Well, here I am
 

Hi everyone. You can consider me a 'refuge' from the macnn forums... but I hope that won't color any first impressions of me. :)

Thank you, Lerkfish for turning me on to this place. If you're here... this place must be cool. Heh. Heh.

A little about me: I've been using Mac's professionally since 'the beginning'... and have a pretty good knowledge of hardware, software and Apple history and lore. I grew up in Sunnyvale/Cupertino... and got to see things like the Icon Park being built... and it being torn down.

Currently, my official title is 'software engineer' (which still makes me chuckle)... and I do most of my development work on Mac OS X (albeit running a rootless XServer to connect to a Solaris or Linux box). I develop community-based applications (message boards, groups, etc.) for a large, service provider/media conglomerate.

My *nix knowledge is pretty shallow, though... but I'm doggedly trying to achieve a clue... and I'm sure you guys can help. :)

Welcome. This place is a refugee asylum from its inception. ;)

LOL!
 

yeah, what Craig said! welcome, and feel free to contribute to any section of it.

The unix section here is SO good I have no clue what they're talking about!

;)

Right. I'm in. Sort of the same situation as daimoni.

'morning, Lerk. Hey, ahh, look- this won't be one of those "I'm leaving the firm and taking all of my clients with me" lawsuits, will it? I find litigation to be soooo declasse.

Now, I won't be giving up on the asylum... uh... MacNN lounge QUITE yet... just testing the waters as 'twere. I am not sure I can totally give up on MacNN. I mean, a cashless/ hogan out/ tn proud (and I wonder why) and gone society may be worth it, but I am just not sure how long I can hold out without a cheerios/andipandi fix. Then there's Timo, chris_v, DBursey and... well, there IS a substantial list. But Lerk and dai are here and that should make it worth the while.

So... can we discuss home repair/improvement and Shakespeare and Elizabethan tragedy and superiority of Swedes and The Sox (that's Red not White) and whether or not Pedro is worth it and and Brittany getting sued by the city of Boston? Can we? That, and when the hell will someone actually WRITE a script that will block out those pesky pop ups? No terminal junky, me. I'm too random.

howdy! well, no, its not like swearing fealty to the feudal lord or anything...you just post here when you like and post elsewhere when you like. You don't have to abandon anything (God Forfend!)

in the coat room, though, its not a free for all (read the about this forum first post), but you can certainly have fun.

I just wanted to invite some of y'all to come visit and stay if want or need.
I don't know much about terminal commands or unix, either, but there are some questions and answers about general things as well.

Also, if you have OSX installed, the main site here has a boatload of tips and hints (hence the name).

:)

i'm here too...
seems dope,
especially cause i'm always looking for x info.
haven't switched yet, but want to be informed when i do.

thanks lerk.
hey max. hey dai.

it's a beautiful life.
btw, just saw gi jane for the first time.
ridley scott is absurd.
being a visual person, i'm so down with his stuff.

and viggo mortenson... well... yeah.
he kicks it.

poocat.

Howdy guys and gals. <xi tips hat in direction of fellow MacNN refugees before introduction commences>. A little about me: I've been a Mac user for roughly 10 years, I work as project manager in the e-business group of a good size manufacturing company. I'm quite happily married with a 2 yr old daughter, and when I'm not spending time with them, I'm either reading, composing on guitar or tinkering in photography. Truth be told these hobbies don't get much attention anymore given the family is a full time deal (outside of work). :)

I'll probably continue to visit MacNN because it is such a zoo, and the wierdness draws me to it at times. Truth be told there are times I'd like another more intelligent place to go however. So Lerkfish, thank you for the kind invitation; I look forward to "lurking" a bit myself, getting to know people here, discussing fun topics and learning more about OS X in the process.

Lerkfish, you can just mail me your kickback via PayPal. J/K :D

Welcome, all! We are clearly not the same type of forums as you'll find on MacNN, but that's OK -- that's why there are 5,000 types of cereal out there, too! I still read MacNN regularly (although I haven't posted in quite a while), and I read and post over on the Macworld forums. I'm not sure we'll ever be able to match the variety and volume of the MacNN forum site, but we hope we can offer something of value to OS X users.

Here in the Coat Room, feel free to discuss pretty much anything you like, as long as the debates don't get out of hand - we try our best to keep things civil around here ;). The remainder of the Forums are fairly tightly focused on problems and solutions related to using OS X, or discussions on tweaking and improving the OS. If you have suggestions on other things you'd like to see, feel free to either drop me a note or post them in the Forums forum.

Again, welcome aboard, and thanks for stopping by to see what's happening here!

-rob.

Well, this is beginning to look like some kind of initiation. I get this "private message" to come check out Maxosxhints, and whayyda know, the gang's all here.

Thanks to Lerk for inviting me here. I will say I hope this coat room is as lively as MacNN's lounge, but without the junk. And boy has there been a lot of junk over there recently.

As a way of introduction, I am a mac user for my office. I'm an architect. I'd love to be switching to OS X full time, but small things keep getting in the way — HP drivers for my scanner, and VPC has to get a little faster on my machine to really let me work in X. But I just updated my other CAD program, VectorWorks to 9.5.1, and the buzz is that OS X's stability really helps that program, which IMHO is buggy and hard to work with.

Perhaps if Retrospect works out for me I can switch to OS X (damn you, Quark!). I'm sure y'all wait, with bated breathe. In the meantime, I shall see what acorns of wisdom are floating around these parts.

