roncli.com blog

This is the 400th post I've published to this blog since starting it almost 7 years ago. If you told me back in 2005 that I'd make this many posts before the blog became yet another side project I'd stop working on, I'd probably not believe it.

Anyway, the purpose for this post isn't to talk about this being the 400th post, it's about the excuse I'm making to write this. Which is, namely, this:

No, not the Chick-Fil-A sweet tea glass. I'm talking about my new 11" MacBook Air, appropriately named DarkSide.

I've been wanting to get a Mac for a while, but never really knew if I wanted a laptop or a desktop. Well, truth be told, I have no more room for another desktop, so the laptop was a slam dunk.

I got it at the beginning of December, and since then I think I've used this thing more than I've used any of my other iDevices. I moved my PHP/MySQL development off of Ox, my main desktop computer, onto this thing and haven't looked back. PHPStrom works just as well on this thing, and being able to use Macports to install Apache, PHP, and MySQL was a breeze.

Despite being a tiny thing - this is the smallest laptop I've owned - this thing's got all the power I need. RockMelt installed and picked up my settings from my Windows machines seemlessly, Grooveshark still plays all the music I like, and I even moved my Ventrilo client off of my web server and on to this thing.

DarkSide came with GarageBand, which piques my inner musician's interest, and getting an early Christmas present of a KeyStudio 49 certainly helps. I've already rearranged some of the spare room to have a little music space away from the rest of the noisy computers and servers, and at some point I'd love to get Reason with Balance to get into a familiar music editing environment.

On top of that, I can unplug this and use it anywhere with a wireless connection. Now, I've had Windows laptops in the past, and I've not even touched them unless we're going on long trips. This thing is almost a companion, I take it just about everywhere, and I use it when I do take it.

The only down side is that there is no real .NET development environment for the Mac, which means that for most of my personal projects I still have to sit at the desktop. I'd love to remedy that at some point, but that may not even be possible. If I had that, though, I wouldn't need to sit at my desktop ever again. Except to play WoW and Diablo III. The D3 Beta's awesome, by the way.

I've even thought about using DarkSide to expand this blog to include some video blogging every once in a while. We'll see how that works out. In any case, I think DarkSide works out as a pretty good excuse to go with post number 400.

Labels: Life, Mac