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Scheming

This month should be a good and busy one. I have been scheming over the last few days, and this is what I have come up with so far for the rest of the year:

  • Post pictures from Peru on this blog (these photos are already posted on Facebook)
  • Post pictures from Australia and New Zealand here and on Facebook (I’m way behind on this front).
  • Bring the Checksum Arcanius Photo Gallery up-to-date.
  • Swap my Apple Macbook Pro for a Lenovo Thinkpad T400 with Windows 7 at work. My plan is for this to also become my main laptop; my current laptop, Graphitica, a Dell D630, will go to my wonderful mom. I will miss the touchpad on the Mac, but I think that pretty much everything else will get better for me with this swap.
  • Help the new housemate, Jasmine, move in. This will probably involve finding a truck that I can borrow for a weekend.
  • Drive the Saturn back to Washington for Thanksgiving; leave it there, and fly back to SFO (this will lower the car pressure on the house, which after Jasmine moves in, will be at 5. Returning my car to Washington will lower that to 4.) As long as I can occasionally borrow a housemate’s car, I will be fine with respect to transportation.
  • Have a few good contributions to Drizzle’s development

That is all for now. More schemes may come.

4 Responses to “Scheming”

  1. Hoyin Says:

    Can I have that mbp somehow?

  2. Ryan Says:

    If giving out computers were so easy, I’d switch computers every day. Alas, I think the Mac will be reclaimed by Facebook to grace another new employee’s desk in the near future.

  3. Duncan Says:

    Interesting – someone who wants to switch from the Mac to Windows. You don’t see that very often! Could I ask why you prefer Windows? I’m a Mac user right now but I’m still not totally sold on it. I used Windows for almost 20 years before switching, so it’s kind of ingrained in me.

  4. Ryan Says:

    It was a bunch of little things that added up to me being really annoyed and not willing to take it anymore. For example:

    1/ No page up or page down without an external keyboard
    2/ Control and Command keys being different was pretty annoying in terminals
    3/ I never found a terminal application I liked nearly as much as PuTTy
    4/ The maximization concept in mac is deeply flawed compared to window’s version
    5/ Multi-screens on macs suck because the menu bar is always on the primary screen, regardless of where the application window is
    6/ The menu bar is always there, wasting precious screen real estate
    7/ It’s hard to tell which window in the the foreground on large screens (the visual queues are too subtle)

    8/ Finally, the straw that broke the camel’s back was really a fusion of numbers 5 and 7: The mac application design guidelines tell developers that when clicking on a non-foreground window, the app should be brought into focus, but the click should not interact with the application (eg, click on a link on a the background window of a browser). This is pretty widely followed, but it’s not universal: Safari (built by Apple!) ignores it when you click on it’s in-window menu area, for example (!), but obeys it when clicking on a link which is maddening — especially when that window is fully visible on another screen and it’s hard to tell it’s in the background. Also, Adobe flash player ignores this (or at least, it did when I made the switch).

    So, while I love mac hardware (except their keyboards), the software is deeply flawed for what I want to do, and is therefore, in my experience, unusable.

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