The Mac is finally on the network.

Until tonight, my Mac Mini had not been connected to the Internet since I bought it when I moved into my house 16 months ago. This can be attributed to a few factors:

1. I actually tried to connect it to the Internet several times without success.
   
2. I'm lazy and give up easily.
   
3. I have 3 other computers I could use instead.

I finally figured out today (technically yesterday) that the version of OS X that shipped with my computer last year still included the "old" Airport software which doesn't support WPA wireless encryption, which I use on my network. I temporarily disabled the encryption, connected to Software Update to acquire the new software, and then was able to connect after re-enabling WPA. I'm not sure why I never even tried connecting unencrypted or with WEP (which the old software supported). In any case, all is now well.

And then there was Chrome...

Not more than a few days after my last post about upcoming upgrades to Microsoft and Mozilla web browsers, Google surprised us all with a beta release of their own browser: Chrome. Features include a novel tab organization scheme, Incognito browsing (like IE8's InPrivate), domain highlighting in the URL (also available in IE8), an "Omnibox" address bar (mixes history and search), a novel "new tab" page, a simpler interface, and a slew of interesting "about:" pages. While the new browser is fairly sleek, it is not as full-featured as the big boys. Also, even though the project is open source, it does not (yet) seem like developers can write extensions like Firefox allows.