As Becky and I talked last night, I realized that this odd passion I’m starting to grow for the Mac world is a distant echo of a me from long ago.

In 1991, I was first introduced to OS/2, and really found it to be superior to the operating systems running around out there. It was great as a server, it was great as a desktop, and I became something of a zealot for the OS. Evangelize I did, and soon I had a lot of folks in Chattanooga running OS/2 Warp. It was good — IBM boofed the marketing, and despite some mainstream commercials, it just couldn’t capture the wind that the Microsoft sail had caught. I still think that the thing that killed ’em was no mainstream 3rd party applications. Nothing killer out there that made OS/2 “the way” to do something. It died on the vine, and I found myself moving to the only game in town — Windows 95 — and there I stayed for a decade.

Now though, I feel that same kind of evangelical, zealous, almost fiber of being sense with my new iMac. The commercials were right. A few clicks, and you’re on your way, surfing, burning, ripping, watching….. doing. And that’s cool. I want to feed the creative side of my brain, rather than the side that deals with making sure everything’s working, and trying to figure out how to make everything work together. I want a tool for my home, not another sysadmin job.

Beck sees this passion for the Mac in me, and I do too. It’s nice to have a passion again, and it’s nice to feed that part of me. The challenge of a new world, so to speak, is helping awake parts of my brain that I’ve neglected outside of the office, and it feels good.

The thing I’m the most impressed by is the interconnectivity. For example, I’m importing my CD collection into iTunes. I had gone through this exercise once before, but I have more disk space, and a desire for better sound, along with more seachable data through Spotlight. iTunes is figuring out duplicates, helping manage file replacement as needed, and making it really easy to pull my massive music collection into a cohesive unit. I’d always thought about being able to “mood” my music — play tunes from the 80s, or electronic music, or an artist — and iTunes is flat giving me the path for doing that. Cool.

My next conquest will be iPhoto. I’ve already started adding metadata through Photoshop CS2, and I expect I will be able to make a much more usable environment out of my photo archive.

My iMac is becoming the center of my digital lifestyle — I think I lifted that from some advert somewhere. But it’s so true!

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As we walked through CompUSA a few days after getting the iMac, Beck caught me lusting after an iPod, and she told me that I have a pattern. I get into something — like the Mac world — and I have to have all the “stuff” that goes with it.

At work, we have a phrase for unthinkingly buying into something hook, line and sinker: drinking the Kool-Aid.

I have drunk the Apple Kool-Aid.

Yesterday, I had a day off (for all this crazy work I’ve been doing this week), so Sio and I got together early, and took off for a day of errands and just wandering around town. Our primary mission was to get Beck a new HP computer from BestBuy. They had a pretty good deal on one, especially after the rebates, and after the parts we don’t need are sold off. Two BestBuys later (three, if you count the one at lunch on Thursday), we finally had a system for her, and a new HP Photosmart 8450 network photoprinter for me.

The new printer is a jewel. I set it up tonight, connected it to the network, applied the software on the Apple, and it just knew what to do with itself. I can’t wait to start printing photos off the thing. It prints at 4800dpi, uses eight color printing, and can print a 4×6 in about 27 seconds. Sweet.

So none of that part of journey was a big deal. Now enter the Kool-Aid.

Along the way, I stopped at CompUSA to pick up a new gadget for my iMac — an iSight. This is a really well designed webcam, built to last and accent the Mac lines. It’s got a fast, autofocusing lens, and seems to be a slick piece of hardware — 30fps at 640×480! Of course, it’ll work with iChat AV, but the thing I wanna use it for is typical webcam “This is what’s going on in the office” applications. Unfortunately, neither OS X nor the iSight come with software to that end, so I have a quest on my hands.

I also looked at an iPod Photo. Man, that’s a cool box… 60GB of music and/or photos. It’s very impressive, and now you can even import directly from a camera to the iPod Photo. Dunno if there’s limitations with that. The multi-functionality of this box is appealing to me though. Listening to themed music while shooting, and then turning around and storing that data back on the iPod sounds like a very cool path, and seems to suit me well.

The biggest competitor to the iPod Photo (to me) is the Epson P-2000. This little jewel only has 40GB of storage, but it’s got a huge screen, and can handle displaying Canon RAW images directly. And the price is about the same as the iPod Photo. The handling of RAW images directly is of real appeal to me, as that’s what I try to shoot most of the time. I guess the jury’s still out, and truthfully, I don’t have to solve that one for a while, not until at least November.

However, it appears I have indeed drunk the Kool-Aid, and am on the slippery Apple-slope that comes with it! 😉

Walter Mossberg from the Wall Street Journal took a swing at capturing the essence of the Apple-announced move to Intel processors over the next couple of years. In this article he says what I’ve been saying.

