New banner

Well I finally broke down and created a new banner for the blog...








so what do you think?

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Tank Tour

I was messing around with my video camera and iMovie the other night and made this simple and quick tour of my Reeftank.

TV Shows & Movies on Mac

Why buy a television, cable or rent DVD's when you can get all the same content online, and most of it for free?

Joost is set up like a tv with cable - they bost over 20,000 shows.

Hulu.com - this site streams content from many major studios - both TV shows and movies such as Nip/Tuck, The Office and The Simpsons. One thing I love about this site is many of the shows are closed captioned, having a deaf wife, I've become sensitive to how much online media is unaccessible to her because she cannot understand what's being said.

Many of the channels and studios also stream their own content online - one example is South Park.

and lastly there is iTunes as well - now offering rentals of many movie titles, they also offer lots of tv shows, and have a season pass feature. The biggest reason to use iTunes to purchase content is that it becomes portable if you have an iPod or iPhone.

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Use Mac for anything challenge...

Lately I've been kicking around the idea of using my Mac for every task in my daily life - from waking me up with alarm clocks, to reading news, to planning my meals and making shopping lists - everything. I will be blogging over the next few weeks as I come up with new and creative ideas on how to use my Mac. If you have any thoughts or suggestions, please drop me a line.

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Daily running apps

So lately I've been loading up on the applications I use daily on my mac. I currently use my MacBook Pro (first gen) for working at home as well as everything else I do. My "work PC" is really a Dell D610 running XP with SP2 and Office 03.

Since I'm not too fond of the Dell I have created a Virtual Machine in Paralles. It's running XP SP2 and Office 2003. I've loaded my VPN client on the VM and I can easily join my VPN and use my VM for all my work needs and still have my Mac and Mac apps available for use. Very handy - everything is stable and runs very fast.

On my day to day use of my mac I found myself using these apps most frequently:


Skitch - this is for taking quick screen shots, annotating them and uploading to my .mac or weblog quickly and easily.
Cover Sutra - this little app I never imagined I'd use as much as I do - but anytime I'm working I have iTunes playing my favorite music - this app lets me rate, pause, skip all very quickly from the keyboard - and it has growl support.
Growl - this little gem is one of the best apps for the mac - it's a notification app that shows various info in the corner you decide. Things like mail messages, tweets, iTunes music - the list goes on and on.
Typinator - just recently got this in a bundle purchase, but basically you program key "words" and they expand to something else - example, to get my email i type eem and it expands to my email address.
Twitterific - I've become a twitter junky lately, and this app I have found to be my favorite twitter app so far.
Caffeine - this app keeps the mac from screen dimming while I am in the middle of watching some video on YouTube or some other non standard Apple video app. Keeps the screensaver from activating as well. I use this all day while I work.
Hazel - I use my desktop as a dumping grounds - this app does a wonderful job of keeping it tidy for me.
Spanning Sync - I use this in conjunction with another application that runs on my Windows VM to sync my outlook calendar with my google calendar and then my iCal with the Google calendar, not the mose elegant but all my work appointments are synced on my iPhone.

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update

been a while since I have updated. All is well - had bronchitis, then had family visit and have been working a ton. I'm planning to start updating this more...

Stay Tuned!