Trey’s Blog

Apparently, I hadn’t thought out my system wiring prior to making this purchase as I was shy one DVI cable and an ethernet cable. For the setup, I went ahead and shutdown two other machines and used their cabling to satisfy my requirements. My initial thoughts were of how beautiful this piece of art really was. Apple’s design team gets major kudos from me. Besides telling it to use American English for all of its language configurations, I was prompted for an Internet connection. I remembered that the Mac mini had built-in wireless so I decided to give that a shot. It found my access point and 2 others in the neighborhood, but when I tried to connect using my WEP key, it failed… and it failed… and it failed again. To eager to see the system, I decided to go with the easy route. I reconnected the ethernet cable and started configuration with that. The OS wanted to grab the first available IP address from the router despite having been allocated to another machine via SDHCP (that machine was off at the time). Since this IP was taken, it was told not to get it. I added a SDHCP entry to my router for the Mac and its MAC address, and after selecting DHCP with manual entry of IP Address, it worked. So far the wireless keyboard and mouse, both using Bluetooth, were the easiest part of the setup. At this point, I’m connected to the Internet and went straight to Mozilla to get Firefox, and a little familiarity. This is my first experience with a Mac of my own, so I’ll be climbing the learning curve for the next month or so, I’m sure. If I was an average user, I would probably be set to go now, but I’m a web developer, so on I go to install FTP tools, web editors, graphics tools, etc.

For now, my Mac is sitting on my shelf, powered off and disconnected, but once I get my cabling plan established, I’ll be reconnecting again. The one thing that is hindering me the most is my busy schedule. It doesn’t allow for much time to toy around with a computer without using it to make money. The only catch is, if I wasn’t doing this work, I wouldn’t have the ‘toys’ to begin with. This may be a life rethink for some other time. For now, all of my other computers are running, and the Mac will soon be my development machine.