My new computer arrived!!!

I apologize in advance for the highly-technical nature of this posting, but I've spent the past 24 hours doing nothing but working with my computer and reading blogs and websites about how to get it configured the way I want it (oh yeah, and I slept a little too). I'm under the delusion that the world at large actually cares about this sort of thing.

And why this highly technical entry? Because it's finally here! It's my brand-new work computer, a fancy-dancy MacBook Pro, ordered a couple of weeks ago, and held up by the special-order international English keyboard (but more on that later). It arrived in my office yesterday around 3:30, and I played with it, trying to set it up just so, until around 12:30. Yes, I didn't leave my office until after midnight. There are both good and bad sides to living in the building your work in. Well, here it is, after only the most basic of configuration by me (i.e. getting all that mess off my desktop).
All in all it really is quite lovely, and so much faster than the beater I've been using for the past 6 weeks. (Which is my old Windows XP laptop, but it is busted. Not enough that it doesn't work at all, just enough that it does everything really slowly, and needs to be rebooted anytime that I change LAN cables or it goes to sleep if I want access to the internet afterward.)

This new laptop really is pretty slick, but I'm having to put in a great deal of effort to actually make it useful to me. The main (temporary) problem is that the IT department here installed the operating system, and they seemed to not bother including the oh-so-important (to me at least) X11. This is an optional install, but it's what lets you switch to a unix interface at the click of the button, complete with multiple desktops. Without this I'm able only to open up a terminal or two on the already crowded mac desktop, and it's no better than having an ssh terminal on my windows machine and working remotely on a unix server in Halifax or Montreal or Victoria or Hamburg or Dorval (which are all places where I still run jobs, oddly enough). I'm also having trouble getting used to the Mac interface, which is substantially different, especially if you're used to doing almost everything with keyboard controls (as I am).

But the biggest problem by far that I'm having, and to which I don't think I'll be able to adapt, is the damn keyboard. As mentioned before, I ordered an English keyboard so that I didn't have get get used to the switched Z and Y on a German keyboard, in addition to the different location of much of the punctuation marks. This is particularly important when programming, and especially for someone like me, who doesn't look at the keyboard at all while typing. I really just know where everything is. Which is why this is such a pain in the ass. Here is what the enter key looks like on my keyboard, and below is what the layout looks like on US and Canadian models of the same keyboard.

They made the return key all screwed up and hard to reach on the European models so that you could more easily get at the backslash. Who decided that? Anyone who either programs or works from a command line uses the return key all the time, almost as much as the space bar, and this is just not workable. I'm going to try to use Ukelele right now to switch the \ and return keys as far as the software is concerned, which means that my computer will be exceedingly difficult for anyone else to use, but I don't really care.

Aside from this, I think the built-in webcam and mike are better than my old ones, so I can't wait to talk to someone to find out! Oh yeah, and blogger unexpectedly switched to German when accessed with the new laptop. Not really sure about that one yet.