Well, well, well

I got my first paycheck with my newly raised pay rate. And I was pleasantly surprised to find that I had made enough to actually cover rent with the check. It was rather a relief to see that it would be possible with the job I have to maintain my life and begin to get my credit debt under control, which was also helped with a little money left over from my college loan. It's not much but it reduces the debt by almost a third … which is actually rather significant. So I recant that and restate, I have some money left and now I feel comfortable enough with the money I'm bringing in that I can let it go. Praise God! It feels good to take a big chunk out of my credit debt. Although to celebrate … I bought a new book.

Yep, I bought a nerd book no less. I got The Missing Manual: Mac OS X Tiger Edition, by David Pouge. I know some of you might be thinking, "But aren't you kinda nerdy? Haven't you worked with Apples for years? Is this new OS so very different?" And I say … yes, yes, and yes. I have owned an Apple since 1999, one of the best purchases I have ever made. But from then to now, the Mac OS has gone through a very vast and drastic change. Namely they moved to a UNIX based system. Once I learned about Linux I have become interested in UNIX based systems. As some of you know Linux is one of the leaders of the Open Source Software (or OSS) movement. It is an astonishingly solid and useful system. But honestly … it was too nerdy … even for me. Then along came Apple. Steve Jobs brought in his old team from the NeXT project, an attempt to make a new *NIX based machine, it wasn't nearly as sucessful as Pixar. But they had a really good idea and a solid base to work from. So they grabbed FreeBSD (or Free Berkley System Directory) and made OS X (pronouced 'ten'). They took the lessons learned from NeXT and molded them with the Apple visual design astetic. Thus was born Aqua, one of the prettiest interfaces ever.

Now I come on the scene, I now have a shiny new Mac Mini (altough mine is one of the older ones that is still running on the G4 processor) preloaded with OS x.5. And since the interface is enough like my old OS 8.6 days I can navigate the visuals really well. The new UNIX directory tree takes a little getting used to but it's worth it. But that brings up an interesting point. Since the underlying system is completely different from what I knew … I really need to get back to the basics, and hopefully learn more about the system this time around so I can be a more effective sys admin. Which is a very long way to say that I'm geeking out in all new ways now. I also hope to learn how to write AppleScript, a rather powerful little language built in to every Mac OS that allows for automation and for making small simple programs. What it really seems to do well is make a multi step, multi program action take a simple button click. And after that I plan to really nerd it up and learn web programing, which is not HTML hacking, I'm refering to the scripting languages like PHP or Perl that make the web really interactive. And if I find time I want to learn to write real programs that can run without the need of a web server. Although if you look around the web there are some really cool things that people are doing with web based programs, like ajax write.

So you'll proably see more of my nerd/geekdom showing up as I delve into the new OS X pool. It should be a fairly refreshing dip. Who knows the next book i buy may actually be about UNIX.