Today's New York Times features an article in the business section about what RIM is doing to fend off Apple in the battle for mobile phone market share between the iPhone and the Blackberry. It is interesting timing for me, since last week I just got a new 8000 series Blackberry as my new work phone. I thought it may be useful to compare the new Blackberry to my iPhone that I bought in early March for my birthday. Blackberries are all about business and all about e-mail, and predictably, that is where my new phone excels. Until the new iPhone software comes out in June with full Exchange support, there is no comparison between how I access my work e-mail with my iPhone vs. the Blackberry. The one glitch with the Blackberry is that it doesn't just work out of the box like I would expect it to. I get my e-mail faster through the Blackberry than I do with Outlook when I am sitting at my computer at work, but when the e-mail includes an attachment then I can't open the attachment. I need to consult the manual and I expect I will have to add some software from the CD that came with the Blackberry to get it to work properly with attachments. Meanwhile, attachments that are .doc files or PDFs open without any additional intervention on the iPhone when I access my Exchange account using Outlook Web Access. So, out of the box, the Blackberry wins for e-mail without attachments, but it is a mixed bag with attachments. So, what other things do I regularly do on my phone? Well, thanks to the ubiquitous Internet access with the iPhone and the Treo 650 that I was using before the iPhone, I am used to hopping onto the Web to check bus schedules, check the weather forecast, check my RSS feeds, etc. And this became an even better experience with the iPhone because the Web looked like the real Web, rather than some truncated, barely functional version on the Treo. And then I tried looking at the Web with the Blackberry. I nearly choked when I viewed my local eating blog Eat Local - Washington on the Blackberry. On the iPhone is looks like the page I am fiddling with in Tinderbox. On the Blackberry it looks like the Web from 1995, when Mosaic first brought access to graphics to the masses on the Web. It looks like shit. There are other features I could compare between the iPhone and the Blackberry, like watching videos and listening to music, but I will never do those things on the Blackberry since it is my work phone. The iPhone is my life phone, and as such, things that really matter like personal photos, music, videos. When applications come to the iPhone through official means in June, the iPhone will become an even bigger part of my regular life, with an iPhone version of OmniFocus and other applications living on the iPhone as well as on my MacBook Pro. Other quirks with the Blackberry: It doesn't charge reliably unless I use the supplied plug-in charger. Although the Blackberry has a cord that appears it would make it possible to charge from a USB port, it gives me a warning that I need to install drivers to charge with the cord on my work laptop and it just tells me it won't charge at all when plugged into my MacBook Pro. There isn't any WiFi in this model of the Blackberry. I lived without WiFi on the Treo 650 as well, so this isn't a huge adjustment with the Blackberry, but it makes the phone seem less than current without WiFi. The tiny screen on the Blackberry is hard to get used to when compared to using an iPhone. I really think that the iPhone could be a little bigger with an even larger screen if it were to be a really workable road computer, but at least the iPhone gives me screen real estate. It is painful looking at the Web on the Blackberry, not only because the built in browser does a crappy job rendering pages as they really look on the Web, but also because it is rendering the pages on a crappy screen. My conclusion is predictable. The Blackberry works well for what it does best, dealing with e-mail in a work setting. But its lead over the iPhone in this arena is tenous, and from the brief experience of this new Blackberry user, the overall Blackberry user experience pales in comparison to using an iPhone. If you absolutely need a clunky, mechanical keyboard on your phone, as I know many users do, then the Blackberry is for you. If you are willing to learn how to work with the iPhone, you may find the overall experience much more rewarding than what you can experience with the Blackberry. Jeff Carlson offered his thoughts about his first 11 months or so of using the iPhone in yesterday's Seattle Times. I echo his assessment - the iPhone is a keeper for a life device. The Blackberry is passable as a work-only device.

