Wahhhhh !!! I have to give back the MacBook Pro. Wahhhh !!! I will so miss my baby. February 07 08

Update: The EFI 1.4 only applied to MacBooks one generation back and beyond. Mine is a 2.2 GHz so I was overlooked. On another note, after 3 hours Leopard installed without any hitch, knock on wood.

You know, I never played the Apple vs. PC game. I chose a PC because that was the first one I used and the only one I used regularly in university. I did do some minimal developing on an apple computer in the late 80s. But I stuck with the PC because, if need be, I could batter it into doing what I wanted it to do. From what I learned about Macs, it was harder and more dire to batter the pretty lil things into doing something.

So, i accepted that for certain uses the Macs would be better and for PCs would do it for other things. But honestly, I did believe that Apple probably did some things better than a PC. It took years for a PC to become an easy beast to network. Hell, even now my XP Pro home PCs lose standard networking setup for no good reason. I assumed that Apple would have paid attention to the failings of PCs and learned to bypass them.

But a recent kufuffle has me losing my (albeit not really invested) faith in the Apple kingdom. You see, a recent firmware update (EFI 1.4) broke the windows side of Bootcamp. Well, Bootcamp wasn't anything but Beta in the old OSX, i.e. Tiger and earlier, as in 10.4. The two major discussions on Apple Forums, state very clearly that this firmware update is affecting every user who had another OS installed on the Bootcamp. Surprisingly, this is still a small subset of the Mac world. And you might think that now that Leopard (got my copy today !) would fix this as they make Bootcamp legal and real in the OSX world. That would be fine, if for the fact that the update to the EFI was not a software related issue but in the actual hardware that affects the video drivers for the OS on the other partition. Go ahead, wipe your MacBook Pro and install Leopard and then setup Bootcamp with your legal copy of XP (I have one I can use, a real live paid for copy of XP) -- it won't work.

And Apple is not saying a thing about it yet. They didn't really have to until the weekend. They didn't officially support Bootcamp or the ways it interacted with the firmware. I just hope they do so soon as the, "We don't know and we don't care!!" attitude coming from their official support lines (we called, we have a real machine here in the office that requires XP to be running on the MacBook Pro) is not very encouraging. Dweebs. October 31 07

Apple things done today. Installed Firefox and Acrobat., that is, after learning the difference of installing in OSX -- it's neat. Fiddled the hell out of the desktop settings and even found a neat halloween based desktop image. I renamed the computer to Jolly Roger after pondering Invisibles names on Wikipedia. Learned a few keyboard shortcuts but still need a few more basic ones. Things loved? The keyboard lighting up as the light in the room lowered & how pretty everything is. Things annoying me? Expanding large PDFs steals a lot of processing power even on this mega 2.2 DualCore -- not even noticeable on my much lower PC. I guess the prettier it is the harder it is to make happen. October 19 07

Honestly, I have wanted one of these Apple iMacs since they came out with the crayola colours. But really, this is my adult version. Alas, I have no money (yeah yeah, shut the hell up... there are kids in Africa stuck with free laptops) so I will have to live with this:
August 08 07

OK, sitting to the right of my desktop keyboard is a borrowed iBook G4. I have brought it home, borrowed from a coworker who fears it has Spyware. I believe she ran into popups.

So, it is not difficult to lead on with, "Does anyone know any sites for newbs?" And I don't mean me, I mean her. She is not just a new Mac User but a new User. She has never used a computer, not to check her hotmail, not to surf the Internet, not write a resume. So, she is slowly getting the hang of browsing ("What's a browser, David?") and I would like to send her to webpages that focus on new computer users and new users of Macs. Anyone?

Update: And these updates will soon get their own posts. First impressions, other than "Ooooo so perty!" were that it is really easy to connect, I just plugged in the ethernet cable and she was connected to my router/internet connection. This may be to the fact that I am also Sympatico as is her owner but it may be just a mac thing, Then I turned on the wireless internet on my router and went over to the Airport. Bing, there it was as well as three other people and now I am on the sofa surfing and researching. August 29 05