Oh yeah! It’s on now. Over night, I’ve become the biggest Mac fan on the planet. Not kidding. I’ve been on Windows (even via Boot Camp) forever, and been quite happy in Microsoft land. But as of last week, when my shiny new Macbook Pro arrived, I’m all about Mac and OSX.
I’ve switched a few times before, but each time I’ve gone back to Windows due to simple issues related to either software compatibility, co-worker compatibility, and application speed. When I switched a year ago, I was on a brand new quad-core Mac Pro, but Adobe CS2 was not native Intel, so it was very slow compared to Windows XP. So I installed Boot Camp and ran XP on a mac for over a year.
This time it’s different. There is a noticeable speed increase in 10.5 compared to Vista, or XP and I really love the updated Finder. Adobe CS3 is super fast, Firefox is fast. After installing a ton of apps and transferring my life over the the Mac OS. Everything just works. Unlike Vista, which has been a constant headache and often slower than even XP.
I’m all hooked up with a Time Machine backup and some fabulous new mac only applications. The transition has gone much smoother than expected.
I’ve got a few blog post ideas about my transition to mac, comparisons to Windows, great mac applications and docking options. So stay tuned for those. But for now, I’d have to say my favorite Mac feature is Spotlight.
My sweet wife has been putting the mini van bug in my ear for over a year. I’ve been anti-minivan, in denial of the usefulness a mini van provides (for a growing family) thinking an SUV would be much cooler and useful. A couple weeks ago I gave in a little and agreed to test drive a new Honda Odyssey. I must say I was very impressed, so smooth, so roomy and so many features. I liked everything about it other than when you get out it’s still a mini van. So I test drove the Pilot (an SUV), which looks awesome, especially the new ‘09 body style, soon to be released. But it felt like I was driving my truck. I was sold.
Of course the dealer did everything he could to sell us a car right then and there. I was like dude, please, I JUST started looking at cars, I’m not taking one home tonight.
<rant>
I despise car dealerships and car dealers (sorry if any of you are offended, I’m sure there are good ones out there, but this is my personal experience). They are seriously blood suckers looking to sell a car to every person who steps onto the lot at ANY cost and squeeze every last penny they can from them.
Car buying (from a dealership) is a game, one that if you don’t know how to play, you will get ripped off. If you are ever in the market for buying a car, read this website “How To Buy New Cars & Avoid Car Dealer Scams” read all seven chapters. It’s free information and full of many great tips and instructions on how to be fully prepared to save money and to deal with the dealers (scam artists).
</rant>
I did a bunch of research on costs and though I typically prefer to buy slightly used, I found that for what we were looking for it was worth it to go new. So after a bit of wheeling and dealing I drove home what is apparently my wife’s dream car, a 2008 Honda Odyssey EXL with DVD in Nimbus Gray Metallic.
A few of my favorite features are the backup camera, heated seats, and the sunroof. It’s tight.
On Tuesday I had LASIK eye surgery at Hoopes Vision and my vision is fantastic! No more contacts to dry out my eyes (or to replace), no more glasses to slide off while I’m playing foosball or to remove while I’m wrestling my boys. It’s great.
I’ve been wearing contacts and glasses since high school, when I realized I could hit a baseball better while wearing contacts. Before Lasik my vision was near sighted with a prescription of -2.0 in both eyes.
With our tax return this year, I finally got the ok from the wife to get it done. I was on the phone within seconds scheduling an appointment. I’d heard good things about Hoops so I gave them a call and checked it out. The entire process was fantastic, from all the assistants to Dr. Phillip Hoops, Jr. Everyone was very professional and the process was very quick.
I won’t go into the graphic details of the actual laser cutting and burning stuff, but if you are interested I’ve posted my video. Sped up 3x and set to a new favorite artist of mine, Bon Iver playing Flume.
The technology for doing this is absolutely amazing and I recommend it to anyone who wants better vision without contacts or eye glasses.
Update: I forgot to mention that they gave me a Valium to make the whole process more relaxing. FTW!
If there was a single must have Firefox extension (I currently have 8 installed), I’d have to say it’s PicLens. Especially if you spend any time on sites like Flickr, Facebook, Picasa Albums, Google and Yahoo image search. When installed, if you visit a supported site (like Flickr), any image you roll over displays a little play button (>), that when pressed scans all the images either on that page, or in the group you’ve clicked on. You are presented with a full screen display of all the images in a very elegant 3d navigation system that you can control with the mouse wheel (zoom in / out) and the arrow keys to navigate.
PicLens instantly transforms your browser into a full-screen, 3D experience for viewing images on the web.
