Posted by Trejkaz Sat, 08 Apr 2006 09:45:00 GMT
The MacBook Pro out of the box is a very nice machine, but there was a lot of crap I had to do to get it up to my usual working environment. I think after almost a week I’m almost done, and I took a few notes on the way… you know, in case they might help others choose whether to go with this system or not.
Read more...Posted by Trejkaz Fri, 07 Apr 2006 04:13:00 GMT
Right about now, I would have been somewhere between Kyoto and Tokyo, had my original holiday date not been postponed (it’s now set for September, on the assumption that I find someone to go with.)
But instead, I’m stuck in Sydney in autumn, in the shitty part of the season where it starts out freezing cold in the morning (so you wear a coat) and then ends up boiling hot in the evening (so you end up carrying the coat home.) Great stuff. I can’t wait for winter, at least the weather will be consistently cold.
The last three weeks have been a bit frantic.
A whole week was eaten by a house cleanup in preparation for a random house inspection. It really drove home a few things.
People should clean their crap up after they’ve finished using it. I generally do this, so as a result I didn’t have as much work to do as everyone else.
Professional cleaners are actually worth paying for. Or at least, they are worth it if the house is big enough. Particularly in a situation where nobody follows the roster past about four weeks, it will be much easier to just have housemates share the cost of the cleaner doing the work.
The current house has way too few places in which to store cleaning stuff. For instance, it wouldn’t have killed the owners to put in a fixed cabinet somewhere for storage of things like brooms and vacuum cleaners.
There is never enough capacity to throw out all the trash generated during a cleanup. This was especially true this time around as we ended up filling the general waste bin, the recycling bin, and generating 2m3 of bulky trash, and still having about 2m3 left over. It would be better if the council just asked you how much you had and picked it up in one hit, instead of imposing arbitrary limits which then necessitate rebooking.
Moving house is certainly an option from here but it’s always expensive and almost always means two weeks downtime while the DSL gets connected. Buying a house is starting to become an option too, but I think I’ll wait for a few more months before looking into that sort of thing. I can’t imagine being able to afford a very good place anyway. My limit under my current income is somewhere around $300,000… certainly a lot of small places do fall under that, but not any terribly good ones. Plus I’d have to make sure I can cover the mortgage payments by myself, because the banks don’t seem to care about income from renting out the extra rooms.
Other than that, the past week has been eaten up by setting up my MacBook Pro. like so many other people who bought this laptop, I’m affected by the buzzing CPU issue, which I’ve temporarily worked around by hacking QuietMBP to use less CPU, but just enough to stop the noise. Hopefully Apple will fix the problem in a software update, because I’d hate for it to be entirely a hardware problem.
Otherwise, the laptop is practically perfect. Mine got delayed, and by the time it arrived they were already into revision E, and all the original problems people were experiencing had been fixed (well, except the buzz.)