I’m back from my vacation, and received news that a new toy is on the way, and will hopefully be in my sweaty little hands by week’s end next weekend. What ever could this new gadget be?

After a workweek from hell in Seattle, and working through the next weekend on my return home, I couldn’t be more ready for a little beach time. We’re off to Hawaii - the big island - for a little getaway. Spending half the week near Kona (the photo above is of the sunset near Kona), and the other half near Hilo.

I should be rejuvenated when I return. Fully energized and ready to… sit at a desk for prolonged hours again.

This is kind of funny, after my last post. :)

Work just got me a new Mac Pro quad-core (2 X dual-core Intel Xeons @ 3 GHz each). This sucker is rocking 3TB storage (3,000 Gigs to folks who don’t know/care what that is), and 8 GB RAM. Yeah… sweet Jesus, what’s all that for?

So work needed to hook me up with a computing powerhouse quickly - like within 48 hours - for a big project that needed immediate attention. When my work asked PC or Mac, I gave it a bit of thought, and decided PC. Then they came back and asked if I wanted to try a Mac that ran both OS X and Windows (via Bootcamp).

“..uh. Yeah, I guess that could work.”

It was kind of our only option at that point, as we needed a bitchin’ system so quickly… and this was ready to buy at the Apple Store. Any decent PC would have taken longer to have built and shipped. Or, I’d have to have enough time to overnight the parts and build my own machine (like I did with my Shuttle PC, which I still adore to no end).

So I’ve got Adobe Everything for both Mac and Windows, and even this little ol’ thing called Final Cut Studio.

There really isn’t anything more annoying than a mac fanboy. I used to by one myself, and eventually switched to Windows years ago. Doing graphic and UI work in the software world, I’d rather be involved in the PC platform. I’d use the *same* applications on either end.

To me, using a Mac is like sitting in an empty V.I.P. room. It’s great and nice and all, but the real party is out there on the messy dancefloor.

So for the most part, I’m using the Windows side of this machine. A bloody shame, because bootcamp currently only supports 32 bit windows (meaning the 64 bit processors and 6 of the 8 GB of ram sit idle). Hopefully the final version will support Vista 64.

But why?? Why would I boot up Vista on my G5 to edit video? Am I insane?

Currently, After Effects renders at the same speed on both sides, even with windows capping off far earlier on the hardware. I know - what the hell. And don’t this beat all - I get nagging RAM errors in After Effects and then it crashes…. on the Apple side! Don’t that just beat all.

I’m hoping I get to the root of this and other issues I’m having on the Mac side (who knew Macs were so difficult to deal with?). I’ll chalk a lot of my initial displeasure to OS X just being plain different. A sample of my initial reactions:

“Jesus Christ. Why can’t the back button on my mouse be mapped to back in Firefox / Safari?”

“Do I have to hover over everything to see the titles of what I have minimized?”

“But I WANT to remove preferences that aren’t in the application folder. Who do I have to sleep with to get a real uninstallation around here?”

“No wonder fanboys are so angry.”

I’ll give it some time, and I’ll try to split my work and personal life between the two and see if I adjust at all. Considering that nothing worked on OS X at all when it first came out, Apple has no room to talk about any Vista software challenges - all the important stuff works. I used OS X right when it first came out - not a single Adobe design application I needed, ran on it. That’s when I jumped back to Windows for a second time.

I’m hoping for a better relationship with OS X this time around. Unfortunately, we’re already off to a slightly rocky start.