Jeffrey Zeldman must be talking about me in one of his latest posts - The vanishing personal site. He writes about how blogs are transforming thanks to social networking sites and other factors that mean that sites like MacNetJournal fade while people shift to other, less personal, more sound-bite driven tools like Twitter. I am guilty of doing a lot more posting on Twitter than I do on MNJ over the last couple of months. Sometimes change is a good thing, but I wonder if this particular change is worthwhile? What I see is that it is just another part of the shifting attention span of people in the Internet age. While we used to write and read entire paragraphs strung together into things called articles in newspapers and on the Net, many are now shifting to 140 or less character snippets of life on Twitter, or status updates on Facebook or one of the myriad other tools. Worst of all, I have fallen prey to this problem. As my time has shifted to updates on Twitter and creating a new site about eating local foods - eatlocalwashington.com - my updates on MNJ have slipped month over month.

What are you doing to mark Earth Day? Right now I am sipping a homemade latte and watching unseasonal snow showers falling outside, and if the weather breaks a bit, I will likely plant a few more things in our garden to join the peas that are poking an inch or two from the cold, dark soil. In many ways Natalie and I are celebrating this entire year as Earth Year, rather than one Earth Day. We started our Washington state eating year on April Fools Day, a year in which we are only eating food made with ingredients that come from Washington state. Thankfully, Washington state is a big place with a wide variety of crops grown and available for a limited number of local food experimenters like us. But 19 days into the experience we are already seeing some challenges to, for instance, living without sugar, without citrus fruit. It is interesting to realize that when we go to the grocery store we cannot venture into the middle of the store at all. There is no buying anything in a box or a can, nothing pre-prepared. Why do this? You can read more about that and check out a new blog we are slowly building to write about our Washington eating year at www.eatlocalwashington.com. Like our eating adventure, this new Tinderbox-based site is a work in progress.

After a month of using my iPhone, I can't say that it has completely changed my world, but I can say that it has improved the usefulness of accessing the Internet through my mobile phone. There have been a few surprises along the way: I found that the virtual keyboard on the iPhone's screen is not as bad as I expected. I expected to really miss the tactile keyboard from my Treo 650. Nope. The speed of connecting to the net through the Edge network is not as painful as I expected. It works just as fast as the older network I was on with the Treo. It works... Those things being said, I do look forward to seeing how the software update in June works with its integration with Exchange server, which should make it considerably easier to work with work e-mail. Until then, this is quite functional as is. And no, I haven't jailbroken my phone just yet. I figure I will wait to see what the software update looks like.

After coming home and taking the dog with me on a 4-mile jog around the north end of Tacoma, I settled in the kitchen to make a simple local soup and biscuits for dinner. The soup was a way to use some of the plethora of potatoes we have from our weekly garden share from Terry's Berries in the Puyallup River valley, along with a leek from last week's share, an onion and our only non-local ingredient of the night - organic beef broth. In a week we will embark on a year of local eating, and we will start writing about our explorations soon on a new Web site. Our experiment is not as hard core as the popular 100-mile diet. Instead, we are trying to take a more sustainable approach - to eat foods grown in Washington state for the entire year. On the surface it seems like it should be an easy year. We already pick up a weekly garden share from Terry's Berries - something we have done for at least two years now - and we buy our meat from a local farmer who is best known as Cheryl the Pig Lady. The photo above was taken on her farm a couple of weekends ago when we stopped to pick up some of our meat. I couldn't resist taking a shot with my iPhone of piglets that could become our future bacon or tenderloin in a few months. It is a simple meal to start a year of local eating - a year that we plan to start on April Fool's Day. How fitting...

To those in the Northern Hemisphere, happy spring! The sun is shining this morning in Puget Sound country and birds are singing, as you would expect on a cliche spring day. Now bring on the longer days!

As you can tell by the surge of posts on this Sunday morning, I am catching up on some Web reading and thinking about tools for my MacBook Pro. As a result, I just downloaded the 30-day trial version of Aperture. I don't really have the time to play around with it, but I know that my current image management tool - Expression Media - is pretty stagnant and a Microsoft product that I am not sure I will ever update again. So, I am taking another look at Aperture, then maybe a look at Lightroom next. Always looking ahead...

