Screen Shot 2014-09-27 at 12.18.14 PMI was updating my network to use a different subnet and realized that the last time I did that, my HP printer stopped working because a lot of the network drivers set the IP address into the printer settings.

So I figured that maybe I would need to update the printer’s IP address on my Mac. I looked at the printer settings and didn’t see anything that might work.

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I updated to OS X Lion a couple of days ago, and for the most part it was a smooth transition.

This is the first upgrade where Apple is using their App Store concept to distribute the OS, so it was a bit scary to hit “Purchase” and watch nothing happen for half an hour while Mac OS X 10.7 downloaded in the background.

There’s no real indication of anything going on unless you happen upon the “Purchase” tab in the App Store App (seems a bit redundant, doesn’t it?):

App Store purchased items
After the long download, there was a typical OS install (well maybe not that typical, since it just worked) that ran for nearly an hour. Once that was done there were a couple of minor housekeeping items (like loading Java again separately for some reason), but all in all not much looked different than before.

I was happily exploring features like “Launchpad” and “Mission Control“, when I stumbled on a weird problem. My mouse wheel was scrolling the browser in reverse. That is, it was working in the more natural direction: scrolling the wheel up moved the text upward, and down moved things down.

At first I thought I had some weird virus, but when I upgraded my other Mac, I found the same issue. So I did a couple of quick searches on the Apple site, and found some mentions of the issue.

Apparently somebody at Apple decided the way things scroll has been backward all this time, and made the mouse default the other direction. There were some how-to fix it, but they showed screen shots from a Mac with an Apple mouse, which has a few more settings than what I saw:

Default Mouse Settings

While set this way, moving the mouse wheel up made the scroll bar go down, which was confusing to me, since that was what I always thought the wheel was tied to. But it did make the text scroll in the direction of the mouse wheel.

After a very short period, I got used to scrolling that way, but soon realized I’d be in trouble if I had to go to a Windows machine, so I simply unchecked the “when using gestures to scroll or navigate move content in the direction of finger movement” and I was back to “normal”.

Mouse settings

I’m sure at some point I’ll probably be sorry (like when I get an actual touch-screen Mac), but hopefully by then Apple will have a setting that will just make my mouse act like it does in Windows, and allow touch to act the way it should.

And then after all that, there is no DVD, no physical device in case something crashes. The theory is there’s a recovery partition (just like the old PC days), so you don’t need that.

Me being the old IT guy, I don’t trust that, so the next time I downloaded the Lion upgrade, I burned a DVD. The store will let you download the purchase again, but 4Gb still takes a long time, so media is king.

Today I received a box containing the replacement PC for my wife. I got a really great deal on a refurbished HP Desktop with a quad core AMD processor, 8Gb of memory and a 750Gb drive from

I’d been waiting about a week for it to get here, and my poor wife has been limping along on my slowly dying laptop in the meantime. I suspect that it’s about to die, as it has become painful just to start up a browser or read email.

The UPS lady arrived at my door shortly before 5pm, and told me that she had heard a crash from the back of the truck in the morning. At first she thought someone had been drinking in the truck: she smelled beer.

As it turned out, a box containing beer had fallen and was leaking in the truck. She showed me the bottom of my package was wet, and said I could refuse the shipment and have her take it back.

I figured that it would probably be OK, since they usually pack things like desktops pretty well (in plastic and foam), so I asked her if I’d be able to send it back after looking inside. She told me that she could come by tomorrow and pick it up and gave me her supervisor’s number.

I opened the box and found that there didn’t appear to be any dampness or liquid inside (so far so good). But then when I actually pulled the desktop out, the front panels were all poked out, and the Styrofoam pieces were broken.

Now I figured that it would be just my luck that it would work initially and then start having weird problems caused by having been dropped. So I decided to send it back, and I called the number the UPS lady had given me.

Her supervisor told me I had to call the shipper and have them make a claim, that they couldn’t return the box once it had been opened. So I called TigerDirect to get a return label and see if they could ship a replacement.

The return part was easy, they sent a link to my email. Interestingly enough though, during the order process, they had offered me a $5 discount for using Google Checkout, and that meant they couldn’t just ship a replacement out. The customer service rep told me they could process a new order and give me free next-day shipping, but it would require a new order.

After looking at the inventory, the machine I had ordered was the last one of that model, and they offered me something that looked similar in price. I looked at the things that were available and decided to wait, so I’m back on the hunt for my replacement desktop.

Maybe somebody is trying to tell me something, this hunt for a new computer has been painful, maybe I should just look for another Mac