The last year, maybe just the last six or seven months, has taught me a lesson. I am a moral person. I don’t like feeling guilty. I don’t like to feel like I am doing something bad. I don’t like software piracy and I especially don’t like being put into that position by Apple, Adobe and Microsoft.

Someone one of these days is going to have to point out to Mr Jobs, Mr Warnock and Mr Gates that the common man can’t afford their constantly changing software. Constant upgrades are killing the empires that these men have built and more and more people are turning to alternatives because enough is enough.

Enough that I have owned seven different computers in the last decade and they are all obsolete except one - even though for the most part all they did was write text. Enough of built in obsolescence. Enough of upgrading for no practical computing reason. Enough of upgrading because the stockholders want to see the stock value rise.

Last summer I took an old 866Mhz PC with 400Mb of RAM. I installed a bunch of large disk drives in it. I installed Ubuntu Linux on it. Linux is Free software.

I want to design web sites. I can. I want to retouch images, I can. I want to get the fancy interface features Apple and Microsoft are touting in their newest releases that require behemoth hardware. I can. I can run Google Earth. I can open and edit any Microsoft Office document. I can serve any type of data on a network. I have no viruses or spyware. On an old piece of hardware no one really wants to use anymore.

After too many years, I don’t want to follow the pack anymore. I don’t care about Vista. Mac OS X is cool, but I don’t want to fork over several thousand dollars for Apple hardware to run it on. I’d rather do something worthwhile with my kids.

Ubuntu - Linux for human beings.

Enough said.

This video is part of Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty.

http://www.campaignforrealbeauty.com

As a fourteen year veteran Photoshop user and teacher, its quite a video to watch and see how the power of such a great software tool can actually become an integral part of a message gone wrong.

Click here for MPG version (2.7 Mb)

Click here for QuickTime version (6.7 Mb)

I’ve been using Macs since ‘92. I was a Mac user working with OS 6 and Photoshop 2. I’ve used Windows 98/2K/XP alongside the Apple machines. I’ve prolonged the useful lives of both PC and Mac hardware with various flavors of Linux (Yellow Dog, Fedora, Ubuntu, etc). I know my OS’es inside out and I am happy about Intel Macs, Boot Camp and XP-on-a-Mac.

In the last year or so I’ve realized that I’m ready to switch back to Apple. Here’s why.

1. Apple makes fantastic hardware.

When we (meaning the College where I work) buy a brand new Mac lab and a PC lab at the same time and run them concurrently, we usually have to replace the PC lab hardware around the time the Macs have reached half their useful life. And we do try to get quality PC hardware.

The Apple machines are replaced because they are older and slower than what the new apps and OS versions require - not because the hardware has failed, which is what happens in the PC labs.

In this sense I’d feel secure, as in one less headache to deal with, installing XP on a Mac as opposed to on PC hardware.

2. The software I really need is available on both platforms. MS Office (or Open Office); the Adobe Macromedia suite(s), Quark, Firefox, etc, etc - its all pretty much 4 quarters to the dollar.

The only thorn in my side is MS Access. But then I must say that Access is very beginner-unfriendly and requires a lot of end user training before users become productive. I could use FileMaker Pro instead (which is Win/Mac anyway) and get people up and running in hours rather than days. Or I can forget the whole proprietary single user DB thing and use MySQL instead.

Anyway, if I need a PC just for MS Access I can either dual boot, virtualize or simply set aside one box out of the bunch for that purpose.

3. With Boot Camp now I can install any OS I want on one box. Speak of saving desktop space and reducing my hardware acquisition costs! For those of you thinking “Wait a minute, Macs ain’t cheap!”, yes you are right. But they are cheaper than buying a Mac and a PC and the Apple machines last years longer, so in the long run they are a lot cheaper.

4. I love my PC, really I do. But I get more work done on my Mac. Why? Because I spend so much bloody time taking care of my PC instead of using it to do real work. Constantly updating antivirus and antispyware apps, applying Windows Updates, patches, scanning for viruses and spyware, tracing the root cause of some erratic BSOD, resolving conflicts… and the list goes on. Prevention and repair take up too much time.

