PC vs Mac part I

I've worked in a Mac shop for 11 years now, using a PC. well, I finally broke down and got a Macbook.

two days our desktop support person tried to get Windows to run.. no luck, he handed me my computer and handed the boss his resignation. Not sure if they are related, but it makes for good reading!

I took the Macbook home for the labor day weekend. there it sat. Finally Monday night I pulled it out. Since its a mac and doesn't have Outlook, the Qwest mail is delivered via webmail, into the Entourage email program that comes with Macs. Unfortunately they cannot be connected the first time from our office, because the VPN we use won't let it. So, the method people who need Qwest mail use is to take the mac somewhere else, home, starbucks, wherever and then connect to the Qwest mail. Once configured it will then work from the office. It didnt work. I tried for several hours on monday night, no luck.

Tuesday am I woke and I realized what was wrong... my ldap password expired over the weekend! doh.. what timing. So I changed it and it still didn't work. I decided to work from home monday so I could get it working. I had one of my coworkers send me screenshots of their configurations and found a port number was wrong. It now works. hurrah, I can now access my qwest mail and peak mail.

Since I can't get windows to work and we have no desktop support (besides my increasingly annoyed cube neighbors) I decided to try to live within the Mac OS.

Wednesday I came into the office and began the process. I downloaded the trial Dreamweaver CS4 and OpenOffice. I set up my ftp sites through Dreamweaver. One issue I have is that I often get files from one server and upload to a new server. This is clunky with DW FTP. DW FTP is great for pulling files down from a server, modifying and uploading to the exact same location on the same server. That is great for 80% of my work.

I had to use telnet and I could not find the command prompt. Rob showed me and it worked fine once I figured out where it was.

I needed to import a txt file into a spreadsheet, a pipe delimited file. That took me some time to figure out in OpenOffice. I had given up, but Rob assured me it could be done. It can. Its really different from the way Excel handles it, but in the end, I converted my file into a spreadsheet.

Current issues:
I cant get my qwest calendar to work. This could be due to the issue I described above. I need to try to connect outside Peak VPN.
I need my ichat account pwd reset so I can use Ichat instead of Meebo on the pc.
I have trouble going between applications or between windows. I opened two windows of Firefox this am and I minimized them. In the bottom right, I could see one window, but not the other. If I clicked on the one window and then minimized it, I could get the other window. Weird.

Its weird and foreign and not very intuitive for my Windows brain.