With this week nearly over, I decided to take a pass on the BC Apple User Group meeting. The rain (yes, it’s back, with a vengeance), the bus ride to the south and the fact that I’m just a little tired kept me away. Anyway, it’s good to have a night home.
I’m in a nerdy mood, even if I didn’t go to the User Group Meeting. I’m listening to KUSC streaming Beethoven’s 7th over the net and the fidelity is nearly as good as I’d get playing locally. In fact, I’d have to listen really hard to tell.
As I often note, the Net has changed a lot of things, even from my last job. I take some comfort in seeing old friends and family in my buddy list (I’m using Gaim at work, which like Adium for the Mac is a multi-protocol chat client). So I see my AIM buddies as well as the MSN and Yahoo users. By the time I get to work it’s already noon on the East coast, so there’s not much overlap as the day gets later. Still, it’s nice to see everyone there, and occasionally I’ll ping someone hello.
If I can’t run on a Mac, at least I can make it more Mac-like. I arrange the icons like a Mac (disks on he right, trash can at bottom right). I also run Yahoo Widget Engine, which, if you set the widgets to appear in only ‘Heads Up Display’, mimics the Mac OS X Dashboard that I like so much. It all requires a bit more fussing and setting up (which I did after-hours) but it works fine and I can get about 80% of the same functionality that I get at home including the weather, stocks, webcam views of the Burrard Bridge and Jericho Beach, clocks for the different time zones, the current US to Canadian dollar level and a few other niceties. I can mount my iDisk, and I can retrieve work mail both at home and at work (no Exchange Server, just plain old POP). It would be great if there was a version of OmniGraffle and Circus Ponies Notebook that ran under Windows (or better yet, they let me have a Mac), but for the time being, it’s not bad at all. Except for Visio. Yuck.
OK. Enough geek talk. Over and out.
