So the mac is here, and it's a thing of beauty indeed. I was hoping for the same feeling you get when you unwrap an iPhone or iPod - attention to detail through and through. And that's exactly what I got - for the unwrapping bit at least. Take a look - it's beautiful.

It's been a bit downhill since then unfortunately. I bought Logic Express pre-installed, and there on the desktop was a logic project "The numbers game". So I double-clicked it ( we won't talk about the trackpad yet - let's give it a chance) and hit play. The song started - good sounds through the keyboard speakers, more instruments coming through, song developing, and then suddenly...

"System overload" error box. Eh? That can't be right, can it? Either the brand new mac is not configured out of the box to play the example song project (attention to detail?), or the brand new fastest mac book pro available isn't up to the job (fairly poor choice for an example then). Either way, the sheen is a little duller.

After that, it was time to nip out for a swift diet coke with some other dads from school (good fun was had by all, even if I did have a rotten stinking sore throat, and a burning desire to get home and play with my new toy).

When I came back, there was a kung-fu panda dvd next to the mbp. I woke up the mbp, and was presented with the title screen of Harry Potter III, and a swirly rainbow mouse cursor (possibly the equivalent of the windows hour-glass). It refused to wake up properly, and since the dvd was full-screen, I couldn't access any behind the scenes trickery. Never mind thinks I, control-alt-delete to the rescue...oh. There is no delete key, and the alt key looks a bit odd too. I checked the beautiful, minimalist booklet that came with it, and eventually found the mac-equivalent key sequence: ctrl-option-esc. Cool, now where's the 'option' key...no key with 'option' on it, no keymap in the booklet. Sigh. A few random combinations later, and it turns out the 'option' key is also the 'alt' key.

That let me kill the dvd player, but then I couldn't eject it - as far as the mbp was concerned, the disk did not exist. Ok, I've had this before (twice, I think, in 20 years of Windows), I'll just get a safety pin, and ram it (carefully) in the hole next to the dvd slot...except (you're way ahead, aren't you?) there is no hole (perhaps it would spoil the beautiful lines of the case). A bit of googling, and it turns out this is a fairly common problem, with a variety of solutions. The one which worked for me was power-cycle with the trackpad clicked (obvious, eh?).

Writing this, I found ctrl-c, ctrl-v etc. use the cmd key instead on a mac. Something else to get used to.

I'm keeping my mac tips here. IT'll get better, I know it will..