Right now I’m using a Mac­in­tosh com­puter in the New Media Clus­ter. I’m sur­prised that I’m not enjoy­ing it. Here’s why, and maybe you Mac lovers out there can sug­gest some solutions.

• Small key­boards are tor­ture on the hands. Why is this key­board (labelled “Apple USB Key­board”) so damn small? The arrow keys are smaller yet. This isn’t a frick­ing lap­top. I don’t enjoy typ­ing with my wrists crammed together.
• The mouse is ter­ri­ble. This “Pro Mouse” is far too small for an adult hand. (Maybe the Ama­teur Mouse is larger?) The cord is made of a cheap ther­mo­plas­tic with irri­tat­ing “shape mem­ory” that insists on form­ing a knot­ted shape that hin­ders the move­ment. I like how the mouse plugs into the key­board though. I don’t like a mouse with less than 3 but­tons. Because the sin­gle “but­ton” is actu­ally the entire top half of the mouse, drag­ging items is hin­dered by a sub­stan­tial increase in fric­tion with the desk as you are forced to press the mouse down against the table while slid­ing it. Stu­pid. The prob­lem is com­pounded by the design of the plas­tic bot­tom, which has radial grooves sur­round­ing the cam­era lens. These grooves have trapped sticky gunk from the desk (which I am not about to try to pick off), fur­ther increas­ing friction—and not evenly in all direc­tions, either!
• Unex­plained behav­ior in Finder is irri­tat­ing. I have loaded a CD-ROM with 20 items in the root direc­tory. I can see them from a shell win­dow. Yet Finder says it has only 3 items, and it offers no way of access­ing the “Data” direc­tory that con­tains what I want. It will not accept absolute path­names, so I don’t see a workaround. Why does Finder hide my files from me? What good could this pos­si­bly accomplish?
• Inabil­ity to delete files. Instead I have to move them to a Trash direc­tory, then delete them. This is ridiculous.

Despite all the praise I’ve heard for Apple’s star-studded indus­trial design team, I’ve con­cluded that very lit­tle of their work is functional.

My major task is to take a Quick­time movie encoded with the pro­pri­etary Soren­son Video 3 codec at 480×352 res­o­lu­tion and re-encode it with an industry-standard codec at stan­dard NTSC res­o­lu­tion and fram­er­ate. I have found sev­eral ways to do this, except that none of them seem to be able to re-scale the movie to appear full-screen (this pro­gram likes the DV stan­dard of 720×480). How do I upsam­ple the video stream? Nei­ther Final Cut Pro nor Imovie are show­ing much promise.

Also, it’s really hard to edit movies intended for video with­out a video mon­i­tor sit­ting next to the com­puter. It’s not the same to see it in a win­dow on the screen: the com­puter dis­play uses a com­pletely dif­fer­ent pixel shape, fram­er­ate, inter­lac­ing scheme, and color gamut.