Settling down

Things are calming down slightly. I'm slowly but surely whittling away at the big side project and hope to be finished with it completely sometime in the next couple of weeks.

I installed Tiger earlier this week in hopes it would fix an annoying habit my G4 has developed of crashing for no apparent reason and taking everything down. Funny how Apple touts the stability of OS X so much. I've had nothing but problems. It doesn't seem to be any more stable than OS 9.

When I made the upgrade to Tiger, the workaround I had been using to keep my ixMicro video card working in OS X wouldn't work anymore, so I spent a couple of days working in OS 9 and was shocked at the difference in speed. It's been so long since I've worked in 9 that I simply didn't realize how slow OS X was. I don't see a whole lot of difference between X and using a Windows box. I started out using Windows (went through college running Photoshop on a 386 DX40 with 8mb of ram and 170mb HD), only to get away from it when I realized that a Mac was much faster at the kind of work I was doing. With X, they've killed the speed edge without giving me anything I can really use. Sure the interface is nice, but it doesn't do a damn thing for me productivity-wise.

As to why I can't just go back to OS 9... well, Photoshop CS2 is sweet. I can do things with it that are impossible with Photoshop 7. Since 75% of what I do is in Photoshop, I'm stuck with X whether I like it or not.