Day two
Another grumpy morning this morning, but sometime midafternoon I had a nice chat with two of my new co-workers that cheered me up a lot. Pleasant, friendly, fun, and left me feeling like I had something to contribute to the company after all.
And then an hour or two later a friendly helpdesk guy came by with a new PowerBook for me; I'd been given a Windows laptop by mistake, and I thought it was going to take another week or two to get the Mac. The helpdesk people here have impressed me consistently so far with their friendliness, their willingness to help, and their rapid responses to requests. Anyway, I hadn't realized how much the Windows box was bugging me until it went away. I can use Windows; I just find it counterintuitive and annoying in all sorts of ways. (Though there are definitely areas in which it's nicer than the Mac.)
'sfunny, I recently read a long review by someone who had switched to Mac from Windows for a few weeks, to be able to write a comparison of the two. The things that he (?) was most excited about were tiny little bits of the OS X UI, a combination of things that were just added in the latest release and things that I didn't know were there at all. (Like: when you press Command+Tab to step through all the applications—a useful interface that Apple picked up from Windows—you can press H to hide the currently selected app, or Q to quit out of it.)
And the things that he was most annoyed by were things where my experience is the exact opposite of his. For example, he was upset that an expensive top-of-the-line Mac with huge quantities of memory was still much slower than a Windows machine at basic tasks; whereas in my experience, a fairly high-powered Windows machine is grindingly slow at even such simple things as deleting a single file, things that the Mac does very quickly even on low-end systems. Similarly, he noted that Safari was okay but was no IE; in particular, he said (I'm paraphrasing here), Safari is just too slow at rendering pages to be any use. Whereas the thing that I love best about Safari is its speed; for me, it renders pages faster than any other browser I've seen, on any platform.
So I don't know what to make of these differing experiences, other than that Windows really fits some people's heads, and Macintosh really fits my head. You can get more or less the same things done on both, but whichever one you're used to is likely to feel more comfortable than the other one.
I'm sure there's a moral to be drawn there about modern politics, too, but never mind that.
