New Machine - Spinning Marble of Doom

After two weeks of ownership the honeymoon is over. I have been presented by the most prestigious of inducti experiences. The Marble of Doom is my favorite of the few names it has.

So, let's review. I left Windows land for two reasons. Vista was unusable and Windows XP was blue screening every time it looked at Google Earth.

I now have an expensive MacBook Pro which is unusable because I don't know how to use it and it has just shown me the big middle Marble of Doom.

I say to you. Computing is going to the dogs. Someone please do some damed testing will you.

I was trying to copy something from the mac into a Parallels installed Windows Server and to do this all I wanted was a little FTP server. So, System Preferences, Shared, check the File Sharing checkbox and then in the options I selected "Share Files and folders using AFP", "Share files and folders using FTP" and "Share files and folders using SMB". I selected the account to share and pressed Done.

I saw the Marble of Doom but figured it would sort itself out, after all I was just envisioning some network restart it was doing in the background. Fortunately I had my old reliable Windows machine to play with while it was spinning.

Is an hour too long to wait for a network to restart? I thought I was very patient.

There didn't seem to be any way to kill the processes since I didn't have a terminal up at the time and the Finder would not open, QuickSilver would not pop up, and the Activity Monitor was not doing anything. So, power button for 10 seconds and restart.

I still don't regret buying the mac, after all, it is very pretty :-P