Swing and a miss!

Well this sucks. I've been waiting for almost a week to get some more RAM for the ol' iMac. It finally arrived today, and it seems that I may have purchased some RAM that is incompatible with my machine. That has never happened to me before, and I have upgraded my PC's many times. Granted, my research may have been inadequate. I looked up what kind of memory works with an iMac G3 600 MHz and found a site that guaranteed it would work. They also wanted about $90 for 512 MB. Ridiculous. That's more than half of what I paid for the entire computer. So I noted the specs, went back to the site that I purchased the Apple from, and purchased what I thought to be the same memory for 40 bucks less. I was all excited because it was really quick and easy to install (much faster than a PC - there's a little panel in back that pops open and provides easy access to the memory slots). But something's wrong. The System Profiler is telling me that slot 0 is empty. But it fits in the slot. It looks just like the stick of 256 that's in there. WTF???? Then I did another search and this is what I found on eBay:

"Only supports modules made with a specific type of chip". If that doesn't just sum up Apple right there than I don't know what does. Now I get to go through the joy of returning items through the mail. Sweet. Maybe I can even go to the Post Office. That's always fun. See what kind of new stamps they've come up with. Find out who's the latest addition to the Most Wanted list. Shit. My fault.

In Bad Taste

Call me Roy Horn...

'Cause I got bitten by the Tiger!

El Tigre esta en la casa...

I tried to think of a cooler post title like "Running with the Tiger", or "Walking with a Tiger" (hoping that someone would catch the limp tie-in with LL Cool J's seminal album "Walking with a Panther"), but I switched over to Spanish. As I was typing that title just now, it reminded me of my ignorance with an Apple keyboard. The alt+160s no longer bring up accented letters and whatnot. So yes, I realize that there should be an accent above the 'a' in "esta", but I can't figure out how to get it there. I'm also lost without Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V, Ctrl+X, and especially Ctrl+Z. I'm sure I can program my Apple keyboard to do it too.

OS X (Tiger) is an amazing operating system. I think I'm ready to say that it feels better than Windows XP (which I never liked), and it might even trump my old favorite Windows 2000 as best OS to interact with. I've said it in earlier posts; Apple rules design. I don't know if it's the pot, acid, or hallucinogenic mushrooms that their legendary design teams are all tripping on right now, but man... it's just a beautiful system. It just feels like you are paying for a superior product. Or at least a different product. And it is tough to differentiate between the cool, counter-cultural feeling of not using Windows versus actually appreciating it as a system. As we talked about at work today, it's nice to not have a machine geeking out about trojan horses, viruses, attempted hacking attempts, etc. But it's early to claim victory over malware.

Clearly a lot of time and money went into the user interface. I'm reminded of the iPod click wheel experience as I drag my mouse pointer over the menu bar at the bottom of the screen. It's actually fun to do.

Underwhelmed for Now...

The Apple arrived as scheduled on Wednesday evening. As you can see in the picture, my dog helped me tear the box open.


Initial thoughts: It is very nice looking. We've come to expect this out of all of Apple's products, manuals, and packaging. Very disappointed that Internet Explorer is the native browser. I was looking forward to seeing Safari. My wife managed to crash the computer within the first hour. For some reason, this G3 does not like Yahoo mail. Check out the hard crash message after I rebooted.

Overall, the Dashboard is in yellow for sure. If an upgrade to OSX Tiger doesn't yield some improved browsing experience, we're going to orange.

There better be some birthday treats at work today.

Tomorrow is the Day

I came to a really sad realization last night. Not only does my Apple arrive tomorrow, but my dog's first day of obedience school is tomorrow night as well. I'm trying not to cuss, so I'll just say that it really, really sucks. I already warned my wife that I'm going to be up late tomorrow night. She was nice enough to get me an early birthday present this past weekend. Woot was offering a wireless Apple keyboard and mouse, so she ordered it for me. Sweet. It won't arrive by tomorrow, but that's alright. I have plenty of extra keyboards and mice lying around. I am going to be so antsy during Sasha's puppy training, knowing that I have a new toy at home waiting for me. Such a geek. She better learn something tomorrow or she will catch a beating somethin' fierce.

I spoke too soon...

