After a year has passed, I’ve finally grown sick and tired of typing on that small, uncomfortable keyboard. I wanted a new one, preferably one that was ergonomically split. I went to Staples to buy my keyboard, as they had the best prices that I could find in a brief online search. When I got to the store, they didn’t end up carrying the old Elite keyboard, but they did have a newer, more spiffy one called the Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000, which conveniently was on sale.

This is the nicest, most comfortable keyboard I have ever used. It is virtually silent, and the keys fit my hands like a glove. The soft, fuzzy palm rest is a great addition, too. It came with software for Windows and Mac. I’m using it on my Mac now, and all the extra buttons work just as they should. The volume, browse forward/back, calculator, all work great. I will mention that the space bar is a little stiff when I push from the far end of either side. Hopefully that is simply because it is brand new. I’ll recommend this keyboard to anyone who prefers to compute in first class.

Lately, since I started using Entourage for my email, I decided to get myself a standalone RSS reader. I downloaded the free NewsFire app for Mac. It’s terrific. It’s lightning fast, and I’ve found that all of its default preferences are spot on. I particularly like it that every time I copy a RSS feed URL in my web browser, then switch over to NewsFire, the program is ready to subscribe to the new feed without naming it or hitting Paste! If you own a Mac and like to keep track of the latest site feeds, I highly recommend it.

Hearing of his death brought to mind an excellent quote of his. In one of his past routines, he explained how language is crafted with the intention to shape people’s thoughts and ideas. He cited that, “At some point in my life, toilet paper became ‘bathroom tissue’.” He went on to say that people had an extreme fear of aging, and how obnoxious it was for people to use phrases like, “80 years young”. The particular quote I’m thinking of came at the end of that speech: “Now, Thanks to the fear of death in this country, I won’t have to die…..I’ll ‘paaassssss aaawwwaaayyy’.” As you imagine, he said it quite mockingly. Too bad he really has “passed away”. He was the absolute greatest.

I’ll admit that a cold launch of Entourage is noticeably slower than the other programs. I did a memory test of Mail, iCal, and Address Book, and they totaled a use of 78 MB real memory combined. Mail.app alone was using 47 MB all by itself. In comparison, Entourage, after extensive use, used 78.5 MB of real memory — Roughly the same as the combined others.

At first run, my Mail data was imported with ease into Entourage. The address book was not so easy, and ended up doing most of it by cut/paste. I wasn’t able to find an exporter that would arrange my data so that Entourage would be happy with it. There is a sync option in Entourage for the Mac Address Book, but I didn’t try it.

In Entourage, I like the flexibility in assigning categories and rules to my mail. There is so much you can customize. Data searches are powered by Spotlight, which are lightning fast. I like how I get a message preview popup when mail arrives. That said, it would be nice if Office would use Growl as an option for popups, but it works just fine as-is. Personally, I like how Entourage stores all of my data in a single file on the hard drive, but this does create a burden with Time Machine. A single change of any kind to your information in Entourage will cause Time Machine to back up the whole Entourage data file again the next time it comes around. (This is one reason I chose to set Time Machine to backup manually.)

One possible annoyance to me is that there is no simple way to “auto Bcc” myself, or another address. I like to shoot a copy of my outbound mail to Gmail, so I can store it there, too. The only way to do this, that I’ve seen, is to create a Rule to redirect outgoing mail to another account. It does work, but it creates a duplicate message in your Sent mailbox for every piece of mail you send out. I can’t figure out how to automatically delete that extra copy, either.

My liking of Entourage mostly boils down to the fact that when I was a Windows user, I preferred Outlook 2003 to any other client. Entourage is the closest match to that on the Mac. It may not always behave in the same way that you have come to expect from Outlook, but it is a very powerful application in its own right. I plan to use Entourage 2008 exclusively for the near future on my Mac.

Fast-forward to today, and I’m hooked on Facebook! I prefer it to MySpace by about 10-to-1. I’ve become addicted all all of the apps you can add to Facebook. I’ve come to enjoy apps like: Word Challenge, Pieces of Flair, The Hatchery, Super Wall, Battle Masters, SimmBook, and so on. I find myself signing in several times a day to check up on things and to boost my standings.

The recent addition of integrated instant messaging in Facebook has only sweetened the deal. It works very well. I like being able to see at a single glance if I have any friends online, regardless of what page I’m viewing on the site.

While MySpace has grown stale to me, Facebook is evolving. I’ve read a few articles predicting a type of “Facebook fatigue” would eventually set in for most users. So far, for me, this has not been the case.

I love iTunes, and I frequently buy the iTunes cards at places like Target, so I load up on downloads. Despite having credits from those gift cards, I’ve bought my last two albums from Amazon. You browse the music just like any other Amazon product, and use a batch downloader that they provide to get your music (For Mac and Windows). After that, the 256k MP3 files are yours to do as you please. Sweet indeed.

