This is one of the funniest, most ridiculous videos I have ever seen. It is a video from 1978 of William Shatner singing Rocket Man. I have had it on my list of favorites on YouTube for some time, and tonight I played it again, and almost fell out of my chair. It’s a must-see. Ha!
With all of the hoopla surrounding the presidential election this year, choosing a new president could be as easy as a visit to Glassbooth.org. Check it out. Take a slick online questionnaire of your beliefs on a range of issues. The website will then tabulate a scorecard of which candidates would best represent you. Pretty cool!
Does anyone remember the cool comic-strip chat program on Windows that Microsoft called Comic Chat? I was just remembering that program today, and decided to look up a few screenshots to remember it by. At the time, I used to think this was the coolest program. Microsoft made the program in 1996, but killed it after the last release in 1998 (version 2.5). It was so much fun to play with! I wish they’d make a new version of this, perhaps web-based, that we can all enjoy. What fun it would be.
I hate Wal-Mart! It’s funny looking back where I had said I hated Kmart. While that is still true, Wal-Mart has pretty much taken the place of Kmart as the store of choice for white trash America. In North Carolina, four out of five people who shop there look so grossly unhealthy that they look like they just walked out of a concentration camp. I am very serious. Some customers typically look outright puke-inducing.
Wal-Mart is always slam-packed. Parking and shopping are a logistical nightmare. They install nearly 50 checkout lanes in the supercenter, but I never see more than about 8 in use at any given time…if that. Waiting in line always takes a whole 10-15 minutes before you can even place your items on the counter. There are always people ahead of you buying $300 worth of milk, Sam’s Choice soda, and other stupid nonsense.
The store greeters almost never say hello to me when I walk in, but always have to harass me on the way out by looking at my receipt all the time. Then you have to work your way past a slew of charities and girls selling cookies on your way back to your car, which is parked a half-mile away.
And almost worst of all; Wal-Mart and their owners think bad language in music is sinful, and only sell watered-down versions of popular CDs. Tampering with an artist’s work should be illegal. Absolutely never, ever buy CDs or movies at Wal-Mart! Ever! I’d much rather shop at Target. The cleanliness and style of Target is simply no comparison to the likes of evil Wal-Mart, its disgruntled employees, or its customers.
MySpace has finally made some improvements its famously shabby interface. They put a new Page Themes option front and center when you now view your home page. I decided to try it. It is far and away better than the old interface, which completely sucked. I recommend all users enable this. Keep in mind that these themes are for your own home page, not your profile page.
Once you enable page themes, you are able to preview and choose themes from a cool AJAX-style slider. Of course, you can go with no theme, while still using the new layout. This new layout reminds me a lot of Facebook, especially after MySpace added friend updates, and other such goodies which I have been accustomed to with Facebook. Spaces are organized neatly, and the ads seem to be a little more tame. I really can’t say if the ads are calmer in their content, but their placement feels less intrusive than previously. I think MySpace has finally evolved into something actually usable.
Engadget has featured a cool chart comparing the features of Mac OS X Leopard to Windows Vista. See it here.
In mid-2007, the day that I bought my Mac, I also purchased Quicken 2007. I’d written in a past post about how I prefer using Quicken to Money on Windows. While that is certainly true, and Quicken for Windows is a great program, the Mac version falls far short. To be fair, the program does have powerful features and reporting capabilities, but the look and feel of Quicken on the Mac makes me always want to hurry up and be done so I can close it.
The Quicken manual says that version 2007 was made for Mac users, by Mac users. I have to tell you, it doesn’t feel that way at all. It feels very awkward compared to most every other Mac program that I’ve used. Overall, I can truly say it is the only program on my Mac that I take almost no pleasure in using.
My biggest complaint is the speed (or lack of). It is the absolute slowest program on my computer. Its startup and general response time is abysmal. Granted, Quicken 2007 is not universal binary, and must run in Rosetta mode on my Intel Mac. This could be to blame for some of the slow response, but it is worth mentioning that I have not experienced any similar slowdown with Office 2004, which also needs Rosetta.
Visually, I don’t care for the permanent toolbar that is hammered across the top of my screen when Quicken is in the forefront. It is quite bulky and the default set of icons I found to be somewhat unnecessary. Toning the toolbar down to a few useful items took me a while. Another major visual impairment is that my register windows only seem to remember their size and location when they feel like it. All too often, I launch the program to find my checking register scrunched up to a small rectangle for no good reason. In addition, I can find no way to change the default font for my register, which I desperately want to. The Insights window could use many visual improvements, starting with changing the small narrow font, which is the same used throughout the whole program! It looks bad and is sometimes hard to read.
There aren’t enough options to customize the program. One thing that is very annoying is that when I load the program, it asks me if I want to review my upcoming transactions. It asks the same question every time, even though most of the time I leave the upcoming transaction list open anyway. So it is already on the screen when the dumb program asks me at launch if I want to see it. Why isn’t there an option that I can set so that Quicken will never ask me to review upcoming transactions at startup?
The folks at Quicken.com are hush about a 2008 version, although 2008 versions for Windows shipped late last year. The same dull message has been on their Mac product page for months now. It vaguely states that information would be coming at a later date regarding future products. I think Quicken Mac needs a complete top-to-bottom overhaul. Start over with new code with native Intel chip support and a fresh interface. With a new Quicken Online service rolling out, some in the Apple community have questioned the company’s future support for a Mac line of products. Time will tell.
