Behold the power of cheese

[chipotle]

Naturally, I broke down and decided to keep the G5.



It's been a weekend of continuing room rearrangement, with another trip to Ikea to finally get a floor lamp that can light up the whole room fairly well, and more poking around to try to find an arrangement for desk, bed, bureau and table in a relatively small space that works. (I'm not sure the one that I have is the final layout, but it's getting close.) And, beyond that, a couple days of trying to do computer setup. I haven't done this for a home computer in a while, and I'd forgotten how... entertaining it can be. You forget the number of third-party applications you "can't live without" and all the little tweaks you do to make a computer work just the way you want until you have to do them all over again. (I'm firmly convinced that this is why so many Linux fans insist that Linux has been easy to use for years and people who don't think it's easy are just stupid; the fans have been using a comfortable setup for so long that they forgot the torture they put themselves through to get to that point. But I digress.)

I'm still not there; the most notable lack now is Macromedia Studio MX, which I can't reinstall even though I have the original serial number: I have an upgrade version, and it wants the serial number from my copy of Fireworks 3, too. I don't have that anymore. (And I'm desperately hoping I can just copy the application over directly and not have to reinstall it from Macromedia's installation program, because their installer at that point was a "Classic" application--Parmesan doesn't have the Classic environment installed on it at all.) But, I'm getting close. I've gotten my address book over, and gotten NetNewsWire moved. I'll remember to move my Safari bookmarks over tonight, I imagine.

This of course is more of a delay for the moment in getting my theoretical work environment set up, since I'm going to be spending too much time playing with the new toy. But, hey.

Comments

[rancourt.livejournal.com]

This is precisely what I was talking about with GENEVA -- the sheer, incomparable joy of tricking out your system to respond and perform *exactly* the way you want it to. People do indeed forget, and more often than not, sit around and gripe that they don't like what they have (often for reasons that are easy enough to fix).

It's part of why I have so much trouble respecting the slew of anti-Microsoft religious nuts who cite 'crappy built-in software' as the reason they can't stand any MS OS. Don't like it? REPLACE IT. That's the beauty of XP -- it truly is that modular. Replace all hooks to EXPLORER.EXE in the registry to your favorite shell replacement; it can be done. Hate IE? Try Avant, try Firebird, try Opera. With enough work you really can replace nearly everything.

Here I am with a laptop that uses Jaguar's icon dock, a replacement file explorer that's based on my favorite Amiga file tool (Directory Opus is back!), a third-party browser that's remarkably resistant to crapware advertising, a third-party icon engine that supports much larger icon sizes, the ISS replacement network stack which I've found quite a bit more stable (not to mention allows me to run their diagnostic software), and third-party control panel, search and run applications. Heck, I've even replaced the command prompt with a port of bash that I'm dreadfully fond of.

Of course, I mean no disrespect to folks who've chosen Mac. I'd be a hypocrite, seeing as ninety percent of my efforts in retooling GENEVA have been to turn her into some bizarre Panther/Solaris hybrid. The point is simply that this is the single most fun, and most rewarding, part of getting a new system.Sometimes I wonder if it's even more fun that actually *enjoying* the tricked-out system when it's done.

...and perhaps that's why it never really gets 'done.'

- Dusty, who'll be puttering on GENEVA every night screaming 'just one more tweak!' 'til he dies