In more ways than one. First of all, I’ve been lazy and haven’t posted anything here. Secondly, I’m once again an Apple user.

For Christmas, anytime anyone asked what I wanted, I told them an Apple gift card. My original plan was to purchase a MacBook. When I got a new work laptop, I decided I didn’t really need another personal laptop. Worst case, I still have my older Dell Latitude which works perfectly for web browsing, email, network configuration, and so on. So my plan was to purchase an iMac. I walked into the closest Apple store and told the first person I saw what I wanted. I purchased the base model iMac. The only extra I went for was the extended protection plan warranty since the case design is not standard and parts are probably not abundant or cheap to replace on my own.  I’ll pick up another GB of RAM at some point.  $150 for the extra GB didn’t sound appealing.  I can deal without for now.

I’m a veteran from System 6/7/7.5/8.  I started in high school with SE/30s.  My buddy had a Mac IIvx with a thousand color display(whoo) and that’s really what got me into Macs.  My family purchased a Performa 6100(I think it was a rebadged first run Power Mac 6000).  I managed to acquired an external Scsi hard drive which I could boot my very own instance of the OS from without trashing the family install.  I loved it.  I spent more time screwing around with that computer and digging into things than I think I have with anything since.  I played around with RegEdit and butchered the sprites from games with my own images I created in Aldus Super Paint.

OSX is obviously a large step from the “classic” system days, but it didn’t take me long to get readjusted to the way things are done these days.  At this point, the lack of a right click hasn’t bothered me terribly.  We’ll see what happens once I start getting deeper into applications, but for right now, the control + right click is workable.  All in all, two days in and I’m still loving the experience.  The UI seems very crisp and sharp.  I read various Leopard reviews and a common theme was disappointment of the UI in general.  So far, I don’t really have any complaints.

At work we’re starting to roll out the new network at one of our schools.  This is the first step of properly subnetting the network away from a  10.0.0.0/8 flat network to something more manageable and secure.  We’re also expanding our VoIP implementation to this school as well.  We’re using Cisco gear all around.  Catalyst 3650-Es along with a Catalyst 4506 will handle the routing with Catalyst Express 500 POEs, Catalyst 2950s, and Catalyst 3650 POEs as the various edge switches we will be using.