It ain’t the end of the world.

Apple’s OS won’t run on just anyone’s hardware. (In fact someone in the office today indicated that the processors used might take advantage of some chip tricks to identify themselves as Apple-endorsed chips as opposed to off-the-shelf models.)

While the hardware is designed with a high level of cool factor, the OS is what makes the beast rock.

So, everyone, take a breath. In. Out. In. Out. It’ll be ok. 😉

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After working for three days to install a gigabit private connection from the iMac to the server, I’ve finally got it working!

It should’ve been plug-n-play, right? Well, I thought so, too. Everything pointed at the iMac having a problem — I could ping from the server to the iMac, but couldn’t ping the other direction. Every book I had pointed to the iMac being at fault. Then I finally had a brainstorm just before bed: check the firewall on the server. Sure enough, the new gigabit interface on the server wasn’t letting anything through. Ah, well… at least I learned something! 🙂

Primarily, I intend to use this as the data path for backups — cross-pollenating the data on the server and iMac — but it’ll also let me do builds of the photo site nightly, and keep up that part of the site more up-to-date. The server has just enough umph to serve pages, but it would reek if doing the photo manipulation, so that’s gotta happen on the iMac, and then get scooted to the server. A lot of scripting is needed, but I think I can pull that off over the next week or so.

What fun, eh?

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eWeek is reporting that at the Apple developers conference this morning, Steve Jobs demonstrated a Power Mac… running on a 3.6Ghz P4.

Whhhaaaaaattttt?

Yup, Mr. Apple has indicated that future Macs will be running on Intel hardware. The Apple Skunkworks has been working on this for five years, and it looks like it’s paying off.

So I just bought an obsolete box, right?

Well, not so quick with that. It’s still two years until the transition is complete, and frankly, that’ll be about the right time to start looking at the state of the Mac union.

And truthfully, Apple’s not gonna make OS X run on just any hardware. They can’t. If they did that, then suddenly they’d have to support every Itchy & Scratchy brand of mouse, joystick, hot dog broiler and anything else that can connect to a commodity-based PC. That’s not their gig, and I don’t think they can be successful doing that.

So where do they go?

The same place they are now — a carefully controlled configuration, requiring some specific and special hardware in order for OS X to work. It’d probably be hardware you won’t easily be able to piece together at home, and I think that’s good.

If Apple puts OS X on any ol’ PC, then the advantage — and significant revenue stream — that is delivered with the hardware vaporizes, and Apple as we know them will be dealing iPods, and competing with the million-pound gorilla of OS… Microsoft. They can’t win that fight.

So all the developers are hosed, right?

Wrong. The current codebase will be able to run on the new hardware using a cool new tool called Rosetta. So, at least for a while, you can develop for the G5 platform, knowing that it’ll run on the new Intel-based boxes. That’ll give developers time to move code over, recompile — allegedly real easy to port from G5 to Intel — and get their products out.

Is it inconvenient? Sure. And yeah, there’s gonna be a sunset date out there for my shiny new iMac G5. Then again, with any hardware, that’s true. The sunset date for some is just better defined than others! 🙂

So, no worries here. I think the Mac OS will survive, despite the hardware change. And I don’t think that Apple will wither because of this change. At the end of the day, I think it’ll be a good thing, delivery faster hardware, perhaps a skosh cheaper, and still a rock solid performer for the kind of work I do.

Well, on my desktop anyway.

As I’ve been re-Mac-ing myself (clever, eh?), I’ve been trying to find best of breed components to go along with my digital makeover. I’ve asked Mac users at work to give me a list of the five best things they have or use (hardware or software) with their Macs. Browser conversations inevitably come up.

I’ve been a big fan and supporter of Firefox since before it GA’d. On Windows, that was an easy choice, as IE has more holes than a big ol’ block of Swiss cheese. On the Mac, that choice doesn’t seem quite so cut and dried. Safari is the native browser, and it seems to do a good job. Firefox is also out for the Mac, and seems to do a good job. So who wins? For me, the jury is still out.

Well, one of the Macfolk I talked to indicated that his decision to let Safari wither on the vine was the inability to examine security certificates within the browser. That’s a big one, although I have to admit that I rarely look at those unless the browser barks about there being some discrepancy.

I guess that sorta flies alongside Apple’s apparent paradigm with their environment. It’s almost an arrogance that dictates that Apple knows what’s best, and will let us know if there’s an issue. It really reinforces the Mac as an appliance, a means to an end, rather than something to constantly be working on. Kinda like a chef having a toaster that he can focus on making toast with, rather than constantly focusing on rewiring the heating coils. Nothing wrong with any of that, but it is really a mindset change for me.

