I just came across this, and it was too funny to pass up…

The Flying Spaghetti Monster (or FSM to his followers) is a made-up deity created by Bobby Henderson last year to protest the Kansas Board of Education ruling to teach intelligent design in classrooms alongside of evolution.
The picture speaks a thousand words…

Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster

Flying Spaghetti Monster – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Technorati Tags: Flying Spaghetti Monster, FSM, Kansas School Board, Intelligent Design, Evolution, Religion

Since switching from Windows a few weeks ago, I came across a site called macZOT! (the crazy CAPS seems to be endimic here). Every now and then, they offer a free bit of software for the Mac. The catch is that for the software to be free, we in the blogosphere have to link to it. The application starts at it’s regular price, and drops 5 cents for each blog linking to it.

So, here is my contribution. The software today is SubEthaEdit from CodingMonkeys. It’s a collaborative writing application that looks pretty neat. All of your collaborators share the same text entry screen, and all of their updates show up on your screen live, and vice versa. This looks like it could be pretty useful.

The deal is provided by BLOGZOT 2.0 on MacZOT.com, who, along with the CodingMonkeys, are giving away $105,000 in Mac software if this succeeds.

So, why not help them out?

Technorati Tags: MacZOT, SubEhtaEdit, CodingMonkeys, Free Software, Mac, OS X

Taking a nap in the middle of the day does not imply laziness. Far from it… taking strategic naps has been shown to increase productivity and mental awareness.

British Airways (of all people!) has an interesting page up about taking strategic naps. May favorite part was a quote from Winston Churchill himself…

“You must sleep sometime between lunch and dinner, and no halfway measures. Take off your clothes and get into bed. That’s what I always do. Don’t think you will be doing less work because you sleep during the day. That’s a foolish notion held by people who have no imagination. You will be able to accomplish more. You get two days in one – well at least one and a half, I’m sure. When the war started, I had to sleep during the day, because it was the only way I could cope with my responsibilities.”
(Anthony, W., The Art of Napping, New York: Larson Publications 1997, p19)

Who am I to disagree? I’m off to bed…

Technorati Tags: Naps, Napping, Sleep, Winston Churchill, British Airways, BA

I’ve been hearing great things about ecto, and, given that I’ve been creating my blog posts manually via the Wordpress Dashboard, it seemed like a good idea to have a desktop app through which I can blog.

So, this is the first post I am writing through ecto. I like the fact that I can see multiple blogs simultaneously, and easily switch between them and write posts. It seems to have a nice editor interface, and the inclusion of Technorati tags is definitely a plus.
It’s a 20-day trial period, after which the software is about $18. There’s both a Mac and a Windows version, and if you buy a license for one, you can buy the other for half off. It seems that the OSX version is much more full-featured though, and I don’t think I’d splurge for both.

I’ll keep you guys posted on how the ecto thing works out.

Technorati Tags: blogging, ecto, Wordpress

Well, this is big news… It seems that Apple has released a public beta of a module that allows you to install Windows XP onto any of the Intel Macs. They’re calling it Boot Camp.

This is pretty neat. Before purchasing my Macbook, I was eagerly watching the homebrew progress of installing Windows XP onto Intel Macs. They had gotten pretty far, with Windows running but missing a few drivers for display and wireless networking.

Well, with Apple’s release of the Boot Camp beta, they include all of the necessary drivers. Everything works, except for the built-in iSight camera, and the keyboard backlighting.

This is pretty cool. I was getting nervous about having to drop $150 on a Student & Teacher edition of Microsoft Office for the Mac, which is necessary for what I do. Now, I can just load Windows XP and use my copy of Office for Windows on that.

Granted, this isn’t the best solution, but it is a stop-gap measure until I save enough for the Mac version. I’m still hurting from how much the Macbook cost me… welcome to the world of Apple.

Technorati Tags: Apple, BootCamp, WindowsXP

Well, after something like 15 years on Windows machines, I’ve finally taken the plunge.

Last night, I purchased a Macbook Pro. I’ve been eyeing the MacOS platform for a while now, waiting until the combination of price-point and features was optimal to make the purchase. With the release of the Macbook Pro, it seemed like the right time to try it out.

I got the lesser model (1.83 GHz) that goes for $2000. Thankfully, with my student discount, the Macbook was $1800. I spent quite a few hours last night transferring my music and pictures… about 15GB worth.

I did have trouble with iTunes… I’ve spent a lot of time rating and setting up my playlists on my PC, and on the initial transfer of files to the Mac, it seemed to have lost all of that work!

After poking around for a bit, I found that if I copied the iTunes Library files (an XML file and another one that I can’t remember – something like .lts), and overwrote the same files in the iTunes Library folder on my Mac, it recreated all of my playlists, ratings, and even song counts. Thank God for that! I really wasn’t ready to redo all of that tagging and rating.

There really is a period of adjustment going on here. I’m generally used to using the keyboard to navigate Windos efficiently, and it’ll take a while before I can do the same with the Mac.

Still… what a pretty machine!

Technorati Tags: Apple, MacbookPro, iTunes, Switching