Boy this video (from Feb 2006) just blew me away. When you think for a moment the implications it has of fundamentally altering the way humans interact with computers - amazing. The desktop metaphor becomes even more intuitive while at the same time much more expansive. Since Apple's already put this to use in the iPhone, will it be much longer before it's added to the 'books? or a tablet PC?

Ok, it's so cold right now that there's ice or something forming on my Yahoo! weather widget. Seriously though - it's supposed to depict blowing snow but I think the iciness of it is telling. In our part of Canada, the weather's been so warm this year that as of January 14 there was new grass coming up in people's lawns - enough so you could see the green. Pretty weird since, well, it is January and it is Canada (albeit close to the 49th parallel). Anyway, winter finally decided to show up on Jan 15th with a snowstorm (not too much snow) but the cold that followed is downright rude. As you can see from the widget it's -14°C (7°F) but the windchill makes it feel like -23°C (-9 °F) out. Tomorrow morning is expected to be -19°C (-2°F) with a windchill to -31°C (-24°F). They call this weather system a Siberian Express. Ewwww. Not fun after the balmy +7s or so we've been used to.

And we come to my guilty little secret now - so if this is climate change, where winter in Canada doesn't really kick in until mid-January, well - I kind of don't mind that at all. It's easier on heating bills, it's more comfortable to be out and around. Winter with snow and cold starting in November used to depress the hell out of me but now I can handle the 70-90 days of winter. Where I live, the winters were far from idyllic anyway. The cold is damp and works it's way right down to your bones. But it wasn't always so.

As a kid, I remember spending tons of time outside playing in the snow or skating in the park. But those days were the frosty dry cold, where the air is so cold that the snow gets squeaky; the sky a brilliant blue but glittering from snow dust blowing off the roofs of houses. That was ok, and we dressed for the cold anyway (or rather our moms dressed us) in layers and snowsuits, hats, mitts scarves, until we could barely move, and then threw us out into the yard. Those winters were Canada. But then it got a bit milder, the winters seemed to become soggy and cold and unpleasant. More icy than snow packed. Hard to walk in, hard to drive in, hard to want to be outside in. And then...

It just seemed to warm up so that winter came later and later. Until now, people wish for it but the chance of us having a white Christmas is around 30% or so. (A far cry from the 80% chance it used to be maybe 10 years ago).

And it really is a guilty pleasure because although I secretly relish a late winter/early spring, intellectually I know it's wrong, wrong, wrong, to have green grass in Canada in January. Brrr. That's the shiver of anticipation knowing that I can enjoy the mild winters right now but there will be consequences. sigh I just don't want to go back to the slushy messy winters - maybe it wouldn't be so bad if we could return right back to the ones of my childhood. Well for now, it almost seems like it outside. Time to toss another blanket on the bed and make sure everyone's cozy. It gonna be a cold one tomorrow.

Well, it's been a while since I last listed a bunch of apps that I simply could not live without on my mac. I figured it's probably time for an updated list so here we go:

1. WindowShades X - by Unsanity. ($10 US). Still using it. Still lovin' it.
2. Himmelbar - by Softbend (free). I'm still using Himmelbar but less and less as I've found new kid on the block Overflow to be just a tad more useful.
3. Overflow - by Stunt Software. ($14.95) I picked this up as a freebie from the Mac App a Day website last December and I'm finding that it's very useful for people like me who need to organize their apps in sensible palattes. Plus it keeps your Dock a manageable size - bonus.
4. Google notifier - by Google (free). Updated to include alerts for both your Gmail and you Google Calendar on your menu bar. Is very nice!
5. NewsFire - by David Watanabe ($18.99 US). Still my hands-down choice for a desktop RSS Reader client.
6. Yummy FTP - by Yummy Software ($25 US) OK this app beats Cyberduck and Transmit (although Cyberduck is still a good choice for a free app). The speed is just blazing fast on file transfers.
7. Mac Janitor - by Brian Hill (free). I'm still using this handy app.

