Mac Usage Improves Tolerance?

This is sort of a strange Macdate, as I am typing it from a Sunblade 100 workstation in the Unity Lab at NCSU's Library, but after working with this Sun for the past several hours something dawned on me: my Mac usage experience has greatly improved my tolerance for non-PC OSes and interface setups.

I've had to use these Sun boxes in the past, and I would always complain about their keyboard layout (e.g. the control and capslock keys are interchanged compared to a PC keyboard) and often times I would not be able to survive using the things for more than a few minutes to struggle to check my email. Interestingly enough, I don't find the keyboard layout difficult to get used to anymore. Maybe it's because I have to keep on switching between the positioning of keys when I switch between my G5 and the PCs that I use, or maybe it's just that not being tied down to one platform for the majority of my work has made me a bit more open minded in the computing world. I can even see situations where it helps having the control key where it is on this keyboard :)

That being said, this machine is still horrendously slow :)

I know the Macdates have been sparse these days, if you follow my regular blog you'll know that's because of the school projects that require me to use these Sun machines that is keeping me from blogging about my continued G5 experiences. Since I've run into a bug in the ASIC project I'm working on and I've made it this far into a Macdate I'll share a few things about my more-than-a-month with a Mac:

1) The more I use Safari the more I appreciate it as a web browser, however it is still entirely too slow for me and there are far too many times where I have to use Firefox because pages won't function correctly under Safari (particular German car configurator websites - what can I say, I'm a car guy and I like to play with their car configurators).

2) I'd switch to Firefox completely if I could get the autocomplete .com URL keyboard shortcut would work. I know, I'm fickle.

3) My desktop is getting messy. All the PDFs I click on in Safari download themselves to my desktop and sometimes multiple copies end up there as I forget that I've already downloaded a particular PDF. I'm thinking of having all of the automatically downloaded links go to a particular folder that I'll just trash periodically. Any other suggestions for removing clutter from my desktop?

4) I have yet to figure out the sense behind the icon organization on my desktop. I swear I've done this a tremendous number of times - I set the desktop to keep icons arranged by modification date, yet I still get seemingly randomly placed icons. The same applies for keeping icons arranged by name, type, creation date and just about anything else I can think of. It's a bit annoying, especially with so much stuff on my desktop - thus problems 3 and 4 are somewhat related.

5) Mail.app has been handling my email extremely well, I wondered how it would hold up under the load of thousands of messages and thus far it has been doing wonderfully. What is most impressive is that deleting thousands of messages doesn't bring the system to a screeching halt, I can actually work with the rest of the OS just as if nothing were happening in the background. Mail.app seems to have Outlook's file management trumped for large emailboxes.

6) DivX files no longer seem to want to play under Quicktime for me. The OS and the DivX codec just seemed to decide that they would exclude Quicktime from their nights on the town and now I'm forced to use the OS X version of mplayer2, which isn't bad but it lacks polish. I tried reinstalling the DivX codec to no avail, I have yet to try reinstalling Quicktime though (although I probably should have before making this post...shhh). Anyone else have a similar problem and/or a solution and/or especially an explanation for why it happens? I'm always curious as to why things happen, not necessarily just that they do :)

7) OCZ sent over 4 x 1GB beta sticks for me to play around with, so I ripped out the 8 x 512MB sticks and have been running on their 1GB modules with no problems at all. I'd actually be willing to say that the G5 has been more stable since the change in memory, but that's most likely due to the fact that replacing the RAM required a shutdown of the computer thus ending the life of any renegade processes. Once I'm sure that the 1GB sticks play well, I'm going to try and throw in another 4 x 512MB sticks to see what 6GB feels like. Before you scoff, I have run out of memory once under OS X with 4GB installed - but I have a feeling it was due to Excel just being its ornery self.

8) Derek was working on the pipeline diagrams for his NV3x Moratorium article (yes, he meant to type Moratorium, sheesh :)...) so I called him over to my place to use OmniGraffle on the G5. He was floored (ask him yourself) and decided that OmniGraffle alone was a cool enough program to want a Mac. I think we've both decided that the ideal setup is a Mac and a PC side-by-side. When I setup my new office in CT this fall I think I will give the setup a try.

That's all I can think of for now. Forgive me if there are any spelling mistakes as the Sun I'm posting from does not have the oh-so-useful system wide spellcheck that my G5 has spoiled me with. Not that systemwide spellcheck has prevented me from making spelling mistakes in the past or anything :)

It's back to trying-to-graduate-on-time again, goodnight all.