Mac Net Journal

My training to run the Tacoma Marathon in May contnues into its seventh week tomorrow, and today I just finished doing my longest run in more than 20 years - a 12-mile tour of Tacoma. Somehow on this rainy weekend I managed to run for almost two hours without any major bouts of wind and rain. Now it is time to settle down for the evening and let the body recover. Next weekend I run a half marathon!

I missed this last week: Top tools for writers
Saturday, February 24, 2007, 10:05 PM

Wired wrote last week about top gadgets for creative and working writers. There are some worthwhile tools there, but they left out a couple of major tools from this writer's tool kit - a solid MacBook Pro and a copy of Tinderbox.

One take on Google Apps vs. Office
Saturday, February 24, 2007, 9:00 PM

There has been a lot of writing this week about Google's applications and the Google Apps Premier Edition. Wired News offers its take: Should you switch? My take so far - if you are willing to trust your data to Google, why not at least use the free versions? Will I take the leap? Not likely. I expect I will dabble with the Google apps, just as I dabble with gmail. I just have a hard time imagining writing a book using Google apps.

Here is another take from the Google Operating System blog: Google Docs & Spreadsheets vs. Microsoft Office

Excel tips galore
Tuesday, February 20, 2007, 9:49 PM

Lately I find myself living in two major applications - Tinderbox on my Mac and Excel or the NeoOffice equivalent on both my Mac and my PC at work. If you find yourself living more and more in Excel as well, today's Excel tips and tricks roundup from Lifehacker will be useful.

Need to open an MS Office 2007 file on your Mac?
Tuesday, February 20, 2007, 9:43 PM

Here is one simple solution of sorts for opening a new .docx format MS Office 2007 Word file on your Mac, even though the file type is not backward compatible.

ArsTechnica reviews Adobe Lightroom
Tuesday, February 20, 2007, 9:42 PM

ArsTechnica does a thorough review of Adobe Lightroom and comes to a predictable conclusion - it does some things better than Aperture, and it has plenty of room for improvement, even in simple actions such as sharpening images: Lightroom: the Ars Technica review.

Ultra-portable digital memory card readers for photographers
Monday, February 19, 2007, 11:48 AM

Mobile Mac: (Card) Reading is fundamental
Dan Frakes looks at four ultra-portable memory card readers for digital photography on-the-go.[MacCentral]

Aperture vs. Lightroom
Monday, February 19, 2007, 11:34 AM

Over on the MacDevCenter this is an interesting week-long series starting today with the official release of Adobe Lightroom - a blow-by-blow comparison by a pro photographer of how the workflow works under Aperture vs. Lightroom.

I will be reading this to see how it compares to the way that I work with my images in iView MediaPro.

One of the worst things about having written a disaster book
Saturday, February 17, 2007, 7:13 AM

One of the worst things about having written a book about disasters in Washington state's history is that it means when you wake up in a hotel room in Wenatchee, you are many times more likely to remember that one of the largest earthquakes in state history took place just up the Columbia River from here: The 1872 Entiat Earthquake.

Off I go to do some last minute winter birding near the Canada border...

Installing a slew of Apple updates
Thursday, February 15, 2007, 9:37 PM

If you are like me and you are installing the new round of updates from Apple tonight, be sure to do a full backup of your system before getting started.

New Mobile Mac blog - subscribed
Thursday, February 15, 2007, 9:34 PM

Dan Frakes has rolled out a new blog about Mobile Mac's. I'll be watching this one...

More ironic auto names
Sunday, February 11, 2007, 10:13 PM

There is irony in the fact that a gas-guzzling pickup that is helping contribute to global warming is called the Tundra. What is it again that global warming is doing to the real tundra?

Of course, the hypocricy doesn't end there. After all, the Tundra comes from Toyota, the same company that paints itself green with the Prius.

My longest run in 20 years
Saturday, February 10, 2007, 10:09 PM

For the second weekend in a row, I did my longest run since I was a teenager today. Last weekend I covered 9 miles and felt pretty good. Today I ran 10 miles and felt like my legs were lead by the time I got up the hill to my house at the end of the run. The difference between this week and last - I ran four days in a row this week, rather than resting on the day before my long run. I won't do that the next time I do a really long run - a 12-miler in two weeks.

One word of advice if you think this is the year you want to try training for a marathon. Hal Higdon's Web site has a very workable schedule for beginning marathoners.

On iTunes under Vista - Whose fault?
Tuesday, February 6, 2007, 7:13 PM

I keep seeing opinions from bloggers about Apple's advice to Windows users to hold off switching to Vista if they want to be sure that their iTunes tunes will keep working under the new Microsoft OS. While it is possible that Apple missed the boat and didn't test iTunes enough under Vista before its launch, hasn't anyone thought that Microsoft may have caused this problem itself? Was iTunes working fine under beta versions of Vista? Was something changed in the final release build of Vista to disable iTunes?

Nah, Mr. Living in Denial Bill Gates would never instruct his employees to use underhanded tactics to try and sully the name of Apple. Of course not...

Steve Jobs: Free our music from DRM
Tuesday, February 6, 2007, 7:04 PM

This has to be one of the smartest PR ploys in ages - Steve Jobs' open letter to digital rights management critics, and plea for record labels to free tunes from DRM

Driving Bill Gates even crazier - cancel or allow?
Monday, February 5, 2007, 11:05 PM

The latest Get a Mac ad is truly funny, as pointed out on MacDailyNews tonight. I doubt it will stop the money train that is sure to keep running smoothly for Microsoft, or that any real hard core Windows users will switch because of a clever ad, but it still makes me laugh.

Meanwhile, Bill Gates can laugh all the way to the bank, since I bought a copy of Windows XP to install on my MacBook Pro running under Parallels last week. Why XP instead of Vista? Simple. My workplace won't be switching to Vista for months, possibly not even this year, so XP is a better choice to maintain compatibility with work. And if it weren't for the limitations of trying to connect to the work VPN under Mac OS X, I wouldn't bother with Windows at all. Lucky for Microsoft that workplaces continue to standardize on Windows systems, simply because they don't know any better.

Switching to Palm to paper - a trend?
Monday, February 5, 2007, 10:17 PM

I have known for quite a while that I was in the minority since I still rely on a Palm, but articles like this one make me wonder how small my minority is: From Palm to paper - Capital radio host ditches PDA, joins low-tech revival

Meanwhile, I use my Treo 650 - OK, two Treo 650s - every day. One for work, one for life. I love Hipster PDAs, I carry 3x5 cards to take random notes, but no matter how much I love the feel of pen on paper, I can't check a Web sites for a schedule of upcoming community meetings on a piece of paper.

The raving lunacy of Bill Gates
Saturday, February 3, 2007, 1:43 PM

John Gruber nails the raving lunacy of Microsoft's co-founder in Lies, Damned Lies, and Bill Gates. Gates does seem to have a real propensity for overstatement and inaccuracy at the very least, and a loose grasp on reality. Maybe that is what happens when you have more money than sense.