My First Month with the MacBook

I made a transition in my career recently. I was getting a little narrow visioned and was losing my touch. One of the first things I had to do when I joined my new company was to buy a new laptop. I could not buy a Dell, HP or IBM laptop since they were competitors and only choices I had left were Sony and Mac ! I had never used a Mac in my entire saga of computer usage. The only little experience I had was when I played with demo models in the Apple stores.

So on the persuasion of my dear wife and my own zeal to do new things along with the new job was go buy a Apple Mac Book. The day it got delivered to my office, I was like a little kid ripping up the packaging and the unveiling of the beautiful box it came in. These guys can really do this wonderfully.

Once the machine booted, (which it did without a murmur) I was taken through a setup wizard which even took my picture ! Now that is neat ! I next proceeded to setup email and that went without a hitch. Browsing the web with Safari was no hassle. So in general things were going great in the first hour or so. Then one thing started bothering me, the touch pad would not let me tap and click. I had to use the button below it. This kind of floored me. Man ! this machine does not have tap pad only a touch pad. So i got a little upset. I went home and ranted and raved about how I had gotten cheated. My wife being the smart one in our family, casually mentioned if I had checked if this can be enabled ? 

So the next day google bought up a dozen or so websites where people had the same issue. I was like .. man this sucks. Only to find a very simple solution, By default it is turned off. Go to system prefs and turn it on. :-)

As I started using the laptop, I had started discovering small nuances and WOWs that rattled my deep fried Windows brain. I will try putting them down

1. The "delete" key is really the backspace key. To "Del" as you type or edit, you fill need to press Fn+delete. Even though I have gotten over this, it still bothers me.

2. There are no "Home" or "End" buttons. you have to rely on a combination of Ctrl+right arrow for End and Ctrl+left arrow for Home. Similarly Pg UP and Pg Dn were a funtion on Ctrl+up arrow and Ctrl+down arrow. look up http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1343 for all the key bindings.

3. I dont like iTunes.

4. When you download an executable, its usually packaged as a .dmg. A dmg is "mounted" first and then the installation can begin. Safari handles this beautifully. However it took me 30 minutes to figure out what was going on. The first thing I installed was thunerbird and spent some time getting it right.

5. I had to get a software called "StuffIt" to be able to unzip files.

6. The next major challenge I had was understanding "Finder". This is synonymous to Windows Explorer but much smarter. there is nothing much to say abt this .. only it that it still drives me a little crazy when i dont get to see my folder tree on the left hand side. You can do cool things like setting folder wise background pictures or colours. You can set the spacing of the grid in the Icon iew, You can specify the size of icons, size of text and in general useless stuff. I have to figure out how to select->hold right mouse key and drag to another folder. In the windows world, this action presents me with an option to copy or move the file(s).

7. I love the application "Preview". This is the one stop for viewing all kinds of files. I dont have to install the Adobe reader !

8. Setting up network printers is a breeze. No need to install specific driver. All this happens in the background and I can just print ! wow ! All I need to specify is the IP address or the network printer name. The next best thing .. I can print to a PDF without having a third party application like CutePDF or PrimoPDF.

9. Airport is like a dream come true. It handles Wi-Fi connections in such a painless way that you will get addicted to it. Another wow.

10. I still would like to see the date on the task bar or Menu bar as its called in the Mac World. Here is a link of how to get this done. Its not a simple click a radio button task. http://lifehacker.com/software/mac-tip/display-the-date-on-the-menubar-316029.php
OR
If you have iCal on the dock, the icon will change with the date. Just look at the icon for the date ! WOW

11. Uninstall is a breeze. just delete and you are done.

12. Adium is a great tool if you chat online. It integrates all the chat clients (AIM, Yahoo, MSN, Gtalk).

13. I am still confused by the "option" key ..

14. Spotlight is godsend. It helps you search anything and everything. and no indexing that Google Desktop does all the time on windows. WOW again. http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=304778

15. Now comes the interesting challenge. If you have to sync your Mac with your Windows Smartphone or PDA. What do you do ? Use SyncMate from Eltima software. The Free version works well. Its syncs up Cal, Contacts, Notes, To-dos. Very useful.

