The Occasional Blog

• Finished pulling weeds around the pond before a spring cleaning tomorrow. Kinda like cleaning the house before the maid arrives, I suppose. #

• Wouldn’t you know it? After 700+ miles, 2 miles from home I misjudge a yellow and accidentally run a photo-enforced traffic light. Ugh. #
• Home again home again jiggity jig. It’s nice to be home again. #

• Working our way South. Waiting for the tour of the Winchester Mystery House.
  http://bit.ly/5zD5V #
• Relaxing at Apple Farm in SLO. Vacation isn’t over, yet.
  http://bit.ly/13xwSb
  http://twitpic.com/2icps #

• Walking through Muir Woods. A nice vacation, indeed. http://twitpic.com/2gp4d #
• Back in town. Being a company guy and visiting the Playstation store. http://twitpic.com/2gy98 #
• Norman’s Ice Cream & Freezes-Perhaps the best chocolate malt I’ve had.
  http://bit.ly/11yfXl http://twitpic.com/2h2sd #

• My one-day work week is over. Back to the vacation. #

• Drove all day. Checked into hotel. Enjoying a beer at Gordon Biersch. Yum. #

I was happy to receive shipment confirmation on my Dell Mini 9 order on Thursday and it showed up Tuesday afternoon. After quickly archiving the SSD (I had considered evaluating the pre-installed Ubuntu Linux setup, but ‘eh, I’ve used Ubuntu before), I proceeded to install OS X Leopard (10.5).

My initial attempt didn’t work directly off of the install DVD (the easy way) so I had to resort to the more mucky copy-install-DVD-to-external-drive solution. On the plus side, the install proceeded fairly quickly as it was not hampered by the slowness of installing from DVD.

After a few reboots and updates, I now have this:

I must say that it is the cutest and coolest little laptop that I’ve used in a while. I’ve been able to install the apps I want to use (Firefox, OmniFocus, 1Password, iStat Menus, Growl, and Adium) as well as the VPN software for work so I can respond to any issue that might come up. After purging items mentioned in my last post, I have 4.5G free on the 16G SSD (formats to 14.03G).

It isn’t all paradise, however. Getting used to the keyboard is proving challenging. Not surprisingly, the keys are about 80% normal size, but I can live with that. The part that’s really strange is that the ‘/” key which is normally to the right of ;/: is now below ./> but the really annoying thing is the right shift key is half size right next to the up arrow. More often than not I end up moving the cursor up a line whenever I try to capitalize something.

While I will opt for my work MacBook or the family MacBook Pro for anything really serious, the Mini 9 is a great little “goof around” Mac that Apple never made. After our budget digests the purchase in a month or two, I’ll pick up a 2G DIMM as I’m noticing the slowdown of OS X on 1G. I’ll also get a 8G SDHC Flash card for scratch and I’ll be ready for anything.

• I was reminded this morning that hiring is the most important task of a manager. I just wish I had more resumes. #
• MacBook Mini (Dell Mini 9 running OS X) up and running! #

• Patiently waiting for the Dell to be delivered. Kinda. #
• Mini 9 received, HD archived, OS X installing… #

• Yay! Dell Mini 9 en route. ETA, Tuesday. #