Brendon J. Wilson

 by Brendon J. Wilson

Pondering Switching to Mac

This weekend has been a bit of an interesting experiment – I borrowed a 12″ MacBook Pro test machine from work to take Mac OS X for a spin. My personal machine is starting to show its age after five years, and I can’t say Vista is an especially appealing prospect. If I’m going to have to buy new hardware anyway, I figured I’d take the Mac for a spin (after coveting them at the Apple store for the better part of a year). Actually, now that I think about it, this is not entirely a new experience given that I owned a PowerBook 180 back in university.

After a weekend of playing around on it, I’m pretty impressed. The positives:

  • Beautiful construction: The laptop body itself is solid as a rock. It’s sturdy and feels finished, especially compared the plastic of my Dell.
  • Keyboard action: There’s something about the snappy spring of the keyboard that is simply satisfying.
  • UNIX toolset: I admit it – the first thing I install on Windows is Cygwin. Not having to do that on Mac OS X is a nice value-add.

There are, however, some items that I find annoying. The behavior of windows is a pain; there is some inconsistency about how windows are opened that I find leave the impression of clutter (I’m a full-window man, all the time). I’m also suffering from some apprehension over applications. While most of my applications are either cross-platform or web-based, I can’t help but shake lingering concerns. I mean, Mac OS support is always a secondary concern for most software vendors – what if something really cool comes out, but it’s only available on Windows. Parallels and BootCamp ease this concern a bit, but not completely.

What I’m really curious about is what bugs people about the Mac. What are the features that irk you? What’s the stuff that really annoyed you after you switched to Mac OS X?

in Technology 3 comments
 by Brendon J. Wilson

Dear Boston Police: Try “Google”

Not a month after the Aqua Teen Hunger Force incident in which Boston Police shut down the city to blow up a number of promotional blinking ads, it seems the Boston Police Bomb Squad is bucking for promotion again today. This time, they blew up a suspicious package in Boston’s financial district, that turned out to be a traffic counter placed there by the City’s own Transportation Department.

How is it that no one bothered to try to identify the device before blowing it up? I mean, I understand that faced with a possible bomb, caution is required. But couldn’t someone take a picture with a cameraphone and see if someone in the City could identify it beforehand? How about a Google search?

In fact, let me suggest a new protocol for first responders to deal with any unusual circumstance:

  1. Open a web browser
  2. Go to Google.com
  3. Type a description of the object in question
  4. Examine the results for a match.

It’s that easy. It even works for other circumstance when you don’t know what you’re looking at. Take the recent case of the immigrant who was denied entry until he removed a medical device from his posterior that the customs officials thought might be used to smuggle drugs. It’s called a “seton”, and despite the fact that the doctor at the airport had never heard of it, a Google search for “seton” and “anal” immediately returns a nice detailed result on the device and the medical reasons it is used.

Come on guys – it’s just not that hard.

in Opinion / Technology 0 comments