16. Clicking on the red ballon in the top left corner closes the window and not the application. Command+Q does it !

17. The photobooth is one thing you will spend tons of time on. Great entertainment tool. My kids and I have a lot of fun experimenting with this.

18. Expose is a nice .. if you master it. It can get irritating sometimes.

19. Renaming files is completely counter-intuitive. To rename a file, you have to hit Enter and then rename it. The right-click menu does not have "Rename". This is a major gotcha.

20. Highlighting a file and hitting the delete key does nothing. To delete, use Command+delete. or right click and "Move to Trash"

So there you have it .. my first month with the Macbook. I still have a long way to go .. its like a nice little toy chest. Everyday i stumble across a new feature or gotcha.

VIVIA !

Trip to Devarayana Durga

It was late on 8 April 2006 we decided to make a trip to Devarayana Durga in Tumkur District. No particular reason. Just people from the team. Bright and early on Saturday 8th of April we gathered in the Oracle OTP office. I had Siddhant (my 4.5 yr old son) along with me. The other people in the group were Nilotpal and his better half;Ruby, Anand and his wife and kid Nalin, Toji, Sandeep and Dev. After the usual "mai tere ko saath (7) baje aaneko bolatha , its now eight" kind of arguments, we had a nice breakfast in Udupi Garden and got on our way at 9 am in 3 cars.

We took the long route using the Outer ring road,Hebbal flyover and Peenya. It took us 90 minutes to reach Peenya. So a good lesson learnt. Use the inner roads ! We stopped for the mandatory tea and then proceeded on NH4 towards Tumkur. This is now a toll road. The toll is 20 ruees/car if you are travelling till Tumkur. Its 10 if you are getting off in between. On the excellent toll road, you can really take off at high speeds, but with frequent 'U' turns this can quite hazardous. I still think this road is as good as the ones overseas. Lots of shoulder area, reststops, and well lit petrol stations.

Just after crossing a village called 'Yede Halli' we got off the toll road. Below the flyover, there was a mass of humanity. We navigated our way through them and the comment was "Dream Sequence all done. Back to reality". We asked for directions and were told to turn right below the flyover bridge towards "Udegere". I could be
wrong abt the spelling, but just asking Devarayana Durga would have been better since this is a well known place. We now proceeded on the country roads with each one of us reminecintg about their own travels when they were kids. Remembering grandpas and village homes we have not visited in a long time. It was nostalgic.

Once we reached Udegere, which is about 10 kms from where we took the right turn, all of us had forgotten the Bangalore traffic. Its a quaint village with children playing on the road and cattle lumbering around without a clue. Toji did remark that the cows were very lean. ;-)

Continuing on the road, we made a left turn towards Devarayana Durga. The signs along the way are very helpful. We passed through a protected patch of forest. Forest always have a way of making environmentalists out of people. The sad part is they forget the comments as soon as they are back in Forum Mall. The road was in very good condition. The white temple on the mountain is visible from the road.


After making a right turn, we started climbing a steep hill. The view is quite exquisite from the top. My Casio Pathfinder watch told me the altitude was 1200m.

We parked our cars, there is space for about 20 cars on the top. I guess this is a famous temple since there were a few people around. The temple itself is about 700 years old.





It is believed to have been a major stronghold during the Vijayanagara empire. So it was like passing through a curtain of time. These were the very steps on which the "Palegars" walked 700 yrs ago.










We made a quick visit to the temple and started exploring the mountain top.
There is old pond structures right next to the temple. Its supposed to a natural spring. We climbed up to the top, and it is a fantastic view from up there. Undulating hills allround, varying hues of green blending with the clouds. We spent some time at the flat rock top and then we climbed even higher where we could see an old structure. The climb is not much, problably 50 feet, but is steep in places and requires some scrambling. There is a nice big cave along the way. Siddhant got all excited about finding tigers, panthers
and pythons. At the top, there is an old stone structure. This directly overlooks the temple. Inside the structure hangs a bell, which had some engravings. It was cracked from being exposed to the elements. After spending some time, we decended down, and took the road to Tumkur. This is again very nice drive through the forest. Once in Tumkur we had a nice lunch at around 3pm and got on our way back to Bangalore. Got into Yestwantpur at peak traffic and spent the next one hour recovering all the forgotten STREES !

All in all a great trip. One of the memory books.

-Ciao.