I mentioned earlier that I had installed VMWare Fusion on my MacBook. One of my objectives with this was to be able to run Windows Live Writer on my Macintosh for editing this blog.
You might rightly point out that there are plenty of blog editors for the Macintosh, some of them reasonably good. However…I’ve tried several of them, and they don’t work quite as well for my purposes as Live Writer does. So…how did things go?
Everyone knows, of course, that you can run Windows applications on a Macintosh. When Macs started shipping with Intel processors this became almost a no brainer. Boot Camp is the most obvious way to achieve the “Windows on a Mac” experience, but is a bit of a brute force approach: when you boot your machine, it is either a Macintosh or a Windows based system, not both at the same time.
Being new to the Macintosh, I’m “discovering” things for the first time that are ancient history for most Mac users. That is entirely to be expected. But I must admit I totally mis-diagnosed a mysterious email attachment I received today.
I mentioned in my previous post that I have subscribed to .Mac, Apple’s online service for file sharing, email, and so forth.
One of the neat things .Mac can do is automatically synchronize your Mac’s address book, email, and calendar so that you can access it using a web browser on any computer. I was trying to figure out why my MacBook’s address book entries weren’t showing up in the .Mac web interface, and finally read the little notice on the site saying that synchronization was temporarily down.
I’ve had my Mac for a couple of days now, and I’m having fun with it. Since it’s a laptop, it is often more at hand then my main PC. That, coupled with a somewhat intriguing calendaring and address book application, has convinced me to migrate my email.
27 years ago, I bought an Apple II+. That was my first computer, and I have many fond memories of its 16 kilobyte wonder.
When the Macintosh came out in 1984, I really wanted one. Unfortunately, it was several thousand dollars too expensive, and I had already committed to spending several thousand dollars on a Unix based machine. Years went by: I bought an IBM compatible machine for business related reasons, and eventually ended up working almost exclusively with various types of non-Apple technology. Many Windows+Intel machines have taken their place in my home, and hundreds more have served their role in my place of work.
My Mom’s 85th birthday was yesterday. My sister Judy pulled together a surprise party, and as many of us kids as could make it were there.
Folks who live in really big cities because they *want* to live there are, in my opinion, kind of weird. But I can sort of see the appeal of being able to walk to trendy shops and restaurants, and particularly being able to make it to the office without driving. I can understand how that would be attractive, and if I didn’t prefer having a bit more space and privacy, I could even see living in an urban core.
Bill Gates has been traveling a bit recently, and was apparently doing a bit of touring in Africa. Unfortunately, his request for a Nigerian Visa was initially met with a somewhat rude refusal.
I heard several news reports regarding some study performed recently on Canadian attitudes towards immigrants. The conclusion was that Canadians are less tolerant than we used to be, and several of the news reports said we are “more racist”. They then cited such things as requiring Moslem women to reveal their faces for ID purposes when voting, and referenced our vaunted “cultural mosaic” political mantra.