Yet I know my hardware and software stuff really well. Imagine those who aren’t technically savvy. Argh! It makes using a PC a real drag and drains the pleasure out of using XP, which otherwise is a nice OS to use.

Macs on the other hand bring a new level of meaning to the term ‘Plug n Play’. Isn’t that what end users want anyway? Being a closed platform does have its advantages.

5. Most end users really don’t care what hardware or OS you have. Users are creatures of habit and “prefer” Windows not out of loyalty but out of acquired experience. Or knowledge of any viable alternatives.

When you consider tha most users live their lives reading and writing email, surfing the web, typing in Word and adding up sums in Excel - they can do that in any operating system and their user experience will hardly change at all. So the brand isn’t of any value as an argument anymore.

6. There’s lots of really cool open source software already ported or being ported to OS X, and it grows every day. Lack of apps isn’t an argument against Macs anymore.

In the end, if having a Mac on my desktop saves me money and anguish, makes me more productive and runs all my software why should I bother with anything else?

Well, it ain’t because I respect the guy. However the man in the balcony spoke for millions and he told the president just what we think of his track record.

Click here link to view the exchange yourself.

Every little effort given to help save our environment and planet counts. Please visit the following links and do what you can to convince people to change the attitude that there is “nothing we can do about it”.

Join the Virtual March here: http://www.stopglobalwarming.org

Help save the Boreal Forest: http://sleepinglikealog.com

Aidez à sauver la forêt boréale: http://www.ondortcommeunebuche.com

Like many North Americans born in the mid- to late-20th century I share the pop culture fascination with UFO’s and other things unexplained. As a child I used to watch “In Search Of…” and often wondered about things like the Bermuda Triangle, ghosts and extraterrestrials. As an adult, shows like the X Files still held entertainment value.

I’m pretty much skeptical about all of it, but I like to keep an open mind. From my point of view, no one has provided sufficient proof either for or against any of those “mysteries”.

So when I came across an interesting thread this morning as I was checking my email, I took the opportunity to do a bit of fun internet digging about. See http://news.yahoo.com/s/prweb/20051124/bs_prweb/prweb314382_1

At first, I found this thread amusing, then disconcerting and finally a tad worrisome.

My initial reaction was “This is B.S. ~ even ex-politicians can get weirder and weirder with age.” So, as I often do in cases of strange information winding up on my desktop, I sought to find other sources of information about it. In my mind, finding that this was just another internet hoax would be just a click away.

But then I found that the initial story about Paul Hellyer appeared to be true. Among other links I found was the article about Mr Hellyer published on Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Hellyer#Peace_in_Space_and_UFO_advocacy

Having read that, I started searching about the reference to U.S. Army Colonel Philip J. Corso’s book “The Day After Roswell”. And this is where things get stranger and stranger as well as more worrisome.

The issue at hand is where lies the truth in an informationscape as large as the internet? Should a larger site such as Yahoo or Wikipedia, who present all this without much analysis automatically have more credibility than a very critical but more amateur-looking site such as http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Shadowlands/6583/roswell020.html

Whom do we trust? Can the trust once put in huge media organizations (think New York Times or the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite) be displaced towards the internet?

Check this out…

http://www.heliomedia.com/download/video/2014.swf

As well as: In search of the Wikipedia prankster

I’ve finally had the chance to start looking at the CSS that lies in front of WordPress (the “database backend” of this blog), and so I’ve begun hacking away at some themes that I have found ~ trying to find a voice that I recognize for these pages.

For now, the stable heliomedia weblog look is based on Frederic de Villamil’s theme “Back in Black”, which you can peruse here: http://www.eretzvaju.org/download/black

I found the aesthetics of his theme close to what I could call my own; and I must admit that I’m learning new CSS tricks along the way.

Cheers Fred!

E.

I’ve always thought that George W. Bush was a pathetic character. Not that the folks in Ottawa have been much better of late, … but I digress.

This Chinese episode tends to prove my previous assumptions.
Click and see for yourself. Once you’re done, click the menu in the left corner of the video window ~ there’s fun stuff on ifilm.

