And today for me, it was to actually touch a modern Mac. Fairly nice G3 Powerbook too. But, as I’m told, it has a wonky power supply and hasn’t been working well of late. So, being the computer guy, it was brought to me to at least get the needed documents off of it. What a lesson in frustration this turned out to be.
WARNING: If you are a Mac fancier, stop reading here and move along. What you are about to read will probably piss you off and generate a ton of hate mail. I’m ok with this.
So, I power on the machine. After a few minutes it comes up to what I presume is the main Mac desktop. Ok
Now comes the part where I have to find the files. With a little help from a more Mac knowledgeable friend, mission accomplished.
Now for the fun part. How do I get them off of the machine?
Well, I had a Zip drive. I plugged it in and something popped up on the screen, but the disk format was wrong. It asks me to format, so I comply. But the process, after 15 minutes, did not complete. So I spend the next 5 minutes trying to find how to reboot the thing.
So, it comes back up. I think I’ll just use a web client to email them to me. So I plug in the network cable and it connects to Yahoo Mail. But it was 30+ documents, so this wasn’t the best idea. I see IE is installed, so I think I’ll just FTP them to my server and be done with it. Well, as it turns out, IE on the Mac won’t upload files via FTP. Great. I’ll archive the files and email them, but I find out that if I can find a zip utility, I can only archive 1 file at a time. What?
Oh yea, sometime during my adventure I managed to copy all of the files from where ever they were stored to what looks like a talk bar. Odd, but whatever.
I did finally manage to get the files uploaded, but here’s my point really. I found the Mac interface (OSX if you must know) to be less than intuative and actually quite confusing. I couldn’t find any of the programs that were installed besides what were on the task bar thingy. I never found access to all of the drives on the computer, couldn’t figure out if they cdrom drive was a burner, and where the burning program was. Also, no right click? Well, there is but it requires a keyboard press at the same time.
I was actually accused of being brainwashed earlier because I could not figure this out. Now you Mac folks go easy on me here, as I have not worked on any apple product since my old IIE back in high school.
Anyway, I had better luck with win3.1 back in the day. Thanks, but I’ll stick with my lame ass, slow, cumbersome and unreliable windows PC.
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September 25th, 2005 at 10:33 pm
[...] &and I find this. Which makes me remember this post from last year. [...]