I hate using a Mac… okay, there, I said it.

I don’t hate much, as I am generally a pretty easy going guy, and perhaps hate is really an exaggeration, but I really dislike using a Mac. The company I work for is a Mac-only shop and there seems to be no wiggle room in that policy. When I started there it was no big deal. I had heard a lot of good things about how a lot of Java developers were starting to use Macs as there cool new development box, so I was willing to give it a try.

I apologize if you come to this posting looking for information about Java’s garbage collection; this is about garbage collection in Plano, TX. I noticed an odd thing while looking for an apartment and even with the one that we recently moved into… there are no garbage dumpsters.

In Tucson apartments you have those big metal trash dumpsters around the complex (similar to the picture on the left), usually one for every one or two buildings and they are generally enclosed in a little walled-in area with a gate. You take your garbage bags out to the dumpster and the collection company comes with the big truck and takes the trash away a few times per week. I guess I am biased as this is what I have grown up with, but this seems logical to me.

I have decided to try my hand at writing commands for Ubiquity… these are currently just playtime demonstration commands but they may work for you.

Open - This command will open selected text urls in a new tab just as if they were clickable links.

I hope to have some others soon.

I remember as a young lad thinking how cool the new Macintosh computers were and whenever we were in a store that had one, I would play with MacPaint, which was always up on the demos because back then it was about all you could do with a Mac (exaggeration but not much). Fast forward, wow 20-something years later and I need to edit a photo on the Mac I use at work… mmmm… yeah, not so much.

In an interesting display of how cosmopolitan the Dallas / Fort Worth area is… my wife and I met Victoria Njau, who is the current Miss Kenya (a good blog about her). We were out looking at apartments and she was a leasing agent for one of properties we visited. My wife had mentioned in passing about how pretty she was and that she should be a model, and very shyly she mentioned that she was the current Miss Kenya.

As I mentioned before, I now use a Mac at work and PC everywhere else, which has become a source of much frustration… now I am dysfunctional with the shortcut keys on both systems. I am sure that the key mappings defined for the Mac have been ergonomically proven in test labs, blessed by yogis and spat on by saki-drinking blind virgin Okinawans nuns, but I have used a PC keyboard for years and they don’t feel right to me… so I changed them on the Mac.

Well, the next phase of our move to DFW has been completed. Last weekend, we loaded all our stuff into a moving truck and drove it from Tucson to Dallas… and what a misadventure that was…

While poking around on the Mac I use for work… yes, I use a Mac at work now (not by choice, it’s just what the company uses)… I came across a little application called PhotoBooth. It uses the built in camera to turn your laptop into a little fun photo booth. It’s one of those applications that gives you a bunch of cool effects you can apply in real time… a neat little toy. Below are a couple of the shots I took:

Damn, this place is huge! I have been in the Dallas/Ft Worth Metroplex for a little over a week now and am doing well. We are still not setup in an apartment yet, but hope to have something soon so we can settle in and get back to some normality. I have some good posting ideas, just no real time to write them.

I was watching the Colbert Report last night and Stephen gave Firefox 3 the Colbert Bump. Now the stage is truly set for world domination.