I started using computers on a daily basis sometime in 1991 or 1992. That’s a bit late considering the type of geek I eventually became, but let’s paint a picture of that time in computer graphics anyway:

• I lived through the upheaving arrival of Apple’s brand new System 7 while I was at school.
• The school computers we used to run Photoshop 2, Illustrator 88 and Quark 3.01 were the venerable Mac IIcx and Mac IIsi. To put that into perspective, the IIcx was a 16Mhz machine that came standard with 1Mb of RAM and was upgradeable to 128Mb of RAM. Back then in Montreal, a single megabyte of RAM was worth about $60. To max out the RAM on a cx would cost $7680, before tax. We had two choices of hard drive capacity: 40Mb or 80Mb.
• The IIcx was introduced in 1989 and required System 6.0.3 or later. It also needed “Mode 32″ or “32-bit Enabler” to access more than 8MB of RAM. It was discontinued in 1991, and as of 1996 it was still considered one of the best-designed Macs ever.
• Our main external media was 1.44Mb floppies. If you were a pro, a 44Mb SyQuest cartridge was what you needed. The 88Mb SyQuest was just showing up and the 200Mb SyQuest was soon to come. Price was still more than a dollar per megabyte.
• The AutoCAD students at our school required OS 6, but the graphic designers needed OS 7, so we had a strange application that permitted us to “dual boot” of sorts but after the machine had actually started up.
• At that time, Microsoft was still “on the rise” as a software maker. Their Mac-only application Microsoft Word was way better than WordPerfect; and as far as I know as an end-user it was a much better word processor back then than what is has now become - since word processing was the only thing it tried to do. It was simple and it did its job well.
• Microsoft hadn’t come up with a world dominating version of Windows yet, but Windows 3.1 was released in April, NT was demonstrated in July and over at CERN in Switzerland, Tim Berners-Lee was concocting something called the World Wide Web.
• I remember being blown away by the first QuickTime video I ever saw: it was grainy, heavily compressed and full of compression artifacts. I can’t even remember if it had sound or not. But it was very very cool. I remember looking at it and saying it would be so cool if one day this thing would be full screen. The one I saw was about the size of small postage stamp.

Time went on. Photoshop got to version 3. Quark bumped up to 3.1. Matching colors from print to screen was terrifying. Thinking of starting to do freelance graphics implied getting a Mac Classic: 8 MHz 68000 processor, 1 MB or 2 MB of RAM, and either a 1.44 MB floppy drive or a 1.44 MB floppy drive and a 40 MB hard drive in a sleek, compact all-in-one case with a 9″ monochrome display for well over $2000. Either that or fork over between 15 and 20 grand and work in color. But switching to 256 colors or greyscale on the monitor made the machine so much faster!

In 1997, I bought my first Mac to do freelance from home. A monster called the Mac 9600: 233Mhz, 128Mb of RAM, a 4Gb SCSI hard drive, a 4Mb video card, 28.8 modem, Photoshop 4, an external CD burner, a 1200dpi flatbed scanner with a transparency adapter. I paid more for that setup than I did for my car.

Flash forward to 2001.

After almost a full decade in the industry, my job description changed enough that I had to purchase my own PC. To my surprise, after a few months of ignoring it and still chugging away on the 9600 when I had the option, I started to love my PC. Windows XP was cool. The machine was bloody fast too. Hardware was inexpensive. My external Mac 4X CD burner was $700 bucks when I purchased it. I bought a 40X for my PC for $110 taxes included. Sigh. Had I been wrong all along? Were PCs not that bad after all?

Well, that was a few years ago now.

I’ve lived with my PC, in different incarnations: Win98, Win2K, XP, XPSP2. At the same time, Apple dumped its classic operating system in favour of Mac OSX and its UNIX foundation. I’ve also played with Linux, both on the Intel platform (Fedora Core 3 and 4) as well as on the PPC platform (Yellow Dog Linux 2, 3 and 4).

So, after all of that - what’s the conclusion?

Well, first of all, don’t believe the hype! The ‘Mac is better than PC’ - or vice-versa - argument is silly. What we are really talking about at that level of comparison is the quality of the graphic user interface (GUI) design.

Essentially, both GUI’s are excellent, with Microsoft making the biggest progress when they introduced XP. Mac has been evolving too, but more like wine slowly getting better with age.