However, I’m ready to hang up my sysadmin gloves at the house. I do enough of that kind of work at the office, and it’s time to focus on my digital lifestyle (to borrow a phrase from Apple), and not so much on how to get there.

The last week has found me making subtle additions and deletions to my Mac-world. I think it’s starting to settle out a bit.

Last Monday, I added a set of Altec Lansing 2.1 Speakers. It was a tough choice, as the 5.1 speakers are really cool, and offer some fantastic capabilities. Add to that the optical out from the iMac, and the combination seems pretty sweet. However, I use my iMac for photoediting, and listening to music whilst I do it. A surround-sound system doesn’t buy me much for my usage habits, so I didn’t go down that path. The Altec’s are great, and really have some big ol’ punch to them.

I’m a bit of a keyboard snob, and for better or worse, harken back to the old days of a clicky IBM keyboard. It’s the touch I like best, and the Apple keyboard supplied with iMac just didn’t cut it. I bought a Kensington wireless keyboard and mouse combo last Monday, and finally decided that it just wasn’t quit the feel I was looking for. It also seemed to drop a character every now and then, perhaps due to my touch-typing style or possibly the keyboard had a problem. Either way, after a few days of using it, I elected to bounce it back to Best Buy.

So, from CompUSA came another Kensington keyboard, and this one has a great feel to it! A short stroke, good click and very Apple-centric. The only complaint I would have is that it doesn’t have USB ports on the back of it like the Apple keyboard does. No biggie, as I found a solution for the USB ports quickly dwindling on the back of the iMac.

Wanting to spread my cash around, I travelled to Circuit City to pick up a USB hub, again from Kensington. This is a seven-port hub, shaped like a little dome, designed correctly with the ports and connections on the back, status lights on the front. The best part of the design is the weight added to the innards. This thing is stout, and stays right where you put it, despite a gob of cables dangling off the back of it. To sweeten the deal, it also came with a little “flylight” — a USB light that you can plug into a USB port on top of the dome. The light’s neat looking, but offers little real use. It’s too blue (too my colorblind eyes), too weak, and is more cutesy than functional. Free is free though.

With the demise of the wireless mouse, I moved the Logitech gaming mouse over the iMac. However, my mousepad from NRAO was starting to show wear from all the mousing over the last year. So lastly, I bought a mousepad from Allsop. This thing is a beauty, and built like a tank. The frame and base are heavy metal, with a nice charcoal surface, and a non-skid backing to keep it in place. Someone did their homework on designing this thing, and have come up with the perfect mousepad for me. Very cool, and looks good on the desk.

Some function, some fluff, but all cool add-ons for my digital makeover. Now if I can just find a Dasani dispensing machine for my office, I’ll be in great shape! 🙂

As of about 7pm last night, I turned a corner in my hobbiyist life. I turned off my laptop, and for the first time in close to a decade, I no longer have a Windows box running.

I have made the switch to the iMac, and have enough things running there to handle my world — email, browsing, etc. I also turned off the gargantuan Linux server, having replaced it with a little Shuttle box, but that’s really smaller news by comparison.

So what have I observed in this migration?

Well, the Apple keyboard and mice are atrocious. Smushy keys and no scroller wheel…. well, let’s just say I’m off to Best Buy this morning to buy replacements.

Upgrading the memory in the machine was a piece of cake, and the instructions included with the iMac were dead on accurate. Very cool. The one thing I didn’t see mentioned anywhere, except in a tech note from Apple, was that mismatched types of memory cause a degradation in DIMM to DIMM performance. That would’ve saved me an extra trip to CompUSA to buy a matching 1Gb DIMM!

I don’t like the included mail client. I haven’t yet figured out how to do subfolders and rules. The Smart Mailbox appears to only be a filter for the things in the Inbox, and doesn’t seem to give the kind of functionality I’m used to with Outlook folders and rules. The mail client does a pretty good of figuring out junkmail though. That’s cool. Now if I can just figure out how to import my Outlook mail….

Last night we went to Borders to get a book or two on OS X Tiger, to try to help me get over the hump — perhaps a “So You’ve Moved from Windows…” book. Nada. In fact, most of the small Apple section was filled with books on Jaguar and Panther, and without knowing how far different Tiger was, I was hesitant to buy books for the older OS. And it’s then that the enormity of the Microsoft sections hit me — rows and rows of books on XP and other Microsoft products. I feel the long missing crazy-man-on-a-hill voice coming on…. the same one I heard when I was such an OS/2 zealot in the mid-90s.

This time though, it’s about more than just the architecture — it’s also about my usage. The iMac supposedly will do more and better photoediting than I’ve seen with my Windows boxen. That is what I’m looking forward to, and now that all the migrations are complete, I can play with that today! 🙂