I’m cooking in someone else’s kitchen this morning. Where are those darned hot pad holders anyway? I am so disoriented.
Fred and his old PC: a stuntman like a bat out of hell standing on top of a speeding Corvette, steering deftly through traffic, maneuvering the wheel through the sun roof with his feet, cap on backwards, a wireless mouse in one hand and a beer in the other. YeeHaa!
Fred and his Mac on Day One: A cowered little man clutching the wheel with both white-knuckled fists, barely able to see over the dashboard (or is it the dock?) and unable to see out the Windows anymore. He can’t change gears and is lost on the back roads in an unfamiliar neighborhood of a foreign country moving at 3 mph and without a clue where he is headed or how to get back where he started.
I’ve installed Firefox and Google Earth, letting the machine stick stuff where it will. Both programs ended up in “Devices” apparently, and show up as such on the desktop. Where do they go and can I just drag them where they belong. (And does this account for why I had such a hard time finding FFox when I booted up this morning?)
I’m writing this post in Google Docs since NoteTabPro is PC and I’m not messing with Parallels and XP just yet.
Set up was painless and it was sheer joy to see the monitor boot up for the first time about 2 pm yesterday. It is very, very fast (including the internet DSL for which the slower PC was a bottleneck apparently.) I was disappointed to find firefox for mac lacks some of my favorite extensions and that the bookmarks toolbar shows text only.
I opened up Mail and gave it my gmail account. I’m not sure what I’m doing, but it seems if I can use Mail as a front end for gmail, it will let me search and find and add notes and such through SPotlight. Another thing to explore.
Today I have to try to get docs and music and such off the external hard drive and drag them to the right places in my Home directory.
I’ve bored you long enough. I’m about to see if I can get this thing up to 5 mph. I’m not exactly burning rubber in all four gears yet. But time’ll come.
Fred, the dmg files that you’ve downloaded are “disk images” like virtual cds. that’s why they’re showing up under devices.
what you want to do is drag the application from the disk image to your applications folder.
(there’s a shortcut to the applications folder on the righthand side of the dock)
http://guides.macrumors.com/Installing_Applications_in_Mac_OS_X
Once you’ve started the application and it shows up in the dock, you can right click on it, and choose “keep in dock” and it will stay there for easy access.
Once you’ve copied the application from the disk image to your hard drive, you can eject the disk image, and then either archive or delete it (depending on whether you think you won’t be able just to download it again if you need it.)
Having a hard time loading your pages this a.m. Must be cuz you’re on a Mac now, eh?
Great metaphor; hope the drive on up the learning curve is shorter and smoother– so you can get back soon!
By the way, I love your ever-changing header images.
Welcome aboard, Fred. It may take a bit of getting used to, but it will be worth it in the long run.
Tim
You beat me. I hooked up my iMac Sunday morning. Got on the net for a minute or two, then got kicked off.
Oh dear, took me 3 days to figure out the problem was a kink in the Ethernet cable, that had bent the wire inside and caused it to have a short. Got a new cable today and I’m back on the net, that seems to have been the problem.
Now I’m speeding down the road too. Maybe 3 mph! Already been lost a dozen times and probably caused more problems than I’ve fixed, but hey they say we need to exercise our brains, well, this must be great brain exercise.