So, it's been over a month now since I purchased my MacBook on one heck of an impulse.  After, buying it I must saw that I had a fair bit of buyers remorse.  After all, I just had built a new desktop quad core PC a few months prior and I had a perfectly workable laptop provided by my employer.  Did I really need another machine?  Probably not.  Fortunately, the remorse was very short lived.  I have never worked with a better piece of computing machinery.  Period.

Lets start with the battery life.  It is incredible.  Most nights, it can handle a full load of development, surfing, emailing, and gaming without being plugged in for the whole evening.  Spending several hours out on the deck is finally an option.  I can finally enjoy my backyard investment to it's fullest.

I assumed that I would spend most of my time using windows.  After all, windows is what I know best. but that also hasn't been the case.  With the exception of actual development work, I do everything in Mac OS X.  When I code, VMWare fusion provides a seamless way for me to run Visual Studio without having to reboot into windows native.

I never have to reboot.  Sleep mode just works.  It's a great piece of equipment.

Between the internet outage last week, and the trip to Detroit over the weekend, I have not had much uninterrupted time to explore the new MacBook.  Now that Lilly and Mary Beth are sleeping, I'm finally getting a chance.  I'm reading "Switching to the Mac - Tiger Edition" which is a very easy read and is not too out of date - so far.  I have a Leopard specific book on the way too which should be here soon.

So far it has been mostly smooth sailing.  I do find myself missing the page up/down and home buttons and haven't quite memorized the keyboard shortcuts, but I think that will be something I can overcome.  The single-button mouse has been a non-issue since I use a blutetooth multi-button mouse most of the time and command-click is becoming second nature for those times when I don't bother taking the mouse out of the briefcase.

Sleep mode is an absolute treat.  I don't know if it is the "newness" of the machine - I hope not, but this machine goes into and out of sleep mode with ease.  It's the first laptop I've ever owned where I had to turn off the "go to sleep mode when shutting the lid" option within a day of owning it.

This is my first post from by brand spankin' new MacBook.  So far, I'm in complete love with it.  Stay tuned for more details as I find my way through this new and exciting world.

As I mentioned previously, I’ve recently been considering the purchase of a MacBook.  Well, it didn’t take long – I’ve taken the plunge.  I decided to buy from Amazon.com, instead of directly from apply for a number of reasons:

• I trust Amazon.com.  That’s not to say that they haven’t let me down on occasion, but as a general rule, they can be counted on.
• They are offering a $100 rebate.
• They are offering 24 months no interest with the Amazon card.
• No sales tax.

I know that the first question that I will get from Rob when he shows up this morning is a big fat “Why?”.  Well, I’ve always been a bit of a closet Apple fanboy.  My first programming experience was in grade school with Logo on an Apple II.  My first programming book was an Apple programming book that I bought at the school book fair (if you want to know the truth, I bought the book because some of the examples had limericks which my 5^th grade self could not resist – I actually had no computer at the time and my parents flipped out for wasting money.)  I also live in a three iPod house.  My 1 year old has her own iPod loaded with her custom play lists of lullaby music. 

The last time I flirted with purchasing a Mac was when the Mac Mini came out.  I passed at that point because it didn’t seem practical.  I was looking for a cheap way to get my hands on a Mac OS X device so that I could test the waters.  In the end, I figured that it wouldn’t get much use if it had to compete for resources (keyboard, monitor, etc.) with my primary box.  The laptop form factor makes much more sense for what I’m looking to do with it.  The fact that I can run windows on it is another bonus.  Worst case it becomes a very cool looking windows box.

I also had it ingrained in my psyche that Apple == expensive.  It turns out that the MacBook is reasonably affordable.  Starting at $1099.  $1499 ($1399 from Amazon) nicely equipped.  I’m looking forward to bloging my experiences.  I probably won’t do a big “unboxing” post – that’s been over done.

Today I attended the Cleveland Day of .Net.  Well, to be more accurate, I attended the first half, leaving during lunch to head home.  The three talks I made it to were really very good.

Joe O'Brien started the day with a good introduction to Ruby.  I had seen ruby a little bit while looking at rails for my current work project, but his talk really made things gel a little bit.  Also, the insight into how IronRuby is being developed was quite interesting.

The second talk, was Alan Stevens presentation on TDD.  He used the ASP.NET MVC as part of the demonstrations - something which I am very interested in and would have been the technology of choice for my work project if it was released.  Again, I've read quite a bit about TDD in the past, but Alan helped the concepts to gel.  He is a very dynamic speaker, and if you have a chance to catch one of his talks, you should make sure to attend.

Finally, Nate Kohari gave a talk about something that was almost completely new to me - Dependency Injection/Inversion of Control with Ninject.  Nate did a great job.  I wouldn't have guessed that this was his first talk in front of a large group.  He kept the attention of the audience, finished right on time and completely kept his cool when the projector broke down mid-way through the talk.  Interesting to note - it was Alan who "refactored" the power connection to the projector on the fly and got it back up and running without blowing the bulb.  When I got home, I downloaded the Ninject bits and spent a few hours getting it to work in some of the unit tests that I'm working on for my day job.  So, in an ironic turn of events, Nate may be working for Merge again, just without getting paid for it :)  I have a long way to go before I grok Ninject, but I'm looking forward to giving it a go, and having fun blogging about it along the way.

One of the most surprising thing to see at a .Net conference was that all three of these speakers gave their presentations with MacBooks.  Seeing Vista and Leopard running on a sleek black MacBook got my juices flowing and now I'm very close to buying one of my own.  I just have to have what all the cool kids have.