Really long post
Last weekend I visited to Maryland, flying in and out through DC Reagan Airport. I had planned to play tourist in DC for a bit just before leaving, but got behind schedule and had to go straight to the airport. I've been to DC once before, when I was dancing in the ACDF finals at the Kennedy Center. That was in 1998, just a few months more than 10 years ago. This makes me want to get back to dancing for real again.
During the flight back there were some amazing clouds out the window. I'm sure it would have seemed less so if I lived up there, but it reminded me again that I still need to get a good camera. I also started wondering weather taking pictures of the sun from up there would damage a digital camera sensor. (With film I wouldn't worry - frying a few frames won't break the camera.) Google doesn't seem to have a clear answer, so that's one more thing I'll have to ask about when I finally go shopping.
The woman in the seat next to me was reading My Sisters Keeper, which I bought some time ago but have never read. I thought I'd bought it at the train station last time I was in DC, but that was 6 years before it was published. Now I think I bought it at another airport between the family reunion and QV in 2006. (I also thought I'd bought a Biography of Tesla [1,2,3], but that wasn't published until 3 years later. I may still have bought them together, but now I doubt it.) Anyway, I was going to read it now, but I just read the Wikipedia article, which spoiled the ending. Dangit.
My macbook, which I named “laconic”, is about a month old now. Having been using it for a month, my impression of OS X hasn't changed much from what it was from just reading and hearing about it. My overall impression of the way to choose a computing platform hasn't changed either - choose according to which set of problems you'd rather put up with.
The user interface is about as annoying as Windows, but in different ways. The dock and the taskbar make different mistakes, switching windows and switching apps have different problems, etc. One thing I miss is the “drop this window to the bottom” key. I think in general it would be better to not isolate windows within their app, but to consider all windows to be peers and do app switches as necessary when switching between windows. The different common keys are easy enogh to learn, but the inconsistency between apps really sucks - this might not be problem on a mac desktop, but it's definitely not a problem on a windows laptop. I think it's a good thing that filenames are UTF-8 strings (rather than arbitrary bytes), but the problems it causes with sharing files are quite annoying.
Overall, I really like my macbook. Partly just because it's a laptop, and I'm finally starting to change habits in ways that really aren't possible with desktops. I'm not ready to call it yet, but I think OS X is also winning on problems I'd rather put up with. The big win is that the startup/shutdown and sleep/wake transitions are much faster than either Windows or Linux. It beats Windows by being BSD, which means I can use most of the familiar Linux command line tools, and it beats Linux because there's only one OS X (having to choose a distro is a worse problem than most that OS X has). But it also loses big on having to buy expensive hardware that I don't get to choose myself. For laptops it's not that much worse than others, but for desktops I think it's still a dealbreaker.
… There's also the bad problem of Safari locking up while I'm composing a post. I'm so glad LJ saves drafts now. I'm also glad that MacPorts includes w3m, which made it easy to download Firefox.
The bag I bought to go with the new laptop is working out very well too. It's maybe a little big for day-to-day stuff, but it was just big enough to be the only bag I needed for both the trip to MI an the trip to MD. I'm hoping that trend continues.
I name all of my computers from a word of the day. I try to go for something obscure enough that using it in a sentence won't be confusing, but with a meaning that's related to what I intend to use it for. I think I named this laconic just because it's small, but it may also have had to do with changes I'm trying to make with my habits, to unencumber myself from so much accumulated stuff. I grew up in a family of pack rats, and I've been trying to fight that tendency in myself since about when i first moved out. I'm not sure how much having the laptop is helping, but I am making some progress. It's going to be a while before the actual physical stuff starts going away, but I think it's going well.
As of this afternoon, I'm officially on vacation. I have two weeks off from school, and one off from work. I'm not sure what I'm going to spend the time doing, but I'm already enjoying not having any deadlines or appointments. My schedule next semester is going to be even crazier than this one, so I have this week of nothing, next week working uninterrupted, and then it's time to dive back in. I'm looking forward to it.