Until Apple offers the same, I’m afraid I’m going to have to continue buying music from Amazon. It’s a shame on Apple’s part, considering iTunes is such a big player. If others feel the same way that I do, they are going to be in trouble some day if they don’t turn this around.

The following is my advice to Apple: Apple is riding so high today, with both the iPod and iPhone’s superstar product status. Considering that Apple and Intel are now all hugs and kisses, I would like Apple to turn the Mac OS loose for anyone to use on any Intel platform. Once 10.6 is ironed out, they could throw down the gauntlet to Microsoft and take Windows head on with the PC desktop market. The top exes at Dell have even said that they would sell the Mac OS to buyers, if Apple agreed with fair terms.

Considering my own Mac Mini is “Intel Inside”, I feel like anyone should be able to run it. Why does Apple want to fight it? Apple’s computers will still sell on their own awesome design merits. Still, I don’t think they’ll do it. Perhaps they suspect that Microsoft would yank their long-term commitment to future Mac versions of Office if they did this drastic maneuver. Who knows.

Despite all that, the best new feature, as far as I’m concerned, is Spaces. It is the one feature of the OS that I can’t function without. At first, I didn’t make much use of it, but over time, I have come to utilize a four-desktop system that makes me much more productive. I put my email and chat program on one desktop, web browsing on another, and iTunes on yet another. It is so much better than using a single desktop with all of my open applications in my way. Now, when I want to start something completely different than what I’m running, I switch to a new blank Space. And the ease of hitting F8 to see all of my Spaces at once is just great.

Spaces is so terrific that if you’re still using Tiger, I can’t help but feel sorry for you. I once tried disabling it, and Leopard suddenly felt like a caged animal. I know Linux has had an option for multiple desktops for a long time, and not everyone will agree that Spaces on the Mac is as great as I make it out to be. It depends on your computing habits. But for me, it’s absolutely wonderful!

The problem was, I had no idea about this new system. I kept trying to copy my bookmarks.html file between computers, only to find that when I loaded Firefox, the same old ones kept appearing in the browser. It took me a long time to nail down what was causing it, but after some research online, I found out that you have to go about this in a slightly different way.

First, within Firefox, choose Organize Bookmarks from the Bookmarks menu. Then, export your bookmarks from your source computer. You’ll find importing and exporting options within the pull-down icon displaying a star within the Organize Bookmarks Library window. You may notice that the file size of the exported HTML file is half the size that it used to be in the past with Firefox 2. (I don’t know the technicalities of why this is, but it’s all the better.) When you get to your source computer, choose to import bookmarks and use the HTML file as the source. Done. I only wish there was an option not to duplicate existing bookmarks. I found it necessary to delete all of my old ones before importing the new ones to avoid having a duplicated mess.

I was not aware of any of this until I failed repeatedly at trying to copy my bookmarks after upgrading to Firefox 3. This may explain why the Foxmarks extension has not yet been updated to support Firefox 3.

The available extension(s) for Firefox confuse me a little. I like using the traditional Del.icio.us Bookmarks extension, which simply puts two buttons on your toolbar (this extension still is not compatible with Firefox 3.0). At the same time, the site also has another extension, called Del.icio.us, which is much more bulky. It adds a sidebar, and integration with your local bookmarks. I don’t care for that much overlay. On top of that, while searching the site, Del.icio.us offered two local bookmarks to add to Firefox that uses some Javascript code to take you to the Del.icio.us site in a new tab, and you can add a bookmark to the page you were just viewing. Personally, I like the last approach the best. No extension is required, and it is very simple.

I do love the simplicty of the Del.icio.us site, but it feels like it’s in need of a bit of an overhaul. It is a little slow at responding sometimes, too, despite it’s lack of graphical flair. I still love it, and use it daily, it’s just that it’s starting to feel neglected by its owners. Hopefully that isn’t the case, Yahoo!

In the past couple of weeks, nearly every prime time show that I’ve taped on my DVR either has had a thunderstorm warning, amber alert, silver alert, or local election results on the screen during the show. It is ridiculous! I don’t care about any of those things! If I want live election results, I don’t expect to find them on the channel showing American Idol. If a bad thunderstorm is coming, then too bad. What do you want me to do? I’m already at home! If a child or old person has gone missing, then I probably can’t help you. The person you are looking for is not standing in middle of my living room, so I suppose I won’t be seeing them tonight.

I think I’m at the front of this complaint. I believe the voices against this will grow louder once it becomes more commonplace and obtrusive. This must stop immediately! It makes me feel like every channel is going to go the way of the TV Guide Channel, which today has about 1/4 of the screen still reserved for the program listings, while the other 3/4 are ads and pointless programming. Gimme a break!