[olug] Who else has a Mac?

[Neal Rauhauser]

  I recently got a new customer with a flock of Mac G5s. They want to 
centralize file storage on a Windows box they own with a raid array and 
I've done very, very little with the Mac since the late 1980s. Today I 
took the plunge and shelled out $1000.41 for a Mac Mini with a Super 
Drive, three years of AppleCare, and the USB stuff to make it work with 
my existing PS/2 KVM.

  The machine fired right up out of the box, found an IP address, 
discovered it had about a dozen updates waiting which it promptly 
pulled, then we were off to the races.

  I loaded up Palm Desktop 4.2.1, messed with it a bit, and it just 
won't behave with my Samsung i500 phone. $39.95 later I have The Missing 
Sync which is much, much more configureable, license bound to the 
machine's ethernet MAC address, and my phone is mirrored. This is 
relevant because the aging IBM Thinkpad T22 on my desktop just lost its 
job running Windows 2000 /w Palm Desktop.

  I went to http://darwinports.com, pulled their little application, and 
it behaves quite a bit like the ports stuff I'm used to in FreeBSD. I 
don't yet have a compiler and I'm wrestling with how to coax that out of 
apple.com, but so far I'm very impressed with the form factor, the 
relative silence (less noise than my quietized Athlon 2000 in the closet 
/w door closed), and the bundled software.

  I'm not sure, but I think I like this ...