Trying To Find The Road Not Taken

Barack is Mac, and Pac?

Apparently, America’s president-elect is a Mac user, a Pac Man fan, and likes sticking stickers on one’s laptop. I really dig the pac-man eating the Apple logo. Is that a Speck clear MacBook cover? Commenters: let the Apple/Obama fanboy flamewars fly!

Incidentally, he also uses a Crackberry. And Biden is evidently a fellow Mac user, at least on the road. And as long as we’re on the subject: I met Al Gore briefly last week, and he was packin’ an iPhone. Although, I was so star-struck at the moment, I may have hallucinated that part along with the swarms of solar-powered United Nations black helicopters. DISCUSS.

POTUS uses a Mac (9to5mac.com, via friends list)

Update: Rob Beschizza at Boing Boing Gadgets tackled this burning! hot! politechnical news! earlier today.

(Via Boing Boing.)

For those who know me, you know I’m just smiling from ear to ear.

I just got finished reading on the TUAW about Mars Edit 2.2. I have yet to settle on a desktop blogging application but have been leaning towards Mars Edit for a while now.

What most excited me was the mention of a mobile version of MarsEdit.

Mobile fans take note — Daniel is working on an iPhone version of MarsEdit, and it will be released as soon as he is satisfied with the quality of the final product.

It’s been a really long time since I’ve updated. After my back went out I got into a real funk and just feeling down. I also noticed my energy level was just dropping. This past week I realized I’ve been drinking coffee every single day since I started my new[er] job. For me caffeine will work for a while but then it will actually make me more and more exhausted. This week I’m taking a break from coffee. I’m having green tea and herbal tea only. The other benefit to cutting back on coffee is, I like my coffee very light and with half and half. Needless to say this is a good elimination from my daily routine.

I’ve decided to use iCal to track my health because I have it available to me at work, at home and on my iPhone. It’s very simple, I don’t have to pre-enter information and create databases. I’ve tried Traineo, but it didn’t track food as well as I’d like. I’ve tried Gyminee, and it’s ok but a pain to enter new foods in. I’ve also tried FitDay which also you need to pre-enter foods. If I’m spending my time entering foods, it’s a waste of my time.

In iCal I’m tracking my food for the day, exercise, weight and any other health related items in a separate calendar called “Health”.

I’ll post an update at the end of the week as to how this is working.

I have to document this week, just so I can look back at this in the future and truly appreciate how much I packed in. If you’ve written me, I was supposed to get back to you, I said I’d send you something, please don’t take offense, the week was very, very busy.

Work:

This week at my job we launched a national ad campaign website (not my design), completed the collection of a large amount of materials for a multimedia project, and 3 email campaigns sent out including one which had 27 unique pieces of content that were not dynamic. And in comparison to my boss and co-workers I think my load was lighter than theirs. Even up to Friday night at 6:00 we were still finishing up projects. Wow! I kept saying to people, the weather got nice and the projects just came rolling in.

Personal:

Well I didn’t have much of one until Friday night. Wednesday I took on waking up early. Thursday was semi-successful and Friday, well Craig and I both slept in thinking it was Saturday.

On a fun note. Friday night I met up with a fellow knitter who was thinking about buying a MacBook or MacBook Pro. We met at Starbucks and I showed her around the operating system, answered questions and had her try mine out. She was pretty excited, I told her to think about it, don’t rush. She was making the switch over from a Dell laptop to Apple, and it is a big decision.

This morning I got an email at 7:40, “I’m ready let’s go!”. We met at the Apple store in Danbury at 10am, and purchased her a MacBook Pro 15″. We left it with them to transfer over her files from her old Dell. I headed home and later in the afternoon we met at Panera to go through setting up her email, transferring bookmarks, importing photos to iPhoto and making sure iTunes was all set and running. She’s really excited and I got an email tonight that she’s having a lot of fun.

I’ve successfully switched 7 people from Windows to Macintosh. No complaints.

Goals:

I’m still working on getting up early. Might kick back my wake up time so it’s not quite as aggressive. I want to be successful not insane. As Colin reminded me, “Never give up”. Absolutely true! There’s no time table, no one’s going to punish me and it’s truly a win-win situation.

And… I will be posting on Tuesdays a Weekly Weigh-In, as part of TheDiet. In the sidebar I’m going to keep track of my exercise on Traineo.com. This week I made some much better choices food wise than I have in a while. All in time.

Last but not least, we watched the Transformers movie tonight. It was pretty good, dialogue sucked, but the effects were amazing. I’m such a sucker for cars and driving scenes. Speaking of I’ll be at the NY International Auto Show on Friday for the opening. Drop me a line if you’ll be there that day.

Spaces @ Work, originally uploaded by criana.

I love the new Spaces feature in Leopard, aka Apple OS 10.5.

1) Lotus Notes
2) VMWare Fusion
3) iTunes
4) Apple Mail, Safari and iChat

I’ve gotten pretty quick with using the keyboard shortcuts to jump around screen.

[Update: I stopped using Spaces while at work, it became more of a pain to remember which window had what folder view open and having to move back and forth. I might revisit this in the future with a more concrete plan for each space]

Craig invested in the Apple Bluetooth Headsets for our iPhones which came with the Apple Dual Dock. This dock has a USB cable coming directly from it to your computer and charges both your headset and your iPhone. Great, right?

All seemed to be well in our dual dock land, until about a week after getting them. For Craig using it with his iMac, it would actually cause kernel panics when he quit, it wouldn’t sync when he put his iPhone in it, and it would repeatedly tell him it was an accessory not designed for his iPhone.

I had been doing ok, but I also had not updated my iPhone to 1.1.1. Since updating to 1.1.1 I now have the same problems.

I searched around on the Apple Discussion boards and found several other people with the problem. The not so good news was, no one seemed to have resolved the issue and further more their attempts to contact Apple did not go well.

One user said the Apple support technician told him it was normal.I stopped writing here about an hour ago to search on MacRumor’s Forums too. Many people with the issue, but we all seem to be holding out for a software update.

Anyone else out there with this issue? Did you find a resolution?

Technorati Tags:Apple, iPhone, Bluetooth, Syncing

As a new owner of an iPhone, and a previous Treo owner, I decided to use AppInstaller. I’m really enjoying the different 3rd party apps.

These are the apps I have loaded:

FiveDice
Colloquy
MobileChat
SummerBoard
Blackjack
iLigh
iSplit
Lights Off
My eBay
Pirate
Pushr (removing this)
Soduko
Tetris
VNotes

The first time I added apps it was a bit buggy and things were crashing. I uninstalled things, and started over. All seems to be working smooth now. I’m holding out on updating to 1.1.1. until the 3rd party groups have been able to get things working again.

My personal take on Apple crippling all this; if Apple is going to release their own apps (widgets) great, then tell us. If your not, it’s ok to take a “we’re not going to support the apps”, that’s the same stance as Palm has taken, but don’t cripple devices all together.

It will be interesting to see how the next few months pan out.