BrianJarrett.com

I finally pulled the trigger; I’m now a Mac user. About a year ago Traci’s laptop’s video card mysteriously died so we bought her a replacement desktop computer. We were tight on cash so we bought a low-end Dell running Vista. I’ve lamented since then on my frustrations and disappointments with Vista and Traci absolutely despised it. It was then I began to think once again seriously of moving to Linux and avoiding an upgrade to Vista, but I found that Linux still just wasn’t quite there on the desktop yet. It was closer than it had been in the past but still not what I needed.

As a result I decided to take another look at the Macs. It had been a few years and since then OSX had been released and the prices had dropped some. Long story short, I began to think seriously about a Mac and began researching what it would take to switch from Windows. I found that it was easier than ever to make the switch.

So after about a year of Vista Traci finally had had enough. We decided to pull the trigger about two weeks ago on a new iMac for her. We received it on a Friday and had her completely moved over to the Mac by Sunday morning. After spending the weekend with her Mac I decided it was time to make the switch myself and ordered mine.

I originally thought I wanted the 24″ display but after working on Traci’s I decided 24″ might be a little too large. I instead opted for the 20″ display but increased the hard drive to 750 GB and the memory to 4 GB. I also bought the wireless keyboard and mouse …read more »

Here are some shots of the new windows (and front storm door and garage entry door).

The new windows are awesome! The installer just finished up the job today. We also had a new storm door installed on the front of the house and we finally got a locking entry door installed on the garage. We loved our old house but it just wasn’t big enough; with these changes we’re slowly starting to transform the new house into a house similar to our old one. It takes time though; looks like the backyard will be a project on the books for next year.

The new windows have arrived and will be installed this following Monday.  I doubt they’re going to get it all done in a single day but hopefully they’ll be able to finish up the following day.  I can’t wait to finally be able to open the windows in our house without scraping metal, stuck screens, and smashed fingers!

It’s official: we’re getting new windows! We had Robert Viviano from Viviano Door & Windows come out and give us a quote last week and we signed the paperwork a few days ago. Viviano did the windows in our previous house and we loved them. Vivano’s installers did a great job last time. Actually, the same installers will be

…read more »

So, why a Mac? Well, I’ve done a fair amount of thinking about this decision and have come to a few conclusions. I need to upgrade within the next two years. My current box, although still quite snappy, will continually become slower and slower as software and operating systems (Vista, in particular) become more processor and memory intensive.

First of all, I had to consider my options. I have three options really; Windows, Mac, or Linux. I know there are other operating systems out there but for my personal machine at home none of the other options make sense. Given these three options I first needed to identify what I really wanted. Part of me, at least the non-conformist in me, wants to buck Microsoft completely. Sorry to disappoint all you Linux apologists out there but Microsoft is and will continue to be a major force in the computing world for some time to come. There is no escaping Microsoft completely, especially if you’re coming from a Windows world and have already come to use some Windows-only software.

But I still want to …read more »

Date::Manip doesn’t work “straight out of the box” on Windows due to the fact that Windows doesn’t have a timezone defined. I use Perl on both Unix and Windows and as a result I use Date::Manip on both systems as well. When I was a newbie this confounded me to no end when coding for Windows. I couldn’t seem to find a good solution for it but ultimately through research and determination I figured out how to fix it.

I create a system variable in Windows for the timezone and then …read more »

For the past 8 years I’ve been toying with the notion of switching from Windows to either Linux or Apple. I consistently dismissed the idea either because Linux wasn’t quite capable of supporting the switch or because Apples were just too damn expensive. Granted, Microsoft has made significant improvements in Windows stability (and even security) over the past several years so the impetus to switch isn’t quite what it was in the Windows 98/Me days. Windows XP was actually a pretty decent attempt at Unix by Microsoft, all things considered, but it’s still Microsoft at its base. Security sucked in XP and doesn’t seem to have improved drastically in Vista, unless you call nagging the end user to death security.

Speaking of Vista, that’s really what’s sparked this whole thing…again. My wife’s laptop decided to burn out its video card so rather than fixing it immediately we came across a good deal on a new Vista desktop for her. After we got it home we ended up replacing the printer (incompatible with Vista) and bought two new copies of Outlook. My scanner won’t work with Vista either, but that’s a bridge we’ll cross another day.

After spending some time …read more »

Most websites use what’s called a cascading style sheet (CSS) to determine the placement of text, font types, and other html markups. In particular a web designer will use this to tell your browser what font to display when you visit his or her website.

For reasons unknown to me, Microsoft has decided that they want to dictate the font you see when you go to a website. They use something they call ClearType and they claim that it makes web pages easier to read. After a user installs IE 7 there’s a prompt …read more »

As a rule I don’t use Internet Explorer; I use Firefox instead. The reasons for this are outside the scope of this article. I do, however, use IE for work-related stuff (it’s our company standard) when necessary and I use it when testing my website. One of the most annoying things about Internet Explorer is a nagging feature which reminds you that Microsoft feels your security setting are too lax. One of the main issues I have with this is that it appears to be all or nothing. If I let Microsoft choose my security settings then every damn time I try to open an image or zip file from a shared drive on my internal network I get a nag message forcing me to say “OK” before I open it. This is unacceptable since my internal network should be a trusted zone.

To get rid of the nag message every time I open a file from my network I …read more »