Hi – thought I’d post my ski pictures here for all to enjoy.
We had a fabulous time. Kevin spent most of his time standing around saying encouraging things, which is why all the pictures are of me. When I stood around, I huddled inside while Kevin did one of his black diamond runs. Which would have been too fast for me to take a picture of anyway.
The Mac:
In a recent discussion on what Linux needed to be a contender on the desktop the ‘Magic’ and polish of the Mac. Most everything has a single place to get things done – that’s the biggest difference so far. There is, however, consistency about where that single place is across applications. For a given operation that you will do with any application – say, resizing the window – you learn it once and your done.
Networking with Windows machines is a bit of a pain thus far; I miss being able to specify a single IP-address based path as where something exists. It’s probably one of those ‘bad’ things that Microsoft does that the Mac doesn’t for some good reason. Stil miss it though.
Windows Home Server
Liking it thus far. There are a few things I wish it could do, but they mostly relate to things that I believe are HP-based additions. I wish I could figure out how to assign it an IP address instead of leaving it to the random nature of DHCP – but doing a manual address breaks something when it comes to talking with the MAC. I’m missing a setting somewhere and I don’t know what it is.
Still, being able to toss a few hard drive at the thing and it Just Works… I like this. Especially that I didn’t need to turn the machine off to add those hard drives.
Right now we have moved all our files over to this system. Add together the drive the system came with, the extra drive I bought for the now dead system, and the ‘large’ drive I pulled out of the dead system… we now have 2.9 TB of space, with 2.1 TB available. Overkill at the moment for sure, but I’m ok with that.
A few weeks ago our main PC died. Well, mostly died. There is a virus on there that no virus scanner I’ve tried can catch. (I suspect Aleah’s new found ability to click on all things shiny led to clicking on Something Bad). Then came the computer crashes that would happen even when trying to re-install the OS on a brand new hard drive. (RAM problem is my only real thought).
So we started talking about things we wanted to do with the computer. We’ve wanted to get it out of that room to make it more “Donavan’s Room”. We’ve also wanted to move the PC into either the living room or into our bedroom – both of which make us want a much smaller computer. Add to this a general (and growing) curiousity about The Other Side…
We got a Mac.
A Mac Mini, to be exact. We get to keep our existing monitor/keyboard/mouse/etc and we get a computer that is roughly the size of a tissue box. (6 1/2 inches wide, 6 1/2 inches long, and 2 inches tall. TINY)
There’s a problem with this though: No Adding Hard Drives. The base model Mac Mini comes with a 160 gig hard drive. To upgrade to a 320 gig hard drive would cost… the same as buying a 1 Terabyte hard drive at regular retail prices.  !?!?!?
So there’s another thing we’ve been talking about doing: getting a computer that we could use to store all our files to access them from the laptop, the desktop, the whatever. Enter in the HP Media Server – which should arrive in the mail today. (go go Amazon Prime Next Day Shipping!)
When it gets here I’m going to load it up with all our media files and create personal space for everyone to store their ‘stuff’. And remember what I said earlier, that I couldn’t even re-install Windows to a new drive? Yeah, that new 1 Terabyte drive is going in the media server right way too. I’ll probably even wipe clean the extra drive that is in the PC and add it in. I expect we’ll have just short of 2 Terabytes of space on the thing to start with.
So that’s the hardware side of what we had happen when the computer died. One new Mac in the house and a home server too.
Now we get to enjoy the software side of things. (such as saying good-bye to all our stored e-mails, and learning an all-new OS)