Hawai’i Calls!

First, why "Hawai’i" and not "Hawaii"? Simple: The Hawaiians (no apostrophe), native and officially, prefer the former. "When in Rome…" For me, it’s a matter of respect.

Alrighty then…now that’s out of the way, what’s the point? The point is, in about 20 hours, Mrs. Kestrel and I will start driving mostly west and some south to California, before we fly to Honolulu on Sunday.

Our itinerary will take us to Evanston WY tomorrow (just NE of the Utah state line), then diagonally through Utah on Thursday, to Las Vegas. On Friday, we’ll drive across the Golden State (the not-so-golden parts: mostly desert) to Los Osos on the Central Coast (just north of San Luis Obispo), where we’ll spend the night at my mother-in-law’s.

Saturday, the three of us will drive down to Los Angeles (Palos Verde Estates, for those familiar with the LA area), to my brother-in-law’s house. Looking forward to some of Bill’s home-brewed beer and homemade wine! Saturday night, Mrs. K, her mom, and I are meeting friends for dinner: The woman who introduced us 36 years ago, and her husband. I’m hoping for Mexican food.

Sunday morning, we trek to LAX for our flight to Oahu. The five of us are renting a house in the Kaelua area for a week.¹

We don’t have any firm plans, but dinner with my wife’s uncle and a snorkeling trip to Haunauma Bay are on the agenda. I will also lobby strongly for dinner at the Kona Brewing Company brewpub (in fact, that will be my suggestion for dinner with Uncle Bob).

We return to Los Angeles on Sunday the 28th. The next day, Mrs. K and I will take Mom to her chemo appointment at UCLA Medical Center (and I’m hoping to visit the Student Store at my alma mater) before driving back up to Los Osos. We’ll stay there a couple days, then start the drive home on Thursday, October 2.

I’ll have the new MacBook Pro with me (more on that shortly), although I’m not planning on blogging. However, I hope to be twitting via the iPod Touch or the Mac. I’ll also try to check e-mail (the house we’re renting has wi-fi) and respond to comments here. However, opening the laptop will not be a major concern! Mai-tais and mahi-mahi will be.

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Yesterday, after weeks of consideration, hemming and hawing, I made the decision to purchase a new laptop; specifically, a MacBook. I was waffling between the black MacBook with 2GB of RAM and one of the two 15" MacBook Pro models.

A small consideration was the ability to play WoW; however, since that wasn’t a major factor, I ended up with the lower-priced MacBook Pro. It’s still 1.5 lb lighter than my Windows laptop, has the same 2GB of RAM (upgradeable to 4GB), and an nVidia GeForce video card.

I went to the local Apple authorized seller, but they had none in stock. I wasn’t about to pay $75 for them to have one overnighted. Instead, I drove up to Best Buy. I was in and out in about 5 minutes.

Say what you will about Apple, but their packaging is outstanding. I’m not one to get all gushy about the "out of box" experience, but it’s sure a LOT easier to unpack and set up any Apple product than it is a similar non-Apple item. (Note to Steve Jobs: License the MagSafe connector technology to everyone, make tons of money, and establish a standard for powering portable devices.)

It took almost no time for the Mac to boot up, set itself up and get my user info. I almost hate to say it, but I like the requirement to use one’s account password to install applications.

It took another 30 minutes, give or take (I wasn’t paying a lot of attention) for the Mac to update its software­–OS X, iTunes, Safari, and a couple other things. Then I downloaded Firefox.

A few differences between Mac and PC:

• Mac "delete" = PC "backspace"; there is no Insert/Delete key.
• Windows can only be resized from the bottom left corner, or the Max/Min buttons; I miss being able to resize from any edge
• Control key (and, I suspect, the alt/option key) doesn’t do the same as on a PC. Command-C and Command-V are the copy/insert functions.
• I love the Dock.
• Application menus are not on the apps themselves; instead, there is a contextual menu bar at the top of the screen. By contextual, I mean it changes depending on which window has focus. Took me a bit of getting used to, but I like it.

I had to deauthorize all my computers in Apple Store, in order to authorize the Mac for my iPod. Not a huge deal; I think it was authorized on my old work laptop and my son’s MacBook, in addition to my old laptop and my desktop. Might have been authorized on my old work desktop too. Not one of those things you’d remember to do, I think.

Now all I need is to figure out how to get my MS Office 2007 on to the Mac. I know I can run a Windows emulator; that may be a project going forward. I also know my son can probably provide a (legal–he’s an MS employee) key for me. Not sure he can get the software though. Will e-mail him to find out.

I also got Adium chat client for the Mac. It’s good, but Pidgin is still more laptop-friendly in terms of screen real estate. (I think Spaces may help there, but I haven’t had time to check that out.) I was very pleased to realize TweetDeck works under OS X as well.
I almost forgot to mention that the keyboard is very comfortable, and I love the way the touchpad works with two-finger scrolling as well as expand/contract. Very intuitive!

One thing I do need to find is a good list of keyboard shortcuts, until I get used to the different special keys on the Mac.

All in all, I’m very happy with the MacBook. Definitely looking forward to playing with it more on the trip.

And so until next month, mahalo for stopping by the Aerie, and aloha!

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