recent angst

system preferences froze while unchecking the "log out after 60 minutes of inactivity" box (that i never even checked in the first place - see "logout has timed out..."). got the spinning rainbow ball of death. had to reboot using terminal "sudo shutdown -r now" and even that took forever and a few tries to get right

the spinning rainbow ball of death is so horrible! and it happens way more often than a hung program on my thinkpad, and i haven't seen the BSoD in years. either way, i'd rather have the blue screen, at least then you know its over -- like taking off a band aid or seeing your ex dating somebody else. this beach ball forces you to cling to the false hope that we still have a chance to work it out, keep trying, it can get better... until your life slips away before you know it.

this particular time i tried using the force quit command (control alt delete? no, on a mac its command option escape) but it was the finder that was crashing. so despite force quitting, it restarted right back into the same problem, and nothing would work. couldn't restart from the menus, nor log out, nor switch programs, or do anything really. got terminal running and was able to reboot using unix commands.

but then during theh boot-up the display brightness reverts to 100% maximum brightness, and the screen is all white, the volume level reverts to 100% maximum volume, and the startup noise isn't all that quiet. so i'm sitting quietly in a darkish room and waiting for the reboot command to work when suddenly the darn thing finally reboots into full brightness and maximum volume scaring the begeezus outta me. (how hard would it be to put those settings into nvram? my thinkpad remembers its volume and display brightness settings between sessions and during startup...and it lets me modify them at any time, even before the OS has started to load... how hard would this be if every non-apple computer has had this for years?)

also, wifi drops my connection at home pretty regularly and starts trying to connect to a neighbor's network. its a weak signal so i only notice after fighting with slowness for a while. i've deleted the connection from the preferences a few times but it keeps coming back. when i try to switch back to my home network, it starts asking for the wep password again. to get it back i have to disable wireless and wait a little while but then it works again when i re-enable it. what's up with that? i've never had this problem on my thinkpad. airport suckage? its intermittent so i can't figure out whats causing it.

so while i still like my mac, i do not love it and at times i hate it. usually those times are when i want it to just work and it just doesn't. or when i want it to be at least as good as my thinkpad and it falls far short, specially on pretty easy things.

though i still feel that as my expertise increases (and system updates improve) many of these angsts will be resolved. but isn't that why you buy a mac in the first place? to avoid this kind of thing?

don't believe the hype, os 10.5 and windows xp are equally inefficient, annoying, crash prone, problematic, irritating, and bug-laden - they just do it differently.

though for the price i do think the mac is a better deal than a comparably equipped windows pc.

and it didn't come with too many craplets bogging the system down, which is nice.

though safari sucks as a browser and mail.app sucks as a mail program oh geez now i'm off on my mac apps don't play well with other apps rampage. i've mostly resolved this one by running picasa instead of iphoto - but it *is* annoying that i'm using virtually none of the built-in apple supplied software in favor of open source free software that i also use on my windows pc and my linux box, and the only reason is because the apple software doesn't play well with other programs.

i am intrigued to try filemaker's bento. i'll let ya know what i think of it.

cheers!