I was asked earlier this week why I switched from Windows to the Mac. And, as I was dealing with configuration issues on about a dozen computers all at once, it dawned on me.
I got tired of the futzing.
Sure, there is a fair amount of that to be done on the Mac, but once you do it, it’s done. You don’t have to keep going back to tweak this or reset that. It. Just. Works.
I thought it was because of Vista. Initially, it was. But as I’ve used the Mac, gotten used to it and ’settled in’, I didn’t even give it a second thought. Until I was asked.
Speaking of which, I finally reloaded Leopard today. The last straw was video uploads to Viddler were causing http traffic to stop. Seriously, how screwy is that. I’m hopeful that this fixes it. If not, I’m hopeful that all the other weird crap that was going on before will be fixed.
At least I think it’s #10. From Searchlight, Nevada on my way to Cottonwood Cove Resort and Marina. I posted some pics in the flickr if you haven’t seen them and I have more coming as soon as I get a faster connection.
Remember, comments are good!
Multiple text messages from this guy this morning has me a bit riled up about IE 6.
Can anyone in the class tell me when IE 6 was first thrust amongst us? A quick check of the Wiki (yes, IE has it’s own Wikipedia entry) tells us it was originally released in August of 2001. That’s almost 7 years.
For those of you that are still running IE 6 for whatever reason, how old is the computer you are running it on? I’m going to bet it’s not 7 years old. Hell, I’d bet most of you don’t have appliances that are that old (well, maybe that fridge in the garage, but you really should replace that anyway).
Anyway, for craps sake, let Windows update do it’s thing (if you can) and update your machine to IE7. If you can’t, it’s time to let the admins at your place of work know that they are forcing you to be unsafe online (I don’t care how many proxies or firewalls there are) and running on old technology.
If you can’t upgrade to IE7 because you are running Win98 or ME, then, might I recommend switching? If you are running Win2k, then for craps sake switch to Firefox. It runs faster anyway. If you are on WinXP, you have no excuse unless the ponytail’d admin’s running your network are too stubborn or lazy to test IE7.
If you are stuck on IE6, try running Firefox from a thumb drive if you can. Heck, you can even grab your bookmarks from home. As long as you have access to a USB port on your workstation should be a piece of cake.
With this I am officially turning off support for ie6 (and might as well throw in any Netscape product as well). You need to upgrade. I don’t need to make my shit work with your broke ass old browser.
List of things: Random
- VPN is working quite nice if I do say so myself. Even the auto transfer is working fairly ok. Still a little buggy, but for now it’s good.
- Firefox 3beta5 is kinda ok. I can’t wait for the final release which is when I’m sure I will switch back to using it full time
- I like cool stuff. I like it when people send me cool links (much like Josh and Chans do. The cool thing is that they send me links via del.icio.us. You can to. Just send those to dbwilldo. Link me up and I’ll even send some back.
- Without flying out of LAX, it’s not possible to get a direct flight from SoCal to Miami, FL. I find that odd. I even had Mr. Travel Agent Guy helping me.
- I’ve been saying this for a while, but I still need to reload the lappy. I might go bootcamp on this time around too, but I’m not for sure yet.
- At the same time, the 24″ iMac from the refurb shop is a smokin’ deal! My penny collection will be going for one of those in the near future
- Gas costs too much. Wouldn’t be so bad if I didn’t drive 500+ miles per week I imagine
- I’m looking for ideas to keep WR.tv current before MTTS, in case you were wondering.
- Recent Grill tune-up = db is happily grilling everything in site again. Watch for more recipes.
- Heading to Cottonwood Cove this week. Camera will be going with. Hopefully Mom will give me time to actually go out and use them.
- Been awhile since I last listened to any Dave Mattews Band. Under the Table and Dreaming sure was a great album!
Thanks again for all of your suggestions concerning the lad. I’ll keep you posted as to what happens.
That’s it for now. Watch tomorrow for a special video hour from either the California desert or Lake Mohave!
Spent the better part of the last two weeks setting up a new VPN for the car wash. Primarily as a backup conduit, but once I make it a hardware-always on-more like a WAN, it will do more (like remote gateway…super handy for credit cards transactions). It’s been a minor nightmare until I discoved the router I was using wouldn’t let the IPSEC traffic into the office network.
Now that it is up and running, time to get to scripting! Well, more like batch files, but the same goal is accomplished. With 1 batch file I can:
- Connect to the VPN with the correct username and password
- Map a drive with the correct username/password
- pause for 20 seconds
- Map another drive
- pause for 20 seconds again
- Transfer files from the remote location to the office
- Retrieve files from the office to the remote location
- Disconnect from the VPN
I could unmap the drives too, but it’s not really necessary.
That is a batch file that has about 15 lines of code. Then I add it to the scheduler to run at 12:30AM everyday, share the VPN connection with all users and put a link on the desktop for the backup.
So, it has taken me the better part of 4 hours to setup 3 locations, but the last 3 will be a piece of cake.
And, there is no way I would have been able to figure out how to do this on the Mac. My ponytail isn’t long enough and my neck beard not luxurious enough to be able to figure out the UNIX command do all of that. But, in Windows, it’s very easy for me. Just a couple of ‘net use’, some ‘copy’ commands and my new favorite, rasdial. Oh how I’m now a huge fan of rasdial.
On the Mac, besides not knowing how to start and stop a VPN session using the command line, I also (still) have no idea how to mount drives from the command line. One of these days I will look that up.
Finally, I have automated file transfer again. Now I shall sleep and finish the last 3 tomorrow night.
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