Wednesday, March 13, 2002

Well, relatively few minutes later and I'm running Radio on the iMac on my properly encrypted wireless network. It all proved much easier than I expected. I'm beginning to find my way around the UI, as well. Though I'm sure there are loads of times when I do things in a Windows-ish way despite the fact that there's probably a much easier Mac-ish way I'm not getting. But is there really no equivalent to Alt-Tab? And I am still heroically using the exquisitely beautiful one-button mouse with no scroll wheel. I know that it's probably much better for my hands, but I have not the faintest idea what I'm supposed to use instead. Can anyone recommend a mouse as beautiful as the Apple Pro mouse, but with (at least) two buttons and a scroll wheel? 11:51:35 PM  comment []     Omniweb is beautiful but deeply inadequate; many of my favourite sites turn out to be missing large chunks using it. But anti-aliasing may just be essential. Why have I never noticed huge numbers of blocky, ugly web pages before I started using a Mac? Meanwhile, I'd like to be sending this message from the iMac, but installing and migrating Radio seems like rather too hard a task for this time of night. I will have to investigate. My little boy (him of the iMac box) has croup and I've been paying (marginally) more attention to him than to my new toy. He loves the iMac and keeps pressing the keys and getting that lovely alert noise. Luckily, until he can move the mouse over the thumbnail picture against his name and click, he's not getting to do anything else with the machine, and I reckon that's at least a year away.  Jon Asato  emailed me with some tips on getting the broadband encryption working again. I'm off to try them. 11:11:30 PM  comment []

Monday, March 11, 2002

OK. A report at roughly the end of the first day. As long as I'm just playing with the iMac, everything seems fine. But I couldn't get the Airport card to talk to the broadband router until I turned off the encryption. So the hordes of people who wander up and down the streets of Walthamstow searching for unencrypted wireless networks will be able to find mine. I quickly put passwords on all the shares, though the Mac seems to be properly controlled already. As for those PC shares, Dr Plokta managed to mount them briefly. It was much like a David Attenbrough programme featuring porcupines. But whatever he did, it wasn't sufficient and I can't find them again. Meanwhile, the best way of sharing files from the Mac to the PC appears to be to publish them on the virtual intranet server, which is daft but effective. All this meant that the bits where I go 'ooh, isn't it pretty' were overlaid with large chunks of 'But guess what! Configuring networks is just as bad as ever (or maybe a bit worse)'. I did have several terrific moments along the way. There's only one plug. The base of this machine is more beautiful than any part of any of my PCs. The screen is astonishing; Dr P had to turn the brightness down because it was hurting his eyes, even through the dark glasses. All the packaging was elegant. I edited a short movie in iMovie in half an hour ("Call it 'cutebabies0001', said Dr P, morosely). Each of the users has their own little photograph on the login screen (we're such a beautiful family). 9:19:31 PM  comment []     OK, it's on the desk, it's initialised, it's asking me for data. Name, age, shoe size, email address, that sort of thing. Whoops! Where's the @ sign gone? Goodness, this migration business might be harder than I thought. 1:50:18 PM  comment []     I promised you an iMac unpacking shot.                     1:26:00 PM  comment []     This, frankly, has nothing whatsoever to do with the iMac, but quite a lot to do with learning how to use Radio. Here's a picture of my daughter, Marianne, together with one of the flowers from the amaryllis she's been growing since New Year, and a painting of the amaryllis.   10:07:28 AM  comment []     Monday morning. Still no iMac, but with a bit of luck this will now appear at the much more sensible location http://www.kittywompus.com/macadamia/ . Which it does, but without its style elements. Let's keep working on this. 9:34:13 AM  comment []

Sunday, March 10, 2002

The fact that the iMac wasn't delivered was made much worse by Dr Plokta coming round and declaring gleefully that there were vast stacks of them in the Whitgift Centre. 6:47:15 PM  comment []     The blog now has a proper title and description. It's not the only Macadamia out there, but I'm unlikely to be confused with a usergroup, a repair shop or a bunch of nutters on holiday, am I? 6:44:52 PM  comment []     So, needless to say, the iMac did not turn up. johnlewis.com are 'working on it'. In my darkest hours I considered putting up a virtual unpacking page. You know... ...here is the iMac not being delivered... ...here it is not sitting in its box... ...You can see me not unpacking it here... ...And finally, here it is majestically not sitting on my desk. Hmmph.   6:18:03 PM  comment []

Saturday, March 9, 2002

On March 6 I wrote: I may shortly become a migrant. I spent part of the weekend reading "OS X: The Missing Manual" which, I suspect, is not something that mere Mac Voyeurs do. I think I may have moved into the Mac Aspirants group. This is, like, a total religious conversion thing for me. And on March 8: Credit cards are truly a force for evil. johnlewis.com told me that they had the iMac in stock; and do named day delivery on Saturday morning. So, if all is well, I will have one in my grubby little fingers by half past twelve tomorrow. Coming soon; some sort of iMac migration webpage, with full frontal unpacking shots. And this is it. What for? I want to write about the trials and tribulations of moving onto a Mac after a decade of Windows.   9:36:56 AM  comment []

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