Little bit of background. Erin’s photography business is doing well enough that we finally needed her to upgrade from her trusty iBook G4 that we bought during college for writing papers. It just is not up to the task of Photoshop actions or managing large iPhoto libraries of RAW images. So what to do.
My brother Nate and his wife Erica are in a situation where Erica was is in need of a laptop and neither of them uses the G5 tower that has been just sitting in their living room. So what to do. We traded almost straight up. Part of the arrangement is that I needed to upgrade the laptop and put leopard on it so that is what I have been summoning the courage to do.
Now I think that I could have figured it all out and it would have worked fine, but i did wimp out and looked up a guide online. The guide at ifixit.com was amazing and I took it all apart and put it back together in a little less than 2 hours. Now that little laptop has an extra 256mb of memory and a 160GB hard drive for any kind of media library that Erica might want to have.

As an Apple fan boy it is my duty to make sure that i keep tabs on everything that Microsoft and Apple do in their advertising. I absolutely hated the ads recently that had Seinfeld and Bill Gates being retarted in a shoe store. The new ads are somewhat better although if they are meant to counter Apple ads then I think that they missed their mark.

Sure you can argue success for the campaign simply because so many people are talking about it but here is my round up.

The Apple ads are successful because they are specific and point out flaws or stereotypes (for those of you still part of the dark side) with the competing product and then point out how the Apple product does it better. Easy to understand and has a purpose, ie our product is better than theirs.

The Microsoft ads really are just saying, all kinds of people use our Windows product, certainly a billion people cannot be wrong. Really? That is the best offense that you can muster up? Choose ours because lots of other people do? I think that is lame.

This is the ad that I think MS should have run. It might be a little more accurate…

So I have not posted here in a while. Actually not anywhere. I have been busy. Ok not really, but I did get some video work and due to the fact that I am working on my intel based MacBook Pro my previous versions of all of my video editing software did not work anymore.

Tonight I went to the Apple store which is 2 miles from my house. Not to be picky but the one that is 10 miles away is bigger and the staff is a little more knowledgable but who am I to complain? There are lots of you out there that do not have a little slice of retail heaven near you.

Anyway, so FCS2. There was a lot of confusion amongst the employees as to which upgrade package I could use. The first guy said I could get the cheaper upgrade and then call apple care and tell them that I have all of the software that makes up the suite. The downside of that would be that if for some reason apple care could not help me out, I would be out $500 and still have to buy software because of the open software policy.

It all worked out in the end so now I am posting while this behemoth is installing. 52GB later I will have some of the best visual tools available and can make whatever I want. The downside is that 52GB takes a long time to install hence the random post for no purpose other than to pass time. More later.

I just read Mark Artrip’s latest life update post and among the other items he mentioned that he refused to believe that twitter was cool. I do agree with his point about it breaking down into the most mundane details about peoples life, however I do like a steady stream of stuff to read and keep track of.

I dabbled with twitter for a while and then realized that it would only be cool if I was a web developer in New York or San Francisco and hung out with all kinds of bleeding edge Technorati, which I am not, do not, and do not. However, despite my friends all not being OCD or egotistical enough to post everything about themselves has not detracted my desire to track lots of things going on all throughout the day. Presenting my solution.

Here is the combination that I use to get my fix of constantly updated relevant news in an easy to read visual format. RSS Menu, Amigo, Growl. Now you might think that I was issuing commands at you friend but I was not. Click on those links or just read below for how I integrate their functions to make my desktop the most up to date relevant place for me.

RSS Menu is great. I have become a huge fan of subscribing to RSS feeds from blogs and news sources over the last six months. This is for me the best way to stay current on things that I care about. Whether it is the New York Yankees Headlines feed or the latest Apple rumors, I let other people do the hard work looking up and researching all of their crazy stuff and then cherry pick off the stuff that i care about.

I also use a program called Amigo which is billed as a Facebook notification program. It does exactly what it says and you get a little pop up every time one of your friends updates their status on Facebook which I must say for some of you is way to often for you to actually be doing any work when you say you are working. I do wish that it would let you do your own updates without having to go into the site, but maybe they will roll it out in another version. Something that I should tell you about this software is that it is kind of free. Actually, as long as you don’t mind being reminded every time you start up your computer how long you have been using Amigo without registering it, then it is free. I think it has been about 130 days or something like that. Let me do updates from my desktop and I will how about that.

Finally, there is the thing that makes both of these apps worth while. The Growl notification system plugin. This is definitely free although I do not know why. It is so handy for so many things. The way that this ties together is that every time one of these two programs updates or there is a new post or anything, a simple drop down (entirely customizable in the looks department) comes out of my menu bar with something like “new article for Uncrate” or “Nathaniel DeZago is in Afghanistan” or whatever. This is quite literally the program that keeps me up to date on everything because otherwise I would not know what is going on with all of my friends. Everyone posts on Facebook sometime, even the slackers out there like me and if you were using this, then you would know right away rather than the next time you actually take the time to go to Facebook. I also find that it is a good way to sort out if you want to take the time to go to a website or not. Since you can get a preview of the articles and headlines, I do not need to physically go to the blog and can keep right on working for real rather than going to check a news feed and then being disappointed.

So this is my Twitter. Sure it is not actually Twitter, but it is how I keep in touch with the constantly updating in real time world that I live in. Let me know what solutions you use for your own situation.

If you know what those initials mean then you probably do not need to read any further in this post. I watched Steve Jobs Keynote address yesterday as it was happening on MacRumors.com and I have to say that I am excited for all the stuff that will be changed a month from now.

I think that the changes to the .mac/me.com service are overdue and it will be great to have that kind of functionality no matter which platform I am on. As the person who is in charge of creating workflows for our smaller size organization this new service could be a super affordable option for sharing contacts and calendars across the country without having to manage an exchange server of our own. Exciting.

Then of course there is the iPhone. What else do you need in life? Well I could use one to begin with, if you happen to have any extra money that you want to send my way I will use it for that I promise. Anyway on the fly highlights of baseball games during the game? A possibly viable gaming platform without them even having to enter the “video game industry”? That all sounds like a winner to me. I just need it to not be on ATT. The two people out here that we know who have AT&T are always cutting in and out on their phones. Even though those coverage maps clearly show Gilbert as having 3G coverage, I am still a bit leary. Also I don’t have $300 for a phone, unless my boss were going to pay for it.

So did I add anything to the overall reaction to the Keynote address? Probably not. Am I really excited about pretty much every announcement including the tantalizing possibilities of Snow Leopard? Yes. I will have more posts later today, but I had to say something about this.

So I was browsing around and stumbled upon the unofficial apple weblog. At the very top of the page was a little post for an application called GrabUp. The description sounds good enough and so I went to the site and downloaded it.

What it does is let you do the typical screen grab command (command shift 4 for the uninitiated) and then it automatically uploads the shot to their server and puts the URL for the hosted image on your clipboard. This means that the image above was done with literally one click and two command functions.

For those of you who care about some of the more technical details it is a system preferences pane that resides up in your menu bar if you want it to which means that it also gives you really easy access to past screenshots through its drop down menu.

If you are into screen grabs like I am then this is a killer app that is free give it some love.

So I was at a meeting over at our building from 9:00am until 11:45am. Yikes! We talked about so much stuff it was ridiculous but hooray for two things: My MacBook Pro and Mind Node. Most of you will know about the first one because we all know that Apple rocks my socks but less well known is this software called Mind Node.
I think that I might actually live up to my promise of including some or all of the little free add ons that I have that make my life so much easier on my mac. There are a lot and i will include links on the side bar so that they will always be there.