Best of all no pagination, for example if you do a google image search for Kobe Bryant and view in Piclens, you can navigate a nearly endless wall of images without ever having to click to load a new page.
In my opinion, this is the future of the web.
Piclens even supports IE, not that anyone should be using IE. But it’s there in case someone still does.
Do you or anyone you know use an ISP provided email (@aol.com, @comcast.com, @att.net) or a work or school email (@yourjob.com, @yourschool.com) as a primary email? It’s time for you (or someone you love) to switch to a free, large storage email system, with an innovative web based interface email service like Gmail (or Yahoo or Hotmail).
These services will give you an address you will have for life with typically all the storage you will need without having to delete any emails. Without the headache of being tied to a service for the sake of losing your email address. They also provide POP / IMAP support so you can still use your favorite email application (Outlook, Thunderbird); if that’s the sort of thing you are into.
It kills me when people send out “I have a new email address” every time they change jobs, schools or ISPs. With each switch they often lose their saved emails, address books and other important information.
Branded email addresses (me@mydomainname.com) are good to use when you want to promote your site, but then you are tied to renewing that domain for the sake of keeping your address. Then, the webmail applications included with webhost accounts are typically very bad and not even worth using. So if you are using a personal domain name for your email, I recommend using Gmail’s “Get mail from other accounts” feature to POP your email into your Gmail account, then you can use the “Send mail as” feature to send email from that address.
For over two years I’ve been using Google’s (free) Hosted Domain service (Google Apps) to manage and host personal email accounts for my forml.com domain. This gives me all the wonderful features of Gmail (and all Google apps, including Google Talk), but with a custom domain name.
There are many benefits of a branded email address. But after much deliberation I have decided to stop using a hosted domain and just go with a regular Google (gmail) account.
My new primary email address is pmayne @ gmail.com (without the spaces) but all mail sent to my paul @ forml.com address will always forward to my new address until I ever decide to not renew that domain (so don’t worry about changing your address books).
The main reason I decided to switch is I want a permanent email address. If in a few years I decided I don’t need the forml domain name anymore, then what? My email address is gone. Now being directly on Gmail, I’m set for life.
A few minor reasons:
Chat can be limited with Jabber services like Twitter.
Updates to the interface are behind the standard Gmail updates.
I finally got up and took advantage of all this amazing snow at Solitude ski resort. The day was epic for as long as my desk jockey legs could handle it. Thanks to my buddy Pat for hooking myself and bcrockett up and giving us the motivation to ride like we like to.
Our country is way over due for a change. A real change. Someone who is open and willing to do the right thing, to stand up for the American people. Someone who will be straight with us, stand by their word and fight for people who need a voice.
In Barack Obama’s first term, he sponsored a bill that required more transparency on government bids and earmarks. It creates a website that documents government contracts, grants, earmarks, and loans and allows them to be searched and openly inspected by the public. Accountability through technology was a key plank of my 2006 campaign and I was pleased to see Senator Obama write this bill and get it passed. He also took responsibility for transparency in his own office by disclosing his own earmark requests.
But I believe that corporate greed and its involvement in policymaking, along with political cronyism, have made it nearly impossible for the people to govern.
So, we fight amongst ourselves over the spin of political slogans and half truths. And so, we are divided. It is time for a change, and that is why I support Barack Obama for President.
I’ve been meaning to move my blog CMS for over a year, since I started using Wordpress on a few other sites. I quickly realized it’s much easier, better, faster and more flexible than Movable Type 3.1. I tried a test install of the latest Movable Type (4.?), but was left unimpressed. It looks like a big improvement, but still a few years behind Wordpress. Especially when it comes to plugins.
Wordpress is written in PHP, and even though I’m very junior when it comes to PHP, with all the documentation it’s easy to customize things how I want. I’m still working on a few customizations with my archive pages. I’m trying to re-create a page I had on MT, a single page with all of my posts, titles only - broken out by months and years. I’m close, expect it to be working in the next year or two.
I’m also working on the design. Currently I’ve tweaked up a template called Grid Focus to get my layout structure going. But I plan to re-design and re-code it all from scratch.
Also, I haven’t really announced my new site, informationdesigner.org, since I’m working on the design and structure there as well. The site focuses on inspiration and educational links regarding Actionscript 3.0, APIs and (interactive) information design. I’m also putting together useful snippets or examples of code using Actionscript APIs and Actionscript based navigation systems.
Oh snap, I just posted on my blog and didn’t include an accompanying image. That was a goal I’m letting go now as I feel it held me back from posting as much as I would have.
Last month Move Networks launched a new and improved website. Now featuring a promo video and HD sample content on the home page (make sure and view “large”) as well as News, Press Release, and soon to go live Blog sections.
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