So while I wait for WordPress to upgrade, so that I can blog on AdamChristian.com I decided that I would drop by t0asted and throw out an update. This last weekend Matt Eernisse and Jeff Olds were both in town and it was Jacob Robinsons birthday so we all ate some delicious Persian food and wandered from bar to bar in Berkeley.

Saturday we all golfed Lake Chabot (the three above including Mikeal Rogers). One of the nicest golf days I have had since I moved to California EXCEPT for how darn early it gets dark. I really could have forged on for another 3 hours in the perfect temperature. I have some pictures on my phone that I will be uploading to picasaweb.

Sunday we hiked around for Cronkhite, which is one of the most scenic places I know of in the bay area. You are up in the hills on an old army base looking back towards the golden gate and down at the beach. On a nice day, I can't think of a place I would rather be.

Lots of blogging about Windmill and Mozmill going on, currently writing some tests for the Firefox Worker Threads feature which will be released in Firefox 3.1.

Now that I am dilirious and just flat out ranting, life is good, I can't wait for snow boarding season. I am considering the Epic Pass which would allow me to ski some serious pow in Colorado... $89 bucks each way to Denver, is it worth it?

Ahh, now the little duck is bouncing on my dock -- apparently it's time to go blog about some serious stuff over at my grown up blog.

Cheers!

I would like to start out by saying, I don't really care what the billions of reviewers, bloggers and naysayers think about the Macbook Air -- it's a fine piece of machinery. I have had the chance in the last two weeks to have a MacBook, Macbook Pro Core Duo 17', Macbook Pro Core 2 Duo 15', and a Macbook Air on the table for me to use all that the same moment and unless I absolutely have to be running VM's the Air will be the machine I grab every single time.

The first thing that I have really become attached to is the new keyboard. I had forgotten how stiff feeling the MBP keyboards are when you first get them and to avoid it I have been using my wireless apple keyboard to work on it. Eventually I will have to break it in, but ill face that when the battery dies in the wireless keyboard.

Secondly, you can barely feel that the Air is even on your lap. It is like typing on a weirdly solid piece of printer paper. The processor runs extremely cool so you don't burn yourself as I have with MBP's in the past. I don't know if you notice -- but I threw together a new header today for T0asted, and this little machine absolutely rocked Photoshop. All of the manipulating and filtering was comparably fast to the MPB.

If you don't run VM's I can't come up with a single reason not to do your day to day computer workings on an Air. As for the peripherals that everyone is complaining about -- I am talking about that last because I completely didn't even notice they were missing. I didn't even buy the external optical drive -- If I don't have a single need for it in two weeks, I doubt I will find myself crying about it at any time in the near future.

I do have to note one weirdness that I have been noticing. When you do a clean boot of the Macbook Air, after not too long the fans start to kick in heavily -- like 6500 RPM. This was happening when all I had open was a web browser and Adium, which is clearly not enough CPU usage to warrant that kind of fan power. After a week of ignoring this I did some searching on the Apple Forums and found some people who were noticing the same thing that I was, and many who had taken their machine into the Apple Genius bar. The answer over and over was -- it's alright, don't worry about it. Well I don't think it's doing any damage to the machine, but it is kind of annoying. I went ahead and installed iStat Pro and spent a few days with the activity monitor running and noticed and interesting trend. After the initial boot and your Air gets itself into this state you have to reboot or close the machine and put it to sleep to get the fans to turn off because it will not cool down on it's own. The funky thing about this is that no applications I was running were using much CPU usage but the finder was using 60-90% of the CPU. So I simply killed it, let it re-spawn and until I reboot MacOSX the finder stays at 0% CPU and the fans stay around 2500 RPM.

I have many other Mac's around the house, and after watching them for a few days not once has the finder grown above 5% CPU no matter how much I was doing. I am going to make a guess here, but I believe that there is a bug in the special build of MacOS (10.5.2, build 9C31) that is causing the finder to use that much CPU.

For the moment (until Apple fixes this bug) or I get annoyed enough to install the standard version of 10.5, when I first boot I just kill the finder once, let it re-spawn and that seems to solve the problem. Since I rarely reboot and usually just put the machine to sleep I have now gone days without seeing this irritating fan activity, woohoo!

Additionally, multi-touch on the laptop is pretty cool... but not really that useful at this point. It will be a while I think before it becomes integrated in a way where it's as useful as it is on the iPhone.

Thoughts anyone? :)

One of the things that comes along with being laid off in the computer industry is that all that nice hardware you are using that the company provided needs to go back to the company. Fortunately OSAF was nice enough to allow me to hang onto my laptop for a month to make a smooth transition to my next opportunity. Unfortunately when I first arrived in Montana I started having problems with the fans and the machine freezing up and becoming insanely hot. FYI this is a MacBook Pro 17' pre core 2 duo, which I received new and used pretty hard for the duration of my time at OSAF. By 'hard' I don't mean I slammed the thing into walls -- I took really good care of the machine, it was just on for like 24 hours a day for two years being used constantly for pretty intense processor using applications like Parallels, Photoshop, and about 4 browsers simultaneously. Well yesterday the machine finally worked itself into an unusable state.

