Manic-Depressive Mac

Thanks to the generosity of Makice parents everywhere (in no particular order: Grandad & Grandma Carol; Nanna; Grammy & Pete; Grampy & Jean), I am the proud owner of my first new Mac since 1996.

I have to qualify that, of course. We seem to have iMacs accumulating in our house. One is a snowy white one purchased for the family; a second is the one that insurance bought to replace the first when the Ethernet went down due to a lightning strike nearby. Neither of those are my Mac, though. We also have a slightly older iMac (also without Ethernet) that came from an English family who left in 2002-ish. The kids use that one now to play I Spy. We also have two working Mac laptops floating around. I just dug out my 1998 model — last used around 2001, when work got me the Windows laptop I’ve been using ever since — to upgrade Carter, who was using an original laptop purchased for $5 from the local Mac shop. Finally, while Kynthia mentioned an old SE sitting near her IU office, I’ve got that beat:

My original Mac sits with its 400K floppy drive, trackball, external floppy drive and a Sekoisha dot matrix printer on the top shelf of my office. I did my first desktop publishing and sports game playing (long live Playmaker!) on that thing. Amy used it for about a year, too, until it became too unpredictable. We don’t have ALL of the old computers, of course. There was a Mac Classic that was sold to someone for biscuits and gravy, and my Quadra was sent to my sister and niece when I got my G3 tower in ’96. And that machine, the one I count as “my last Mac purchase,” was traded for food last summer.

All this is to say that I’m firmly entrenched in Macdom. I think differently. And aside from needing the Windows environment for work-related Microsoft applications, I have been content to live within the confines of the Finder, largely virus-free and installation-easy. But after such a long layoff from the day-to-day operations, I’m finding it a bit difficult to feel as competent as I once did on a Mac.

Aside from the amazing quiet and appealing look of this laptop, there have been some early struggles. This dual-boot trick hasn’t happened for me yet, mainly because I have an XP installation disk with service pack 1 instead of the required 2. Attempts to download such from IU and create a bootable CD failed, so I’m going to have to truck into campus and come up with $10 for the CD I need. There is also a possible weirdness with the Intel chip that quirks out some minor Mac apps, most notably for me: Desktop Manager. It works great on the non-Intel iMac upstairs, but on this laptop I can only get named desktop views and navigation help on the main page. And, when using the free secure FTP clients I found, they have a tendency to crash and restore my open folders to whatever state they were in at startup. Quite annoying. And not a lot I can do about it at the moment, since my troubleshooting skills didn’t get upgraded to OSX.

For the time being, I’m back to using my Win 2000 laptop for web development and my new Mac for fun stuff. At least this gave me an excuse to back up my files for the first time in two-plus years and reformat and external drive.