First post from OS X | Steven Wilkin

I’m composing this from the MacBook my new job has has provided me with. Coming from PC-land it’s a culture shock, a very sleek, stylised culture shock, but a culture shock none-the-less.

I’ve got a 2GHz Intel Core Duo processor along with 1.5 GB of RAM at my disposal, so everything is very smooth and shiny but I’m having to adjust to an operating system I’ve never used before so I feel almost crippled when it comes to doing things I don’t normally even have to think about. Oh, and the keyboard just seems wrong.

First thing I did when I got my new toy home was to set up wireless networking: before I put together an IPCop router I was using a Gigabyte GN-B49G and had never used the wireless facility, but I plugged its WAN port into the switch for my “green zone” and went through the router’s setup wizard and bingo! As a finishing touch I configured it to use MAC authentication to prevent any of my lovely neighbours hi-jacking my bandwith ;)

So far there has been nothing that has struck me with “ah, this is what I’ve been missing all along" but I’m looking forward to adding another string to my bow, regardless of the amount of muscle memory I’m having to fight against to do anything via the keyboard. The only negative side I can see to using a Mac is that the experience might be a one-way thing and I’ll never be able to go back to commodity hardware. I’ll always have Linux running on my servers though!