Meanwhile, I have been intrigued with the offerings from iBank and MoneyDance. I haven’t tested MoneyDance, but its feature list is impressive, and I’ve read a 2008 version is on the way. I have actually tried iBank 2, and it is indeed fast and clean. However, the $50 price tag feels way too steep for the simplicity of the program, and I don’t want to shell out more money after buying Quicken last summer. That said, version 3 of iBank is being released as a beta any day now, and looks to be a vast improvement with many new features. I’ll give it a try when it is finalized. By that time, I’m sure I’ll have had enough of Quicken 2007.
I have been using Leopard for over a week now and I have some first impressions to share. I think it is a really cool operating system, although Tiger pretty much did everything I needed beforehand. However, there are some features that I have been using that make me not want to go back to using Tiger.
The crucial feature in Leopard for me is Cover Flow. I mentioned in a recent post how I’d been on an uploading spree with Flickr. In deciding what photos were worth sharing, I turned to Cover Flow to flip through my photos and folders. It was the best experience at such work that I have ever had! This feature for me is my absolute favorite. Even on my Mac Mini, flipping through material in Cover Flow is as smooth as silk. Unbelievable. Quick Look has already shown to be a real time-saver as well, but I am less excited by it as I am Cover Flow.
The new Mail 3 is really good. I love the RSS feeds and have actually been using them! Previously, RSS feeds weren’t something I much cared about outside of the occasional visit to Google Reader. The reminders are just great, too. Small details like a progress bar for incoming and outgoing mail are certainly welcomed changes. Mail 3 also offers a variety of stationary for rich text messages, though I have no interest in that. As a whole, Mail 3 fits my needs perfectly. Since installing Leopard, I haven’t used Gmail nearly as much as I had prior, since I enjoy the new Mail so much.
The new Stacks feature, which fans your files upward from the Dock to show your files, is actually pretty cool. At first I was skeptical as for the need for this, but now I like realize the benefit. It can probably be customized to show something other than the Downloads folder, but I am happy with it as-is for right now.
Spaces is not much of a time-saver for me. I actually decreased the default number of Spaces from four, down to two. I have experimented with putting windows in either space and toggling between them. While it is a cool feature, I don’t run enough things at once to take advantage of this. Too often, I’ll move a program to another Space, only to later need to drag a file from a folder to that program, only to realize they are in two distant Spaces. The best I have found for my needs is to put Mail in the right Space all by itself, and leave the left one for everything else. I have pondered the thought of disabling Spaces all together, but will try to make use of it.
I’d like to tie a complaint of mine about the Mac OS to the Spaces feature, and this issue was present in Tiger as well. When I minimize a window to the Dock, and later use cmd-tab to cycle through the running programs, I want the minimized window to get back onscreen when I choose it this way, automatically. This behavior is what I am used to with Windows. But on the Mac, when I minus the Mail down to the Dock, but later want to toggle to it with the keyboard, it doesn’t reappear on its own! If I could have the option to set Mac OS to behave this way for the tab program switching, I would have little need to enable Spaces.
I still have not enabled Time Machine, or even researched my plan to partition my external hard drive. I will work on this in the future. For the moment, I am still backing up manually. One thing I will voice complaint about is that my USB hard drive randomly spins up without me provoking it. While using Tiger, this did not happen. Now, it is awakening itself regularly for an unknown reason, even though I know I am not using it.
Leopard has plenty more great features than what I have listed in this post. I just want to write and touch on my first experiences with some of the ones that I have come in contact with the most. As for Leopard, Apple should be releasing 10.5.2 any day now. From what I have read, this should be a very large update.
I absolutely can’t stand that TV commercial for the Swiffer WetJet mop where the woman, who is a terrible actress to begin with, debates on stage with what turns out to be a dripping mop. Who gets paid for this pathetic crap? The whole ad campaign with its stupid puns, and “we’re parting ways” lines, and the dripping mops they confront is downright annoying. I promise, nobody is amused!
Last week, I upgraded my Flickr to a Pro account. Since upgrading, I have been uploading lots of photos to my library. I decided to upgrade my version of the Mac Flickr Uploadr to version 3.02, (the newest as of this writing). This was a mistake. I had been happily using version 2.31. Prior to this experience, I’d never been one to rollback to an older version of anything. Flickr is now an exception for me.
The new Flickr Uploadr is extremely bloated. Quite buggy as well. My version 2 installer was 420 KB. That was it. The new version 3 installer is a whopping 20.2 MB! How is it possible to have an increase of that magnitude? That is insanely large for a batch file uploader.
It is certainly more flashy, but at what cost. New tags I type mysteriously disappear in the mid-word and later end up in my tag list on the Flickr site as a bunch of misspelled words. What is that about? It has crashed on me a couple of times, and it routinely gets hung up at some point during nearly every batch I have uploaded. I leave the room, thinking it is uploading its brains out, only to come back and hour later and it says, “27 of 100 photos did not make it. Retry?” Arg! That is so irritating, but sometimes I am glad the program is still responding at all. Also, my attempts to cancel a batch in progress have proven fruitless. It asks for confirmation, only to seem to get lost in some endless loop. I can say that I do like the drag-and-drop ability of version 3, but that is about all.
I erased the program and reinstalled version 2.31, which is so much faster! I have uploaded several batches since downgrading and the whole operation was so much quicker and easier, and I never had a failure. Everything now works as it should. It is supposed to be a simple batch file uploader! How much pizazz do you need? The new Uploadr is a great example of something good that they had to take way too far. What a mess.