After apple's announcement of their "Time Capsules", I realized an Airport Extreme would make my portable drive as convenient as it should be, and allow the wifest and I to easily share music. Sharing music was easier when my desktop was always on, and had a dedicated IP address. Since getting the laptop, our last.fm compatibility has fallen from "Super" to merely "Very High". (The wifest blames this more on "Metal Mondays" than on sharing configurations).

After our netgear router needed to be rebooted for the bazillionth time1 , I took my birthday money to Microcenter and bought an Airport Extreme.

Unfortunately, like all apple products, they're designed to look pretty, but the minimalist interface often leaves important functionality out.

Why the picture of the device needs to be so big, I'll never know. The first half dozen times I tried to set the thing up, it returned a typically (for apple) vague response to the effect of "The airport extreme could not be set up". No amount of digging turned up the right answer, (rebooting the cable modem), but previous experience reminded me that my modem is sometimes stingy with an IP address. Turns out setup was running just fine, the router just couldn't access the internet. This is not a terribly complex error, nor one that would frighten most people. Nonetheless, apple has decided that it is too complex for the general public, and will not be shown to them.

After getting the router set up, I connected the printer just fine, which was another reason for getting the airport. Connecting the portable hard drive was another matter. The airport utility came up with another vague error: "Disk needs to be repaired." After seeing my boss lose a terrabyte of music after plugin his FAT32 portable drive into a mac after years connected to a PC, my heart lept into my throat. Then I remembered that Vista would only let me format the drive NTFS. I googled a bit, and it turns out the error actually means "you can't have multiple partitions, NTFS, or weird block sizes on your hard drive" That's not just vague, it's misleading.

So, I took the drive to visit my other backup drive, the one still in my desktop dev server. I backed up all the stuff on it, reformatted the drive as HFS+ with journaling, and put all the stuff back on it. I brought the drive home, hooked it up, and it worked great. after playing some music, I went to run my backup, now a month overdue (I'm still chronicly lazy), and vista told me that the network drive didn't support RPC's. Why this is a requirement for holding my backups, I don't know.

Microsoft and Apple both annoy me. At least with windows I know precisely why I'm annoyed. the error about RPC was confusing at first, but unique, and looked like it made sense to the person who wrote it. At least I can use my dev server to host my backups.

1. Owing to poor heat sink design, as near as I can tell. Netgear's Pro equipment is great, but that seems to be related to the metal boxes and integrated fans. The consumer stuff always craps out after long periods of use

I bought a Vostro 1500, so that I'll have something to do work on, that I can take to and from the new job. And so that I can hang out on the bed with the wifest in the evenings, instead of being stuck at the desk in the beer and videogame room.

I'm not running Linux on it, because I need Photoshop, and I didn't buy an apple because it would have been 2-1/2 times as expensive to get something with a decent video card. I'm also not running XP, because I plan on having this laptop longer than 15 months1

Getting Used to Vista

There's nothing I heard in the press releases or OSNews posts about Vista that made me want to upgrade. Having it now, that seems kind of strange. There are lots of improvements to the usability that I hadn't heard about.

• Searching: The new indexing works seamlessly. The MSN/Live search for XP wasn't even close. Press the windows key to invoke, and start typing. It works almost as well as Quicksilver does2 .
  
• Screenshots: They're in Alt+Tab, Supra+Tab, and the taskbar, which is awesome. The taskbar especially, I love having a minified version of progress bars and whatnot readily accessible.
  
• The address bar: It's functional now. The column view in OS X is cool as hell, but it limits how much you can show about the files in a folder. Vista has column view in the address bar, which is way simpler. I love being able to click back up the folder tree:
  
• Snipping tool: It's a little clumsy for this post, since I'm trying to describe what happens when you hover or click stuff, but it's generally pretty fantastic.
  
• Windows Calendar, and Contacts: I can't install Outlook Live3 , but it's not as much of a bummer as I thought. Windows Calendar subscribes to my Gmail, basecamp, and last.fm calendars nice and easily. Instead of maintaining a seperate address book, or running a global address book app (a la OS X), Vista uses a contacts folder, just like any other folder. Simple and Beautiful:
  

There are things I'm not a huge fan of, including TCP Scaling (causes more problems than it solves), and the obvious UAC (which could do with some sensible defaults, so it didn't need to be disabled while setting up the machine.

The Laptop itself

I've not been much of a fan of dell for a long time. Apparently, I can be bought. Even with the screen and video card maxed out, and all the specs4 at least double those of my aging desktop, it barely broke $1K. Nonetheless, I am annoyed by:

• The 10GB recovery partition. They give you the option to partition the hard drive during the order. They just failed to mention the recovery partition and the DirectMedia partition.
• The eject button on the DVD drive. It doesn't seem poorly designed, except that I can't hold that side of the laptop without pushing it. Maybe I'm just uncoordinated.

1. End of mainstream support for XP is March 2009
2. you can't make "sentences" the way you can in quicksilver, but that's not the reason quicksilver is indispensable
3. I can't seem to buy an update anymore, either, the product home page goes 404.
4. except the hard drive. I didn't really need all that terrible early 90's hair metal anyway.

P1010600

Originally uploaded by mjrtomjr.

1. awesome name
2. kickass logo:
   
3. cool uniforms
4. wordpress blog with a connections theme

what's not to love?
Pay attention, microsoft: compatibility = complicity. this is a war, you are choosing a side.