Andreas Haugstrup Pedersen | solitude.dk

This is my first blog entry from my new laptop. It's pictured above. That's New Hotness on the left and Old Yellow on the right. Don't worry, I didn't take Old Yellow out behind the shed to end his misery. He's resting on the floor beside me and through the wonder of Remote Desktop technology he's has been repurposed as a music jukebox and general file storage.

I was lucky to have a couple of friends who helped me pick the right laptop. Adrian pointed out that Apple laptops were not as expensive as I thought and I had lots of IM'ing with Anders about differences between Dell, Acer and Apple models. In the end I chose the macbook because it was lighter, smaller and cheaper than the Acer model Anders had made me fall in love with.

After two days of setting up and working I'm digging the way you can set up Exposé to work. So when I move the mouse to the bottom left corner of the screen all open windows will move aside so I can see and work on the desktop. When I move it to the bottom right the dashboard with some essential widgets (like a Pong game) will show up. And when I click the middle mouse button Exposé will kick in and show me all open windows. That's awesome. I'm also really getting into Spotlight — it looks like it will be a real timesaver.

I'm not digging all the silly little differences that mostly feel like differeces who's only purpose is to be differences. For example: I'm navigating folders in the Finder using my keyboard. I find a folder I want to open or a file I want to execute. So I click on the Return key. Any sane person would expect this to open the folder, but not on the mac. On a mac the Return key defaults to a rename action. Because I want to rename files all the time. If that wasn't bad enough the macbook keyboard actually has both a Return key and an Enter key leaving me with two keys dedicated for renaming files. I have tried (in vain, comments welcome) to change this outright stupid behaviour. You would have thought a company priding itself on User Experience would have fixed this behaviour in the 1980s, but maybe hardcore Apple-users sit around and rename files all freaking day. Also the Apple-c and Apple-v for Copy and Paste are a bit hard to hit with one hand. The Control key is just placed better. Apple-W and Apple-Q on the other hand are much easier to hit than Alt-F4.

Apart from a couple of small things like the ones above, I really like my new computer. It's much much much faster than my old computer and overall Mac OS X is a great operating system. Programs actually open when I click their icon, and that's one hell of a difference.

Yesterday I accidentally poured some water into the keyboard of my laptop. I cannot recommend it. Fortunately the only thing broken is the ‘a’ key, but after signing my first e-mail as “ndres” rather than “Andreas” I've come to realize how important a letter ‘A’ is. Now I've bought an external keyboard while I figure out which computer to buy next.

I've been looking at Dell laptops. My present laptop is a Dell and I've been very happy with it. If anyone has any recommendations I'd love to hear them. My current list of requirements is short:

• No Macs, I have to be able to afford food
• Screen no bigger than 15"
• Screen resolution no smaller than 1280x1064. This point and the one above limits choices considerably.
• No shared memory on graphics card.
• Water-proof keyboard

Today I recieved my usual e-mail ad from Apple. I've been getting them since I bought Quicktime Pro, and it's nice to see all those things you can't afford.

I noticed how they were nice enough to convert the price into my local currency. It's a bit strange that they wouldn't translate the whole ad, but I guess they are thinking that most Danes in their market understands English (very likely). The problem here are the measurements. Inches are nothing but some anecdote from introductionary math classes to Danes. Likewise pounds are something you measure coffee and meat in, not hardware.

The only thing this ad tells me is that the new Apple computer has some random size — could be the size of a packet of cigarettes, could be the size of a box of cereal — that weighs around the same as three packets of meat (however much that is). If they demonstrate their proficiency in localization by making the cost show up in my local currency, surely they can apply the same skills by using the metric system.