As an advanced user, I love the XP interface. I work faster on Windows than on OSX. Everything feels at my fingertips, I’ve customized it enough - in a very Mac-like way I’ll admit - that there’s little searching for this or that tool, app or function.

Let’s remember one basic principle here that too many people tend to forget: Apple has always designed computers (and their GUIs) to bring computers to the masses. As a power user you are supposed to feel like some things are either not immediately available, not “at your fingertips”.

I sure wouldn’t want a first semester kid to find herself in a command shell all of a sudden, typing away … rm -R /* . (I know the system would prevent her from executing that, the point is, keep the kiddies playing where they know the rules of the game!)

So, as far as GUI’s go, its a draw.

But I still feel Apple should start thinking about their long-time users, or newly converted power users - especially those coming from the Linux universe, who are going to want to have lots of things at their fingertips but without the hassle of installing X Windows or going around the system hacking at this or that, or installing a whole bunch of third party doodads. Right now, OSX feels too simple out of the box.

Putting the user interface issue aside, where do I stand as far as which system is better? Well, as far as software applications, productivity and such end-user issues I still think its pretty much a draw - with the caveat that Windows has the edge on third party software available. Try hunting down, for example, an open source ftp client with lots of features and an interface you like that is OSX native. It’s tough, options are limited. There’s no FileZilla for Mac. And Interarchy isn’t free.

So, despite all that, if I had to buy a new computer I’d probably buy a Mac.

Why?

Because in the last few years, I have have spent more time maintaining my PC than I ever did maintaining all my Macs. In my office, I have seen the following machines go by over the years: Mac Plus, Mac Classic, PPC 8100, 9600, the original Bondi blue iMac, and finally a G3 beige desktop. (Getting the PC prevented me from needing to upgrade to a G4 or G5.) Of all that hardware, in all the years I used and abused them I only replaced a floppy drive and a power supply. And the floppy was under warranty.

I’ve gotten rid of my Macs because they became obsolete, not because they didn’t run anymore. Even though the iMac is only a 233Mhz machine with 128Mb of RAM it acts as a great Linux web development server running Apache, PHP and MySQL.

Mac makes the best hardware out there, no doubt in my mind at all.

A few years ago, the electricity blinked in my office. Just blinked, less than a half second. My 9600 couldn’t care less, just kept on going. The iMac restarted and was fine, just as was the G3. The G3’s external drive didn’t like it though, but that was a minor repair.

The PC died. It seemed fine at first but the death blow had been dealt. Partitions disappeared, data corrupted - all sorts of nastiness which in the end cost me a new board, together with CPU and RAM.

I’ve had to constantly fight viruses, spyware, install firewalls both physical and logical. Keep everything updated all the time and still I wind up having to reinstall Windows at least a couple of times a year. I remember running an installation of Mac OS 9.x for years without major issues much a less a full format and reinstall. And when I did reinstall it was often preventative maintenance, not emergency repairs.

In the end, it maybe (very) expensive to buy a Mac but its costlier in the long run to own a PC, both in terms of money and of time.

Unfortunately - Steve Jobs are you listening? - those of us with a mortgage, a few kids and a bunch of other things to deal with can’t fork over a minimum of four or five thousand dollars for a new workstation. (I don’t consider the Mac Mini a workstation, and an iMac will still cost just shy of three grand when you add decent amounts of RAM (1.5Gb - not even maxed out) and disk space into it.)

Looking to the future, I am now curious to see how Intel based Macs will change the landscape. But for now, my heart belongs to Apple whereas my pocketbook limits my choice to Wintel.

Changing web hosts is a drag.

Especially when you want dynamic content hosting. Setting up MySQL databases, webmail, blogs, forums and wikis isn’t a simple thing… no matter a control panel vendor says. I’ve spent more time with Tech support in the last couple of days than I ever have. But then before all I needed was simple HTML hosting.

To be fair, the Tech Support has been great. I can chat with them and usually everything gets taken care of in about 15 minutes to half an hour.

Word to the wise: switch hosts before your previous contract expires. Give yourself a lot of overlap time and don’t change the DNS until all the kinks are ironed out.