Jay McGavren’s Journal

For anyone who doubts that the Internet is making us into sociopaths…

This man wins…

Left on the Gangplank front door and subsequently “improved”…

Dinner at Pink Taco in Scottsdale. Sacrelicious!

I’m astounded - went back to the XP laptop to clean out a worm (the first that’s ever gotten past our firewall that I know of), and found myself trying to use OS X keyboard shortcuts. Years of conditioning to the Microsoft environment, undone in just a couple weeks.

Some old habits do die hard, though - I still find myself holding Caps Lock on the Mac in a futile effort to activate Enso. I need to visit the Enso mailing list and see how stable it is on OS X.

I’m getting fed up with GUI OSes in general, BTW. The Mac keyboard shortcuts, while slightly more sensible, are still totally random at times. I feel like I’m learning Street Fighter special moves or something. And there’s no way in hell I’m using the mouse.

I’m tired of losing the window I want amid the myriad windows onscreen and having no way to find it except command-tilde (or whatever), and the problem is made worse by the multi-monitor setup at work. I’ll sit there hammering on the keyboard, wondering why it’s not responding, only to realize I’ve barfed random text all over the terminal on the other monitor.

I’m starting to understand the curmudgeons who refuse to leave Emacs all day, I really am.

…’cause this time, Matt Mullenweg (Wordpress founder) was here.

Evidently he’s got mad Wii Tennis skills, as evidenced by the “pwned” section of the whiteboard…

[11:28:21] [chris@xmpp.foobar.com] test
[11:28:51] [chris@xmpp.foobar.com] The power of the Internet
[11:28:58] [Jay] internets ftw!
[11:29:42] *** chris@xmpp.foobar.com is Offline
[11:29:55] *** chris@xmpp.foobar.com is Online
[11:30:02] [Jay] miss me?
[11:30:10] [chris@xmpp.foobar.com] No :-)
[11:31:11] *** chris@xmpp.foobar.com is Offline [Replaced by new connection]
[11:31:13] *** chris@xmpp.foobar.com is Online
[11:31:19] [Jay] it's spiffy!!!!
[11:31:24] [Jay] hi ward!
[11:31:44] [chris@xmpp.foobar.com] hello
[11:32:06] *** chris@xmpp.foobar.com is Offline
[11:32:14] *** chris@xmpp.foobar.com is Online
[11:32:20] [Jay] wooo!
[11:33:14] [Jay] Jabber is not a truck.
[11:33:25] [Jay] It's like a series of tubes.
[11:42:34] [chris@xmpp.foobar.com] need to make a friends list
[11:42:45] [Jay] woo! i liek frenz
[11:42:57] [chris@xmpp.foobar.com] I can has friends.

Why is it I waited to get a Mac until I hardly even care what OS I’m on? I had Spotlight replicated via Enso. (Enso’s actually better, since it’s quasimodal.) I had a decent equivalent to the BSD core via Cygwin. (Though I’ll now be able to compile some Ruby extensions that I couldn’t on Windows.) Console2 is an excellent alternative to Terminal. I had Textmate covered via E - Texteditor. (Er, wait, that’s not really a satisfactory substitute at this point.)

Well, I had to fight tooth and nail to get those Windows equivalents working properly, and the seams are still showing. The Mac versions work right out of the box, and seem to work marginally better. I hate everything when I first start using it, but I’ve already had some “Hmm, that’s well-designed” moments with OSX. It’s definitely not the panacea I was hoping for, but I think it’s going to grow on me.

I’ve been talking about it for over a year, and I finally ordered a MacBook. ($1000 refurbished by Apple, Intel Dual Core, 2GB RAM.)

I made myself wait a week first, but pretty much everyone at work owns one and brings it in to the shop, so I could finally stand it no longer. These guys code with a fleet-fingered ease that I’ll only be able to match if I can practice at home.

Sweet!

Command-space, "firefox", Enter
Command-space, "textmate", Enter
Command-space, "firef", Enter
Command-space, "term", Enter

Totally think-free. I’m not missing Enso nearly as much now (especially since Spotlight doesn’t care if the app was already open or not).

Time to see if there’s room in the budget for that $850 refurb MacBook…