graphics and tons of data loaded and looks just fine. Total eye-candy! I love being able to have truly translucent terminal windows, even though there is no practical reason to do so. The OS is very interactive and beautiful. It's as Unix-ey as they say, and that's a good thing! muttered around 9:33 PM

Saturday, December 21, 2002 I'm posting this from my new Mac G4, dual-867Mhz, which arrived today. Sweet! The only problem I'm having at the moment is that there's a lot of "ghosting" on the monitor at higher resolutions (I'm running at 1600x1200 at the moment). I suppose this is due to the cheap VGA cable I had to buy tonight in order to connect up my Sun monitor to the Mac. muttered around 11:50 PM

Monday, December 16, 2002 Oh yeah, I ordered a Mac G4 tonight! I never would have predicted it, but my conversion to Unix at home some time ago has led me to the Mac. The possibility of my becoming a Mac owner was made possible by the release of OSX (which is based on Unix). In my opinion (shared by many other geeks), OSX makes the Mac not only tolerable, but the world's nicest Unix desktop. Of course, the software and hardware look amazing, too, which has always been an Apple strong point. I went with the "basic" dual-867mhz model, and upgraded the RAM to 512M, and the video to the Radeon 64M card. The thing comes with a 60G hard drive, and I figure if I ever need more, I'll just add a firewire-based external drive. I also went ahead and ordered MS Office (currently a good deal), and a copy of Castle Wolfenstein. The total was around $2500, which ain't too bad, really. This should be plenty of machine, given most of my "consumer" work (digital photography, graphics) at home has been done on my aging 266mhz laptop, and my "development" work on my Sun Ultra 10-440mhz and collection of even older, slower Sun boxen. The Mac allows me to combine the consumer and developer worlds on one elegant machine. Nirvana! BTW, this post was carried out on Mozilla 1.0.1 for Solaris. At last, I can post to blogger, reliably, from a Sun box! muttered around 10:22 PM

I still have the goofy cold I wrote about in my 12/04 entry. It has never really "taken off", and thus it seems unable to run its course. I took a solid week (12/07-12/13) off from workouts. As of Saturday the 14th, I've returned to spinning, but am not lifting for another week. I'm even considering not lifting for the remainder of December. However it ends up, I'm currently planning to spend the first month or so of my return to lifting doing circuit training just to see how that works out, and to relieve the boredom I've been experiencing with lifting lately. muttered around 9:30 PM

Wednesday, December 04, 2002 Stayed home from work today with a cold. I felt pretty darn crappy this morning, having a headache and sore throat. However, by lunchtime I was much better. Hopefully it will be gone tomorrow. muttered around 9:44 PM