The Christian Science Monitor has posted a 12-shot slide show of spring training images, and it includes three shots from the Seattle Mariners camp in Arizona. I haven't been a sports reporter or editor for 14 years now, but I still appreciate the pull of spring training... A nod to Rob Galbraith for the pointer to the slide show.

Off and on over the last week I have been trying the alternative Web browser, Flock, as my main window on the Web world as well as a tool to stay in touch with folks on Twitter. Flock is really an offshoot of the Firefox browser, and if you are like me and you have been living life in either Firefox or Minefield recently, it is easy to have Flock import your settings and bookmarks and get up and running in no time at all. What makes Flock an interesting alternative is how it integrates with the cliche Web 2.0 services - Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, del.icio.us, etc. You can log in to each of these services through the browser and manage and interact with your content. You can do all of this in another Firefox browser or with Safari or OmniWeb, but Flock is built with this interaction in mind from the start. For instance, by offering the option to see Twitter posts from those you follow in a sidebar on the left side of the browser, I can limit how often I go to the tab where Twitter is open in the full browser and yet still see what people are talking about. No other browser that I am aware of for the Mac offers this same all-in-one, dashboard view. My verdict so far - Flock is an interesting alternative. I am still debating if I should shift to Safari as my main browser since I will be buying an iPhone soon, but Flock is still in the running. It works with Google Docs, gives me a fully capable view of Gmail and opens my eyes to some cool imagery through the media bar tied to Flickr.

My time has been occupied with other things for the first 10 days of February, but I do want to include a few links to catch up now that I am getting back in the swing of things: About this Particular Outliner - A progress report - catches up on recent trends with Mac outliners. The portable hotspot - a round up of mobile wi-fi hotspot options from an expert, Glenn Fleishman.

TidBITS notes the arrival of a new site that aggregates news headlines from top Mac sites called Alltop. It does look like an interesting dashboard for tracking news. I will be trying it out this week. Find out for yourself!

Erik Hanberg is debating whether to buy the next update to Microsoft Office on his Mac or to opt for another solution. I say go for it! I have written four books and lived without Office on my Mac since 2000. How? I have used a variety of tools over the years - Nisus Writer, OpenOffice.org and others - but my main tool now is the latest version of NeoOffice. With this program loaded, I don't miss anything from Microsoft Office. I can use track changes without any problems, which is the main differentiator between other tools and Microsoft Word. Meanwhile, I can use a tool like Google Docs for simple opening, saving, sharing and minor editing of documents. Yes, I do use Office at work, where the entire work environment is Windows-based. Sometimes you just have to go with the flow. But I have so far avoided forking over hundreds of dollars for Microsoft Office on my last three Apple laptops. It can be done!

Dan Frakes offers a good, balanced review of the tradeoffs involved in the creation of the MacBook Air. Yes, it is a niche machine. But it may be just the ticket for hard core travellers or those who are willing to compromise some functionality in trade for lower weight. When you read Dan's piece, note the good content in the comments that follow the article. What a difference 24 hours makes in terms of mellowing the response to a new product like this.

It's been a long day, but it wouldn't be right to go without making comments about today's Apple announcements. Here is my short list of highlights: Like everyone else, I was impressed with what I heard about the MacBook Air. Some people have quibbled about the fact that the battery is built into the machine and not easily accessible, but I don't see this as a deal breaker. Some will surely also see difficulty with the lack of ports, the built in speakers, etc. But I find the machine intriguing for its light weight and relative computing power. My wife is likely to get one later this year to replace her aging iBook G4. The Time Capsule is confusing to me. I can do automatic wireless backups by connecting a hard drive to my Airport Extreme base station and schedule nightly backups using SuperDuper and get more flexibility than the Time Capsule offers. Still, the 1TB version looks interesting, and it does work with Time Machine - a program that I still haven't even tried simply because I don't sit around with my MacBook Pro connected to an external hard drive all of the time. I will have to give the new movie rentals through the iTunes Store a try soon. I currently subscribe to NetFlix, and this may be the ticket to get rid of that monthly bill. But it is too early to tell what the movie selection will look like through the new online rental service compared to the variety I can see through NetFlix. My only disappointment of the keynote address was the relative lack of updates for the iPhone. Yes, there is a software update, but I was hoping for a memory boost for the iPhone before buying one in March. No luck yet, but there are a few weeks left before I will buy...