On boot the machine will make the chime, show me the Apple icon and the spinning loading icon but after about 4 minutes of pretty intense hard drive read it will reboot. This process happens over and over and over. I followed all of the reset procedures and have a bad feeling it may be the boot sector on the hard drive. I really hope I can turn it into a firewire drive and get that data off there as soon as I get a new machine to copy data over onto. Currently I am writing on my reliable old Powerbook G4 that runs ice cold and has been used intensely since my sophomore year in college (pretty impressive really).

To finally get to the point here, I don't get a machine from my new job until the 25th ish and I just cannot wait that long so I need to get a machine, which has led me to a mental debate. Ultimately for my high intensity work tasks (Parallels cross browser testing, building the Java app in Parallels on Linux etc) I will need a jacked up MacBook Pro, 4gb RAM, nice and big drive (200gig probably) and I have made the decision that the next machine is going to be a 15 incher. The 17 is nice in that I can have two browser windows at a pretty good size next to one another but with spaces in 10.5, and the higher screen res on the 15 it really doesn't make up for the fact that the 17' is pretty heavy, takes up a lot of space in my backpack and isn't really comfortable to have sitting on your lap. The other thing is that when I am laying down in bed and working the weight of the screen on the 17' closes itself on your hands when you put your knees up to high in the air. I know that is a bit of a trivial complaint, but it is pretty real as I am currently in that position with my G4 and had forgotten how nice it is! The other move I will be making with my next MBP is the glossy screen, the reviews I have read just make the clarity sound worth it -- plus neither screen works that great with the sun shining into it so I don't think that complaint will be able to play much into the decision.

Anywhoo I can't get the MacBook Pro 15' that I want right now because every BLOG/Site I read out there that talks at all about Macs is pretty convinced that in the near future (some are saying weeks) the MBP's are getting an upgrade pushing the proc speed up (maybe moving to the Intel Peryn's that get better battery life), and will include the bigger track pad with multi touch functionality. I pretty much don't have a choice but to wait for this update. However in the mean time I need a machine to write blog entries, keep up on email and news and write some code... what shall I get?

I first thought, maybe I should just go as cheap as I can and grab a MacBook -- the very low end. As this is a pretty good option, I realized that this might be the excuse I was looking for to get a MacBook Air. my current concerns are; 4200rpm drive is pretty darn slow (and only 80 GB), no firewire (seriously?), no ethernet, the screen is kinda small, VGA iSight, no external drive.

I will address these one at a time, starting with the drive. I know some of you are thinking, why don't you just get the HDD upgrade to SSD -- well frankly it's not worth $999 dollars to me, I'm trying to spend less not more money remember. Also, I read today that the only category where the SSD drive is faster is the randomized drive access category (not worth dropping from 80 to 64 gigs). But come to think of it, the G4 laptop I am currently using has a 4200 RPM ATA drive in it and I am pretty sure that the speed bottle necks I am seeing are caused by the 1 ghz proc and the 1 gig of RAM. When my 17 inch MBP was updated from 1 to 2 gigs of RAM it was a huge difference. the MacBook Air fortunately does come with 2 GIGs of RAM or this would be game over. The second is that my backup with Time Machine is via USB 2, my email is all stored in IMAP, and since my last back up there are about two folders of data that I care about which I can suck off by turning the 17incher into a firewire drive and copying the data to my G4. Back the the drive space issue -- I have multiple external drives and other machines on the network that are there specifically for storing and serving media, so I shouldn't be toting more than a couple gigs of media at a time (this is acceptable to me). The only time I find myself using firewire was with my DV camera that died last month, and transferring data between Macs locally which leads me right into the 'no ethernet' issue. For $29 bucks you can get an ethernet adapter -- another save by Apple, because this again would be game over.

I have a lot of friends that have the shiny white MacBook and have no complains about the screen size, I am used to the monster 17 incher, but I am confident I could get used to the 13.3 especially since Apple did put a lot of energy into making sure it was a quality screen resolution and clarity. I honestly can't remember the last time I used the iSight, no one I know wants to video chat with me and I have an iPhone for taking pictures of myself on the go.

The last thing here is that it's $99 bucks for an external drive, and every once in a blue moon I'm somewhere and someone wants me to burn them a CD of something.. but this is very rare. I don't watch DVD movies on my laptop since I have a good size TV connected to a Mac Mini, and the Air allows you to use other machines drives over the network.

When I started this thought process, I really didn't think there was any way that I would be considering getting an Air. When I saw the announcement by Steve I wasn't even that excited because I don't travel that much so I didn't see much excitement personally for an ultra portable but if the MBP's don't get an update before I get home in the next couple weeks for another $700 bucks over a MacBook I will most likely be getting one, and now I'm a bit excited about it. I would order one right now online to satisfy my urge for immediate gratification, but the Apple Store and Mac Mall are telling me that the earliest I can get it is 2-3 weeks.. and at this point I could be still in Montana, on the road or back in California and it sounds like more fun to wait till I can walk into an Apple Store and leave with it.

At this point I think I have thoroughly convinced myself, did I miss anything?