Shooting the breeze

It's been about 2 weeks now since I've converted to the "dark side" as some of my clients have affectionately put it once I mention that I've switched to Apple.

Overall I like it. The operating system OSX Leopard is a fancy desktop with a lot of bling features that can wow you. Vista probably has some similar bling features but I'm not going to touch that OS with a 10 foot pole.

As a "switcher" I haven't found adapting to the Mac as jarring as I thought it would be. Finding and organizing files on this hasn't turned out to be as confusing as I remember it being a few Mac OSs ago. In fact, I find the Mac finder to be much more intuitive then the Windows explorer file windows.

Installation of programs are a breeze. For those friends of mine who I had to teach how to install Windows programs? I'm sorry, it's much easier on a Mac. You just drag them into a folder. Idiot proof.

Most peripherals just work. Most of my original windows keyboards, mice, external drives, Win-ipods, printers and wacom tablet work just fine with it so I haven't really had to shell out as much extra cash as I expected. Thank god because this darn laptop cost an arm and a leg.

There are some things that are weird and take some getting used to -- applications don't really "close" when you close the windows. You have to quit them separately. So by the end of the day I might have like 10 applications running and don't even know it. And then I had my old habit of clicking outside of window panes when I wanted to deselect something...now with the mac that just makes my active program disappear into the background. So the first couple days I was constantly juggling with my screens all over the place.

Not bad eh? Half a post without ranting about something?

Talk about rant. What's up with rechargeable batteries? We got them in just about every type of device these days but am I the only one that notices that they never seem to last that long before they become nothing but bricks? You have perfectly good devices with dead batteries. We got laptops, wireless phones, cellphones, cameras, ipods, etc.

There's all this talk about Nickel this, and Lithium that -- charge them up, drain them full, don't keep them cool, store them 40% capacity, yadda yadda. It's almost like my wife and I have to keep a chart "Hey don't plug that laptop in yet...drain the battery!", "The phone has one bar left....NOOOOO don't put it on the charger!", "You left it charged OVERNIGHT? What are you crazy!?"

My wife almost bricked a new ipod nano I bought her a year ago for her birthday. She literally used it ONCE on the plane ride back home and didn't bother figuring out how to charge it. And then since moving here it's been sitting in a box for months. I spent the night trying to resuscitate the poor thing because it didn't pick up any charges at first.

I find it weird how my wife can spend her entire day helping people attach and detach body parts & memorize medical terms that I can barely pronounce...but she simply doesn't know how to plug her ipod into a USB port?

I better leave it at that or I might wake up with a limb or two missing tomorrow.

Otherwise things are looking remarkably good so far this Monday...

1. I resuscitated my wife's ipod from the brink of death
2. I sell off my old computer chair just a day after posting it on Craigslist
3. My bro said he's bringing over his old acoustic guitar for me
4. I managed to swing by and grab 2 Kokua Festival tickets after a tip from my sista Jenny who said they had 100 left to sell off today

Good day! Just praying it'll stay this way.....it's not even 10am yet!