And that's pretty much it in a nutshell. I'm always on the lookout for productivity apps so let me know if there's one out there that just shouldn't be missed.

What a sweet, sweet device! I've often commented how nice it would be to have an all-in-one handheld rather than needing some sort of tech devices bandolier to accommodate phone, ipod, pda, etc. Yes, I know there are Treo's and Blackberries - but the iPhone is like someone just went "hey man, what would you want to be able to do with a handheld device?" and just made it happen. This is convergence at it's sweetest. The iPhone converges the iPod video, a cellphone, a digital camera, and wireless web into one sleek device with all functions accessed by touchscreen. Hmmm, this is going to be one device that will almost certainly require screen protectors if you want to keep the screen in mint condition. Checking out the demos on apple.com I noticed the interface seems quite intuitive (no surprise there) and I just love that the device know to present information in portrait or landscape mode depending on how you turn it around. Outstanding.
It's definitely going to be my must-have device for 2007.

I finally made some time to get a backup system in place for my work and home machine. I had purchased an acomdata 250GB external drive some time ago and had cloned my mac drive to it when upgrading to Tiger but had never since decided quite how to accommodate both machines.

Initially I was backing up my mac laptop to my iPod - which works great by the way (and saved my ass not too long ago when my drive died) - but I still felt uncomfortable having my work machine only backed up there and felt really uncomfortable not backing up my home system at all.

Ok, back to setting up the external drive, I decided to go with 2 partitions: one HFS+ for the mac and the other an NTFS for the PC. Partitioning it was easy using the mac's Disc Utility. I simply split the drive into one HFS+ volume and one FAT32 (the only windows compatible format available via Disc Tools) volume. I figured I'd just reformat the FAT32 volume to NTFS using XP - but of course, the PC balked at recognizing the drive. sigh

So a little research on the web led me to an application by Mediafour called MacDrive (very highly recommend this by the way) which allows PCs to recognize and read mac discs and drives. Very nice. They have a free 5-day demo which I downloaded and installed and it worked like a dream. Voila, there was the Work Backup volume indicated as a mac drive and the Home Backup volume - which I was then able to reformat as NTFS. Incidentally, why reformat to NTFS? Well, FAT32 has a filesize limitation - it won't read/write files over 4GB in size, and backups will be considerably larger than that.

So once the drive was set up, I used Retrospect to backup my mac and XPs backup utility to back up the PC. By the way, the backup utility on XP home is not installed by default. You either have to install it from your XP Home CD-Rom or if your vendor did not include the software you can download the utility here.

Ahh, a bit of effort but well worth it for the peace of mind.

Well, I hope everyone had a lovely Christmas and New Years. December was pretty much a write-off for me in terms of "spare time" for blogging. I swear (and it's now down in writing) that next Christmas I'm going to set up a Christmas project (with timelines, task lists, milestones etc.) so that I can get to mid-December and be done with the madness. Maybe even have a bit of time to kick back for a bit and enjoy the holidays. It such a stressful time for me that pretty much as soon as Christmas was over I ended up getting a nasty cold that came on full force on New Year's Day (just lovely) so just when I had time to do some extra work around the house I ended up completely devoid of any energy. Ah well - it's not all bad. I actually got some rest on my extended holidays.

I can't complain however, even though it was a whirlwind of activity (and over much too soon) I am humbled by the yummy tech gifts that came my way. A lovely widescreen lcd monitor to replace my aging 17" flat panel BenQ; and an iPod shuffle clip-on for when I'm out running. Both very useful and very much appreciated.

Of course, the new monitor didn't fit on my old crappy computer desk so I ended up buying a new desk too.

Yes that's me (with D's handy dandy power driver)! Only 6 hours of putting the new desk together later and now there's more room in my office at home plus I got the chance to go through all the junk that had been accumulating and toss a bunch of stuff out. I've got seriously a bankers box load of 3.5" floppys with the most archaic stuff on them - heh - I don't even have a floppy drive on my computer anymore. (ok well I'm not quite done going through all my junk but we're getting there). Getting organized - what a great way to start the new year.