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I’ve just impulsively upgraded my Mac Book Pro. When I bought it I opted to fore go the 200GB 7200rpm hard drive upgrade for the satisfaction of walking out of the store with it that very day. I knew any hesitation may result in financially responsible reconsideration. Good thing I didn’t! I’ve been really happy with the MBP, and dream of replacing my commodity desktop with a Mac Pro, but the same financial responsibility buzz kill prevents it.

Anyway,  after a brief fight with insomnia last night I decided to upgrade the MBP. I’ve ordered the following:

• 320GB 7200rpm hard disk - $110
• 4GB (2×2GB) DDR2 PC5300 Ram - $75

Grand total with free shipping from NewEgg was only $185. Much cheaper than a Mac Pro. The huge hard disk should allow from my XP partition and hopefully an a Ubuntu partition while not feeling cramped in OS X.

My only regret with the MBP is that it doesn’t have a nice dock. I suppose a USB port replicator would work well enough, but it seems like such an unsatisfying solution.

Today, I was amazed yet again by the flexibility of Mac OS X. I was transitioning the color scheme from my text editor to the syntax highlighter for the blog and needed to convert the RGB values to Hex. The first couple I did manually, but realized there must be a utility out there that would do that for me. I found this nice little Hex Color picker.

What really amazed me was how easily extensible the Mac system color was. I dropped the plugin file in a folder, restarted my text editor and it was there. No installer. No registry settings. Pretty amazing.

I’ve been a .Mac subscriber for almost a year now and have found it pretty handy, mostly for iDisk, and the some Mac settings that sync. With the recent introduction of MobileMe, I’m left a bit perplexed. On launch day I tried to bring up http://mac.com, the old .Mac address and found the maintenance page telling me I needed to hold my horses. That’s fine. I fully empathize with deployment pains. So day two rolls around and I finally get to log into .Mac, now Me.com.

This was my nice greeting:

That’s od. I’m using FireFox 3.0 on Linux, but it only works with the FireFox on Mac or PC. Hmm… That doesn’t make any sense, but OK. Luckily there is a work around. If you install the User Agent Switcher plugin you can fake a browser, or OS version of the browser in this case. IE7 on Vista is a  user agent installed by default so I give that a try. It doesn’t work, but maybe the plugin doesn’t do what it says it does, so I reboot to XP, and try and bring up Mobile Me in Internet Explorer. Now I’m greeted with this:

OK again.You already told me you recommend FF 3.0 or Safari and maybe the plugin actually did work. I’m really not a fan of IE 7, so I’ll use FireFox. Great! I can use the web applications, but when I go to setup my Mobile Me Control Panel options, I’m given these choices.

Didn’t you just tell me I shouldn’t use IE, but you’re not going to sync my FireFox bookmarks? That doesn’t make any sense Apple!