Glenn Fleishman offers his picks for what Apple will unveil or announce tomorrow during the Macworld Expo keynote address by Steve Jobs. One of his predictions - the announcement of a 3G iPhone - would put a chill on me buying a new iPhone in March as I have been planning since the device launched last June. We'll see what really happens...

Wired offers its predictions for what will be unveiled next week at Macworld. The highlights: iTunes movie rentals, HD content and some kind of light notebook or tablet computer. Two out of those three appeal to me. I still haven't jumped on the HD or even the big screen LCD or plasma TV bandwagon yet, so HD content is outside my interest. One thing I am definitely interested in is seeing whether Apple gives a bump to the iPhone with a 16GB version. The iPod Touch has a 16GB version, so maybe they can shoehorn 16GB into the iPhone. Maybe, maybe not...

Brent Simmons announced today that the newest version of his excellent RSS reader, NetNewsWire, is now free. Now I can stop feeling guilty about paying for the program many years ago and then benefiting from updates without any more payment ever since.

If you follow a lot of technology Web sites through an RSS reader, like I do, then you too are dealing with a flood of duplicate articles about the latest flash-in-the-pan electronics from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. I tend to watch these with less and less interest each year. One reason is that as I get older I am less inclined to waste dollars on gadets that I will use for two weeks and then abandon - or at least I hope I am. Another reason is that only a fool would spend their cash on the latest gadgets at CES without waiting to see what Apple will unveil next week in San Francisco at Macworld Expo. And so I wait...

Glenn Fleishman begs the question about the usefulness of Twitter tonight with his most recent TidBITS piece - Conversions of a Twitter revert. As a casual Twitter user, I can understand Glenn's perspective. But I am not throwing in the towel on Twitter just yet. Compared to play things like Facebook and MySpace, Twitter is full of usefulness. How am I using Twitter? I use it to write about tidbits of life and things that I encounter online that are not really worthy of full-fledged posts on Mac Net Journal. It is a middle road between the time investment of writing pieces on MNJ and the posts I refer to on my Google Reader feed that shows the most recent items in the left sidebar on this site. It's an efficient way to say something without completely breaking from the flow of other things I am doing throughout the day. How might I use Twitter in the future? Well, I see other potential uses for the community that can be created on Twitter. Some organizations are using it as a platform for breaking news or as a way to communicate with remote teams, and it may be useful as a communications tool for my regular daytime work. It could provide another way for people to subscribe and follow what is happening on a topical basis from trusted sources, something smaller and more personal than RSS feeds. The trick is finding those trusted sources. I am still waiting to see what happens with Twitter as a platform before commiting real resources to it. But so far I am enjoying the experiment.

Although we didn't go birding today, we still observed our normal New Years Day tradition of noting the first bird that we see or hear to start the year. I didn't hear my first bird until around 10 a.m., when I took our new puppy outside and heard one of the many calls of a Dark-eyed Junco, closely followed by seeing and hearing an Anna's Hummingbird. In past years my first bird species of the year has varied widely, from the aforementioned hummingbird to a European Starling, a Common Raven and a Northern Flicker. The idea with noting the first bird of the year is that the species holds a special focus for the coming year. My first bird this year is very common in the Pacific Northwest, where it is most commonly known as an Oregon Junco. But I will see what new tidbits I can learn about this common species during 2008. If past years are any indication, it is likely to be the first of more than 200 bird species that I will see in Washington state this year. I have seen more than 200 species of birds in my home state each year since the year 2000. On to another birding year!

Over the last few months I have been playing around with microblogging and photos more, outside of what I a have written about on Mac Net Journal. So today I added a couple of links to the left sidebar on MNJ to point to my new Flickr photo page and to my page on Twitter. Nothing major, but it is about time to freshen things up a bit on MNJ. I guess there are some benefits to not feeling well enough to go bird watching today, as I have the last few years on New Years Day...

