Mon, 08 Nov 2004
Following the brilliant weekend at Mt Buller last year, we went back again in August this year to see if history wouldn’t mind repeating; this time bringing along my step-borther and his kids. Happily, things turned out even better: similar amounts of snow, even nicer accommodation, and way better weather.
We tried rearranging our trip to get the most skiing time in: we flew to Melbourne in the afternoon, then drove to Bonnydoon, where we enjoyed a cold, but nevertheless tranquil, evening in little motel resort place. Next morning we headed on to the mountain and checked in – the aim was to get a full day skiing in when we arrived, but we only actually managed to get our skis and lift passes organised by a little after lunch. Oh well, worth a shot.
There were enough people at the mountain over the weekend that when we arrived on Sunday, we had to park on the side of the road rather than at one of the resort carparks; then we got one of the 4WD snow taxis to cart us and our luggage up the resort. We got dropped off behind the lodge, and it took a bit to actually work out where we were meant to be, so naturally a snowball fight developed.
When we eventually worked out where we were meant to be, one of the owners/staff of the lodge was showing us where our unit was and how to get back out onto the slopes, and helping with our luggage. As was the cute little girl you can see in the photo to the left, with Alisa Camplin, underneath the signed racing vest. There was another jersey signed by Zali Steggall and Jacqui Cooper. How goddamn classy is that?
Oh yes, this time there’s a movie too. It’s way cool! It’s also Quicktime only. Damn Apple!
* aj continues waiting impatiently for his ibook
* Rukh continues waiting impatiently for Bush to be booted out
<blender> rukh: a week to go
<aj> Rukh: true, i suppose i could be happy that my wait will be a lot shorter than others’
<Rukh> heheh
<Rukh> aj: so you’re getting your ibook in a lot less than one weeks time? :)
As it turns out, I did get my iBook in less than a week’s time – it arrived midday last Monday. We’ll refrain from reflecting too heavily on how much shorter a wait that was than Rukh’s continues to be…
Anyway, like I suggested, it looks like I’m going to stick with running MacOS X on it instead of just installing Debian (or Ubuntu) like I did on my last. The ability to reliably suspend and use the inbuilt modem and wireless aren’t things I’m willing to give up, and it’s nice to have the little extras like having Expose just work, being able to play with iTunes, iMovie, and Command & Conquer, having QuickTime work natively, and generally just having a desktop that doesn’t treat me like some genius hacker for which nothing is too hard, is a pleasant change too. Shark, Apple’s profiler, sounds pretty nice too, so hopefully there are more things to look forward to.
The real irritation switching from Debian to MacOS is the crazy complications involved in installing third party software. Apple’s software updates with an “updater”; Unixy software gets installed with fink, either by apt-get, or using the “fink” tool, or the “darwin ports” system. Third party software gets installed by downloading a disk image, opening whatever the vendor wants – the installer for my printer driver from HP insisted on closing all my open programs, including my terminals, eg. Nice. I’ve had to google and separately install, hrm, Camino, Blapp, GnuPG, GPGKeys, GPG-AppleMail, SubEthaEdit, RealPlayer, X11, XCode, and my aforementioned printer driver. And so far I still haven’t gotten to the point where I can collect my mail or code comfortably.
On the upside, I’ve got something like 4GB of freshly ripped music, and made up a fun little ski movie.
But I hate to think of the security implications; there are just too many different sources of software that can all have problems, and for which I’m never going to hear about updates. Oh well; here’s to defense in depth.
But hey, if you ignore that detail, what you get is pretty cool. The slot loading DVD/CDRW drive is much snazzier than trays, and the hardware is generally really nice – even the keyboard is quite a step up from my previous iBook. Specs are heaps better (11Mbps to 54Mbps, 20GB to 80GB, 128MB to 256MB, 500MHz G3 to 1.2GHz G4, USB1 to USB2), and the software’s pretty pleasant overall. I’m not even sure I’m bothered by the lack of focus-follows-mouse.