Late last week, I did the unthinkable. I ordered a new laptop…from Apple.
I’ve been watching the MacBook Pro line closely lately, especially since Apple introduced the new unibody design, and I’ve been really impressed with what I’ve seen. In addition, OS X seems to be maturing to the point that nearly anything you can do on a Windows machine is do-able on a Mac. Worst case, you can install Parallels Desktop for Mac or VirtualBox and run a virtual Windows machine for those things that are Windows-specific.
The tipping point for me came with fast enough dual-core processors and sufficient memory to make running a virtual Windows box a reasonable proposition. Until about a year ago, it simply didn’t make sense.
Anyway, the stars aligned, and I finally decided to give the Mac a shot.
The new machine is a 15″ MacBook Pro, 2.53GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4GB of RAM, 320GB SATA HDD, with dual video cards and 512MB of dedicated video ram for the discrete video processor. That’s a heck of a lot of hardware.
I actually went with a refurb rather than new – saving about $400 in the process. My experience with refurbs has been excellent from Dell. Let’s hope Apple continues the trend.
So now my big challenge is to start the process of identifying Mac replacements for common software I use. I’ll try to keep you up to date on how the switch works out, and my impressions as I wade into this new world. Wish me luck.
Turns out the problem was indeed a data center fire (which is a truly frightening prospect). As best I can tell, a transformer shorted out and started a small fire. Sprinklers kicked in and put out the fire but also shorted out generators and caused much more serious problems. Ultimately, all power to the building had to be shut down, which caused issues on a huge scale. Loss estimates run into the tens of millions of dollars when you figure in lost sales online, etc.
Fisher Plaza in Seattle, site of the data center fire
More info here, here and here.
Looks like Authorize.net is down hard. That’s a huge problem for online retailers, thousands of whom rely on Authorize.net to process credit cards.
See Authorize.net Goes Down, E-Commerce Vendors Left Hanging for a little more info.
I just installed a plugin that promises to tweet any new posts to my blog. This post is a test to see if it really works.
Results: Yes, yes it does work. COOL!
Better still, the tweet also updates my Facebook status. Talk about digital convergence! Wonder if I can also set it to blog anything I tweet? (Wonder if I can create a black hole by making every digital tool I have forward everything to every other tool simultaneously…hmm. Maybe I need to think about this a bit)
It would appear that any photos that were uploaded to a BlogWare photo album have not come across with the rest of the data that I migrated. Not sure if it’s worth tracking those down…it probably accounts for fewer than 30 posts.
I’m moving the blog to WordPress, so bear with me for a while as things settle.
It’s a little sad to move off of Blogware (which has served me well for many years). I played some small role in the birth of Blogware as one of the earliest beta testers. Unfortunately, Tucows has essentially abandoned Blogware — they’re still keeping everything up and running, but no new development is underway — and WordPress has just continued to get better and better.
So today I took the plunge and exported my content from Blogware. It wasn’t too difficult to import it to WP, and I’m up and running.
There will be bumps in the road. For one thing, the URL’s of all my posts will change, so I’ll have to wait while Google catches up to the change. But frankly, the blog is here mainly for me (with the exception of a couple of posts that get a lot of traffic from Google and seem to be helpful to a lot of people), so I’m not too concerned about it. The handful of popular posts will be OK; I’ll install traps to redirect any incoming traffic to the new URL.
The other unfortunate thing is that the identities of those who posted comments in the past appear to be lost, presumably because Blogware and WordPress use completely different systems to identify users. Not much I can do about that other than to apologize to anyone who’s upset that their comment is now anonymous. Post some new ones and we’ll be fine.
If you’re a WP afficionado, post a comment with your favorite cool feature so that I don’t miss out on anything. Thanks!
File this one under “bizarre coincidences that you simply couldn’t dream up on your own.”
One of my clients has been having trouble with ColdFusion on his server. I’m not a CF guy, so I can’t solve it for him, but he ran across a company with a bunch of very smart CF guys whom he contracted to dig into it.
Today he forwards an email from the consultant with a fantastic, well-researched explanation that got almost exactly to the heart of what was going on. With just a little more insight about the server configuration (which I was able to provide) all of the pieces fell into place and it looks like we’ve found the root cause.
That’s all well and good, but the name of the consultant — Steven Erat — looked vaguely familiar to me. Try as I might, I couldn’t place it, and there was no obvious connection (he’s in a completely different state, even).
But a few minutes with Google revealed all. Turns out that SIX YEARS AGO we had exchanged comments on each other’s blogs. In fact, I just noticed that his blog still appears in my Blogroll, bookmarked lo those many years ago.
It’s amazing how small the world really is.
Christopher seems excited about the new camera.
Fun with my new toy, a Nikon D40.
Does your mouse wheel drive you crazy sometimes? Try this out…
WizMouse is a mouse enhancement utility that makes your mouse wheel work on the window currently under the mouse pointer, instead of the currently focused window. This means you no longer have to click on a window before being able to scroll it with the mouse wheel. This is a far more comfortable and practical way to make use of the mouse wheel.
WizMouse from Antibody Software (it’s free)
