I’ve been putting it off for weeks. At the end of the last school year I wanted to redesign the lab, especially after I found out that I wouldn’t have the math class but would be teaching yearbook with my other computer classes. I carefully measured every aspect of the lab, the furniture, the data drops and electrical outlets and decided that I wanted to draw up the layout so that I might save myself the frustration of moving 50-odd pieces of furniture only to discover that I don’t have enough network drops or electrical outlets or that I can’t fit the desks and the students in a given configuration.

First problem I ran into was that all the CAD programs have a horrendously difficult learning curve. I spent something like six hours looking for a program that would let me draw a simple wall and then a basic room. No such luck. When I couldn’t find anything online I settled for whatever they had at CompUSA that would run on my mac. Then I avoided the project for a bit over two months. Imagine my frustration, when I clicked on the program tonight only to watch the icon bounce a couple times in the OSX dock then disappear. Shit, another drawing program that silently crashes in my Intel-mac! This totally blows!

Let’s see, Adobe Photoshop 7, Adobe Photoshop Elements 3 and now TurboCAD 1.1 won’t run on my mbp. When i went to write this entry I wanted to see what clipart I had and launched an iPhoto utility called iPhoto Buddy that lets me use more than on library (so that I can have one main library, one with clipart/stock photos, another one with CadreX pix and another one for photos from before 2002). I watched the iPhoto Buddy icon go bounce, bounce on the dock and then disappear. Shit! It’s bad enough that I can’t use Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, but this is getting ridiculous. Occasionally Quicken or other apps that seem to depend on Rosetta fail to launch. I can usually get those back with a shut down/reboot, but this is becoming very un-mac-like and more like a bad Windows experience. I mean I never used to shut down or reboot my iBook or my G4, but now I’m having to because all too often the mbp wouldn’t wake up properly, or when I get the bounce/bounce/disappear routine. I guess I need to give AppleCare a call (now where the hell did I put my mbp AppleCare information?!).

One bright note: brother Matt bought a copy of Roxio’s Popcorn 2 for me as a belated birthday present so that i could experiment with “burning” some of my DVDs to my 5th gen iPod. After a couple oops, like running out of space on my iTunes drive ’cause of all the podcasts and video-podcasts I had and then trying to use the program without benefit of reading the couple paragraphs of instructions, I did get it to work. I have to say, in the midst of all these detours and frustrations, it was very cool to watch “Lost in Translation” on my video iPod. Now if I could get the rest of this shit to work!

Question: How can you tell who the technology pioneers are?

Answer: They’re the ones with all the arrows sticking out of their backs.