My old nemesis "the blue screen of death" returned this afternoon, less than 6 hours after I posted a comment that it all but doesn't exist any more. (Sorry about the poor photo quality - I took that picture with my cell phone.) I demonstrate excitement for the Apple, one of my PC's power supply fries out. I try to say something nice about the Windows operating system, and I get a hard crash like I haven't gotten in a long, long time. Suspected cause: I disconnected my iPod while it still said "Do Not Disconnect". Come on! That causes a total failure of the Operating System?? On a positive note, it did give me a chance to exercise the cool "recover session" feature within Firefox. I had about a half dozen tabs open and Firefox opened them all back up from where I left off. I wonder if Safari can do that. Maybe it doesn't need to.

Target Date: 10.11.06

We have a date. And it's October the eleventh, 2006. We also have a correction. The United States Postal Service is not carrying my package. A Federal Express employee is. But I'm not taking down the picture of Cliff Clavin because I feel he was a much more agreeable postman than Newman was. His trivia knowledge probably rivals a certain co-worker of mine. You know who you are.

I'm going to start searching for Apple software at some point this weekend. If you have any recommendations, please post them.

My Item has been Shipped

The excitement builds. Lots of chatter today about the ability to mod an Apple versus a PC. I'll be interested to see how easy it is to switch ROM drives, upgrade RAM, swap hard drives in and out, etc. I'm assuming this especially poses a challenge with the iMac since it is an all-in-one unit. My Apple is now in the hands of the few, the proud, the United States Postal Employees. God bless 'em. Poor bastard has to lug a 42 pound box up my driveway and onto my porch.

Great Expectations

Why do I already have it in my head that everything will work better on the Apple? Am I setting myself up for disappointment? For some reason, whenever I burn audio CD's on my Dell, the first couple seconds of every song skips. I've switched brands of blank CD's, tried different burning software... nothing fixes it. I thought on the drive home from work today that Justin Timberlake's "SexyBack" will not skip if I burn it on my Apple. Yeah I said it. I burned JT's new album, FutureSex/LoveSounds this morning before work. And it would be a pretty dope CD if the first couple seconds of every song didn't skip!

Plot Development

I am giddy with excitement. At the ripe old age of 27, I am about to be a first-time Macintosh owner. There were plenty of excuses in the past to not give Apple a chance. My cousins were Apple-users, and I always thought our Commodore 64 was better. Why? They were rocking the green screen while I was living large in 16-bit color. Tapper, Bruce Lee, Spy Hunter... I could go on and on about why the Commodore 64 was an amazing system, but I'll try to stay on point. Certainly Apple evolved and got better over time, but then Michael Dell jumped on the scene and we bought a Dell 486 when I was in 8th grade. Windows 3.11 was mind-blowing. Yes, it was somewhat reminiscent of my cousins' Apple, but better for some reason I cannot explain. That Dell 486 was just awesome. It was a life-changing event for a young boy that grew up to be a superstar IT professional. (Intended to make my co-workers laugh.)

By the time I got to college, I was fully drunk on the Windows Kool-Aid. I worked in the campus computer lab where roughly half of the machines were Apple iMac G3's; you remember them - they had the cool candy color shells, the processor, hard drive, and CD rom drive were built into the monitor. They were beautiful machines, but I disregarded them because I had no idea how to use them. Anytime someone asked for help, I had to punt to the one guy in the lab that understood Macs.

So now I'm older. My father-in-law is an Apple fanatic. Whenever I'm at his house and I use his computer, I am in awe of the elegant design, but am totally lost from a navigation perspective. But I'm fairly competent, right? Gimme some time and I'll crack this nut. Now it comes down to price. Apples are crazy expensive. But the refurbished ones aren't. Today I bought an iMac G3 with a 600MHz processor, 256 MB of RAM, and a CDRW drive for around $150. Steve Jobs...

Holy Crap!!! There is smoke coming out of my old Windows PC!!!! I think I saw fire. D@mn that smells really bad. My wife just tried plugging it in and it seems to have partially started on fire. I suspect that my dog may have had a role in this. How ironic - my secondary PC just died.

So anyway... Steve Jobs is finally getting a chance to win over my heart. I will let you know how it goes.