Thanks, Timo

With a Timo in the wings, can a Max be far behind?:D

So, unlike my friends from that "other forum", I have failed to do the teeny weeny bio.
I am a New Englander. Humorless, pious, bean eating, puritanical, superior and rugged. Well, rugged when I need to be. OK. Just when I'm out in the yard.
I am the cheif Mac geek at a DoD contracted R & D facility in Massachusetts which is a part of a fairly major institution for higher learning. Or, as I call it, "The Temple of Intellect™" My co workers refer to me as the Maytag repair man. You're Mac users. You know why. So, I have days of fire and busyness interdispersed with days and weeks of incredible inactivity. I use these moments to my advantage. I tend my little herd of Macs. I tweak my OS X Server. I apply OS X hacks to test systems and then, after seeing if they work well or kill, apply them to my Ti.

And I lurk the lounge.

I read, I write, I walk, I eat my lunch and go to the lavatory. I do not post from inside the lav. I could , but I don't.

Hark! A cry for help! Is it kernal panic? Some arcane knowledge of the bowels of OS X is sought? COuld it be some wild and wooly problem of... nope. SCSI. Mundane SCSI issue. Sigh. I'll just take my little cape off, the one what says Moof! and grab my screwdriver. Such it is.

LOL!

Ah, max.. you really know how to bring back the memories....

After I got sick and disgusted of design and advertising, I went underground and became "the Mac guy" at a large ad agency in S.F. Their motto was, "The Truth, Well Told". Yes, I walked in the valley of evil... No kidding.

Those were the days of OS 7 (and many buggy point releases until 7.6.1)... I tended my herd of 040's and early PowerPC's. I was the NuBus king and the churlish earl of SCSI. I fought the good fight, and kept the encroachment of NT4 at bay... but my trusty sonic screwdriver could only do so much... and so after a year I went to France for a month... and was then unemployed for six more... but I returned triumphant as a web developer at a much better company (for a while).

And so ends this chapter in history.

THe interesting thing, dai, is that I got it ALL here. And I mean ALL. I sit here, typing on my Titanium 667. We have lots here at the Temple of Intellect. We are also wallowing in DP QSs and FP iMacs. We also have Newtons... and 6100s, 9600s, 5260s, one or two Mac TVs (!!), a Pippin (ISYN), buttloads of 040s,030s... Classics, color classics, IIxs, and yes, it is true, I worked on a IIe last week. We gotcher PowerBooks, Portables (ie- LISAs...we got three), Desktops and peripherals. We gotcher Printers, monitors and drives, all Apple branded. You name it, I can almost guarantee we've got at least one of them on hand somewhere in this joint. System 1-X. I mean it. THis place is a collector's dream. And it all belongs to the feds.

Wow, maxelson, need an assistant?:)

Heh. Heh. What did the Feds do... raid my ex-housemate's house? ;)

Let me know if they ever get rid of old Apple IIe parts... I could use some.

daimoni--

I hope I didn't stumble on an inside joke.

Were you serious about Apple //e parts? A very good friend of mine is cleaning out a lab-ful of them in a couple of weeks. He asked if I was interested and I am going to take one or two (I had one in high school and sold it in college for $50 for beer money--dumb, dumb, dumb....).

At any rate--if you do need parts for real, let me know and I'll see what I can find that works and ship it your way!

G.--

I could not justify an assisstant. I am getting Dell and Sun certs just to fill in the downtime. As for the museum quality of this place: everything that comes in is tagged "Property of US Gov't" and remains so. All disused machines, parts and peripherals are warehoused and then destroyed. NOTHING and I do mean NOTHING makes its way out of here. It is either used or destroyed. It almost hurts. I wish I cold help out with parts, but it would be a federal crime to do so, so I'll not go there.
But yeah, I love my job. At the moment, it is all Mac all the time. I am the only Lab wide Mac resource, so it will always be my main task. But I consider the additional certs to be more feathers and more stuff to do when I get bored. The Sun stuff should be fun, at any rate.

Oh- and as for vintage and obsolete parts- stuff you cannot even get from Apple, I tend to use PreOwned Electronics - www.preowned.com. They are not as cheap as they could be, but in a pinch, they'll do.
I had this guy with a Classic who needed a new analog board. I told him I could probably get him a "new" Classic for much less money than it would cost to purchase the board (by 2/3rds at least!), but naw, he wanted to keep his jalopy. A lot of folks around here use the Classics as instrument interfaces. The NI interface card costs in the neighborhood of $700.00, regardless of the cpu, so the machines are still worth plenty to them.

Wow. That's very kind! :)

I really do have an Apple IIe... it's a late model ''platinum'' series (the kind with the numerical keypad). I picked it up a month or so ago for $25 at a place in Sunnyvale, CA called "Weird Stuff".

The truth is, I have no idea how to get it to work. Heh. Heh. I don't have any external floppy drives for it, nor a monitor (yet) for that matter. I read that a 3rd party made SCSI controler cards for them... if so, that would be very cool. I could hook it up to an old external SCSI drive - and would be good to go.

Regarding stumbling on inside jokes... please stumble away! We're all in this together. And as long as you're laughing with us... :)

Any of youse guys got a ][gs you'd be willing to part with? Or the ][e emulator card for a Performa? I got software here just dyin' to be run. :D

And without the 5-1/4" drive, it's a pain, even with the software emulators available.

Hey, looks like i"m not the only one who wandered in here! Thanks, lerk, the Unix section in this place is INSANE! IT's like a foreign language... only cooler! ;)

I'm Cheerios, poor starving college student, Comp Sci, formerly mech engineering major out here in California... middle of hte central valley. Ummm... female (chuckles at gasps of amazement ;)), end of sophomore year... another NN refugee, although that's not quite the right word, 'cuz i'm not abandoning that madhouse... just looking for intelligence, as well as ridiculousness! ;) Ca$h was getting a bit much... Happy surfing and thanks for the tip Lerk, hope to see ya all around! :D