jeremy.id.au

Pictures of the New Zealand trip have been uploaded to a gallery. Though note that there is probably still some sorting out to do so only the best pictures are shown there.

Having come back from New Zealand I felt a new lease of life. This had me motivated to do some things that I perhaps wouldn’t have done for the past year. I thought of starting a small business or even getting a job. I thought up some marketing ideas for an IT business but didn’t manage to get out to test my ideas.

In the mean time I decided I needed a new computer. Well sure, my PC was fine, even though it was the same dual celeron 466Mhz (with 512 meg of RAM) computer that I’d been using for around 3 years (having inherited it when my dad died).  But I was fed up with being fed up with being tied to my desk to use the computer, instead, I wanted a laptop. My old laptop as nice as it was, weighing in at hardly a kilo, was ready for the trash as it constantly locks up. The next bit probably comes as a surprise to some people. I had been using Linux for over 5 years and here I was going out to purchase an iBook. Though I’d been contemplating an Apple purchase for a while. For quite some time I’ve thought that the hardware was nice, though I never really thought about what I’d do with such a machine, after all Linux runs on everything.

But there was perhaps something else lurching at me. Here we have Mac OS X, one of the most usable operating systems and it has a Unix core! Hardly four years earlier when I got my last laptop, I remember the joys of spending an entire long weekend fine tuning Linux when I should have been studying. Fortunately with a distribution such as Debian, once you install, you should never have to reinstall again. Though with a laptop, you usually want it to *just work*. Additionally, I was faced with other problems. Software in Linux was often lacking, there were no decent office productivity apps. I liked the way Abiword was so lightweight, but the dialogues stating to insert code at line 547 of abc.c for said feature weren’t too helpful. It wasn’t for another year or so until OpenOffice was an option.

I still like Linux. From a technical point of view it’s probably my favourite OS (particularly the Debian variety). However, Mac OS X Aqua is probably one of the greatest desktop environments that I’ve used. I couldn’t do without features such as Exposé. In fact when I went back to my Linux PC to do some things, I kept hitting F9 to no avail. Probably the main areas of disappoint are to do with things like terminal emulation. Terminal.app claims to be an xterm, however, it’s keybindings differ and so causing problems with backspace. With some work arounds the problem has been minimal. Other than that, there’s an annoying 802.1x bug. So I love my iBook, though I’m no Apple loyalist and remain skeptical of some their tactics. Still, I think it’s great that there is an alternative to the Intel PC running Microsoft Windows that everyone can use.

Only about a month after I had my new iBook, the inevitable happened. My PC power supply blew and took half the PC with it. One would almost think it had some concious of jealousy. Though in all reality it was probably going to happen anyway and it’s just as well I had a backup computer.

At the same time as purchasing the iBook, the Apple Centre owner offered me some work because he was interested in my *nix skills. I took the offer because I thought the general experience would be worthwhile. Worked there for about a month, though it was nothing exciting.