Ooooh, pretty Mac!

16:15.18 - Thursday 9th October 2003   (Link to This Entry)

Just got my hands on a 17in Widescreen Mac PowerBook for the first time, and I gotta say it's one sexy beast. It's very cool and minimalist and roughly half the thickness of my Inspiron - half the weight, too. The hinge holding that huge screen upright wasn't as stiff as I would like it and at one point the screen fell forward almost onto the backs of my hands, giving me a minor heart-attack (these things cost approx £2500, remember!).

Gotta lurve that MacOS too. Bearing in mind I've touched a Mac roughly... what... twice before now, I was able to get the inbuilt 802.11b AirPort talking to my router without problems within about five minutes. Ditto, Entourage (Mac Email client) is pretty easy to set up that was working flawlessly as well.

And of course, the whole thing makes Windows XP look like Amiga Workbench - talk about slick. These things are so polished it hurts.

Minor point: There's no Infra-Red on it! Aieeee! We had a tiny tiny little Canon i70 printer to play with at the same time but couldn't connect it to the Mac, as the USB connector at the printer end is the same type as at the machine end - Type A or B? I forget. And of course, there's no room for a big clunky Parallel port on either unit, so...

Battery life didn't seem impressive either, but then with that simply heeeeuuuuuge screen, what do you expect? Damn, that PowerBook is one tidy machine - I was embarrassed to park my scruffy old Dell next to it.

OMG - I so want one! That, or MacOSversionwhatever for x86 and a can of silver paint...

Back to Basic

22:36.43 - Thursday 9th October 2003   (Link to This Entry)

I restarted the Auto-Update program for the Lotto site tonight and I've already got further than previously. This time I'm trying to keep the code nice and clean, making nice modular Subs and Functions instead of just cramming the whole lot into one huge spaghetti-esque mess. I must say it's progressing nicely.

This new one's basically going to be a small status window parked in the corner of the screen. It'll just have four LEDs which can be Grey, Red, Yellow or Green depending on the status (Unused, Not Done, Processing and Completed respectively) and will look hugely impressive. Honest. No, really!