Welcome Berman, the new Mac in the household

Thanks to kind funding from my parents, we have just added a new laptop to the household network. Berman is named for the radical cataloger who challenged the racist, sexist, Christocentric and just plain arcane biases of LCSH. (We had though of going with Avram, which sounds a little cooler, but Sanford Berman is a bit more personally significant to the both of us).

Berman has been installed with:

• Adobe Creative Suite 3
• Parallels 3.0
  
• MS Office 2004
  
• Firefox (with Zotero, FireFTP, Twitbin, and Foxmarks extensions)
• Adium (basically Pidgin for Mac)
• Second Life

Its already talking quite plainly with our server, and the DVD player is clean and easy (the remote control really helps, too). All the installations, configurations and customizations have been incredibly easy. I'm still figuring out the Mac print interface, and making sure I've configured Berman to talk to the shared printer properly.

Even installing Kubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake) on Parallels was ridiculously simple. A twenty minute download, and a pointer, and I was set. I'm still working out how to save everything, but that shouldn't be a problem. I will read the book of a manual that comes with it when I have more time.

Still have yet to test the wireless connection, or to point iTunes to the music uploaded to the server. I will probably also install more programs as I need them, as well.

Very, very, very pleased. I take back most everything ill I may have said about Macs.