- I got my new MacBook Pro. Yummy!
- Amusingly enough, Cisco’s internal ordering tool thingy won’t ship to my home address; it’ll only ship to the local Cisco sales office. Which I figured was fine; it would guarantee that someone would be around when it was delivered. I signed up on the UPS “e-mail me updates on this tracking number…” thingy, and was shocked to get an e-mail at about 9am on the morning of the expected delivery date saying “We tried to deliver, but no one was there.” GAAAHH!! I promptly called UPS and told them to re-route the driver back; I would go to the location to accept the delivery myself.
- But I wondered: why wasn’t anyone there to accept it? Slacker sales guys! ☺
- Props to UPS for near-real-time updating of the notification (rather than the driver having to return to the distribution point at noon or the end of the day — I got the notification e-mail within about 15 minutes of the missed delivery).
- So I went to the sales office (all the sales guys had arrived by then), and was there when the driver came back an hour or so later. So I got my Mac. Much, much happiness.
- I have therefore [almost] retired my IBM Thinkpad running Windoze (that I got when I joined Cisco) and migrated entirely to my MBP. When I first got my Windoze laptop, I thought I could be open minded and be able to use Windoze and be just as productive as I could with a Mac. No so. I always felt constrained; especially since I’m a developer, I could never do any real work on my own laptop (Cygwin was a totaly dog, mainly because launching each process was sooooo slow!). So I’m really glad to have a Unix-based machine as my main working unit now.
- I had to switch from Outlook to Entourage. Not bad, but it does have some annoying differences:
- Minor: You cannot import my .pst files from Outlook directly; you have to upload everything from Outlook to Exchange and then download to Entourage (which took a long, long time and required shepharding so that I didn’t go over quota).
- Minor: Overall, it seems to be a bit of a hog; typing can be a bit slow (perhaps it’s the spell checker?).
- Minor: The ordering of messages in a thread is not consistent; they’re not always in order. I haven’t figured out why.
- Minor: Events on the calendar display do not display the color of the free/busy status of the appoinment; you have to open the appointment and click in a sub-item to see what the free/busy status of the appointment it.
- Minor: Dragging mails from an Exchange folder to a local folder copies them (vs. moving them). This is annoying because it typically means that you have to do 2 actions: drag and then delete.
- Minor: Every time you exit Entourage, it wants to delete everything in the junk mail folder (what if i haven’t reviewed it yet?). There does not appear to be a setting to disable this behavior.
- Major: To-do items are not stored on the server. This is unbelievable to me. Not only are they not backed up, they won’t appear on my Treo.
- Major: You can’t change the accept/tenative/reject status of an appointment once you have accepted it. Wow!
- It’s not all bad, though. I do enjoy the fact that Entourage syncs to Mac’s Addressbook and Calendar, which, in turn, I have set to sync to my .mac account (which keeps my home iMac, for example, also in sync, and therefore my bluetooth-enabled cell phone). So I really do have 1 addressbook between all my devices at home and work. Which rocks.
- I’ve taken the time to update some Mac software that I was using. For example, based on George B.’s advice, I’m now using Darwin Ports instead of Fink. I’m using a different (and, IMHO, better) Apple-ified emacs. And Virtue Desktops ( UPDATE: someday to be likely replaced by OSX 10.5!). And Witch (which rocks).