It was one of those mornings when you know it is Thursday already, and you are just plain beat from a heavy work week that has been dragging on you to stay late at work. The dream was my usual Dream Within A Dream, filled with symbols of everything and anything, all circling into a whirl of past memories and catholic boy guilt, there is meaning somewhere but I never remember my dreams and like I said the real world was beeping! No really! Turns out the battery backup unit I have for my living room receiver was beeping like crazy, that it had no power and I woke up thinking, the battery probably died in it. After trying to fix it, I realized the house was too quiet. Looks like the unit was okay, it was the entire house that had no electricity. It’s like 3 a.m., and I’m trying to look for a freaking match to light a candle, so I can see to find a freaking flashlight. I end up using a cellphone to light my way through the house and find my watch, so I can set an alarm to wake me up in a couple of hours, so I can go to work. I finally get back to bed and all I can think of our those stupid beeps waking me up in the first place. There’s no time to start dreaming again, just thinking of work, of stuff I need to do, stuff I want to avoid, and no more dreams within a dream, just noise in my head.
Month: March 2007
Being The Mac Guy
For a long time, I was stuck in the world of Microsoft support. All I did was research and fix problems with applications running on Windows networks. Being a hard core Macintosh user since 1993, I sometimes felt miserable and frustrated with the Microsoft world. This all changed last year. I now have to support Macintosh users and it ain’t easy being the Mac guy!
The first thing you run into in supporting Macs is the Mac users themselves. Not all of them are smug, but quite a few certainly come off that way, from the first moment you inquire about their problem. Then there is OS X itself, an operating system which doesn’t have any of the usual crutches that you encounter with Windows. There is no un-installer, no Event Viewer, and so on. Instead you have to deal with The Console, and most of the BSD and UNIX tools which not all Mac users are even familiar with. Needless to say, supporting Macs when they do have a significant problem is actually harder than regular Windows support. A lot harder! I find myself sometimes even dreading a Mac call, but I’ve only been doing it for a few months and I’m certainly getting the hang of not only how to investigate Mac problems, but also how Mac users think.
Over the weekend though, my precious Venus (a Blue&White G3 Power Macintosh) decided to no longer boot up after applying the latest Mac OS X 10.4.9 update. I’ve had this machine for years; it is even older than my first born. Over the years I’ve upgraded hard drives, memory, video cards, and CPUs in it, and it has taken everything I’ve thrown at it and more. Alas I will try one more attempt to get it to boot into an OS tonight, before I totally give up on it. Losing Venus has been hard on me, I still don’t think I am over it, but one must go on.
I’ll probably end up getting a new iMac, just because I can’t see myself spending $2500 on a Mac Pro Tower.