Apparently Seattle's New Years fireworks didn't go quite as planned. According to the Seattle PI, a computer error forced the company doing the fireworks show to detonate everything manually. And of course, all of the speculation is about which operating system was running on the computer that caused the problems with the show...

Welcome to the New Year from the Pacific Northwest. What lies ahead this year? Well, I look forward to hearing what emerges at Macworld Expo this month in San Francisco. I also look forward to finally switching to an iPhone when my two-year contract with Verizon ends in March. We'll see what else lies ahead. Meanwhile, I open 2008 with a new extended life battery in my MacBook Pro - which looks like it may give me 3 hours of battery life rather than the two hours tops that I saw with the original Apple battery. I'll keep testing it in the coming week. Another thing that will happen in the fall of 2008 is I will mark a decade of writing and publishing Mac Net Journal as a blog. More on that as the anniversary date approaches. Happy New Year!

My friend Robert Michael Pyle is setting out in a day or two for a year-long adventure across North America, to complete a butterfly big year. The Xerces Society has a Web site about the project, and Bob posted to a butterfly mailing list that I subscribe to a couple of days ago to mention the journey as well as the fact that a couple of sites will blog about the chase. As I just wrote in an e-mail to Bob that he may or may not ever see, since he is cancelling his e-mail account for 2008, what a great way to spend 2008!

The other day I downloaded the freeware battery diagnostic program CoconutBattery and on a whim ran it against the battery in my 18-month-old MacBook Pro, and low and behold it says that the battery only has 27% of its previous charging capacity remaining. This helps explain why I can only run the machine for 30 minutes or so on battery power before it suddenly shuts down. I thought there could be a problem with the power manager on my machine, but the issue persisted even after resetting the PMU. So, it looks like I am in the market for a new battery and I need to recycle my current battery. The options - Apple's battery or a supposed higher capacity battery that is available through FastMac. I'm pondering... UPDATE: The battery now shows 23% of its capacity remaining. Methinks the battery is in a rapid failure. Meanwhile, the price difference between the battery options: Apple battery = $129 from Apple, $109 from Amazon True Power battery from FastMac = $99.95

New York Times blogger Marci Alboher offers some good food for thought in 5 Time-Management Tricks. I just wish I were better at practicing what she is preaching in this piece - especially about tackling e-mail...

I checked the Web site for the Tacoma Marathon today, to see if it will be run again in 2008, and it appears that it is on the schedule to start at 7 a.m. on May 10, 2008 - just a little less than six months from now. I wonder if I can get myself in shape for it without running into the injury issues that stopped my bid to run the first-ever Tacoma Marathon last year? I figure it's worth a try. Now, how to wring out enough decent time for running 20-30 miles a week in the very new future...

I am not so sad to read that CompUSA is closing the rest of its stores nationwide, but I am a bit disappointed about what this means for Mac users who want to go somewhere local to get Apple gear in Tacoma. Unless I am willing to battle the traffic to drive to Renton or Seattle to the nearest Apple Store, the only option I can think of that is left in town is Best Buy. Ugh...

What is an Internet-addicted Mac user to do when he is about to spend a week living offline? This isn't a trivial question if you are someone who is used to living with an always-on connection to the Net. Your e-mail is inaccessible because you cannot connect to your archive on Gmail or Yahoo mail or whatever online tool you use, and your blog archives and feed reader is likely offline too if you live in Google Reader or another Net-based tool, like I do during the regular week. So, how can you take your Internet with you? This isn't rocket science, but it is worth revisiting. Over the last week I mainly just lived without the Net, but on a couple of occassions I was able to sip some free WiFi along with a latte at a local coffee shop, and during my short times there I tried to make the most of the connectivity by using more old school Net tools to feed my habit. Offline e-mail When it came to e-mail, I used good old PowerMail to suck down my mail and to reply to anything that needed a response right now (OK, to be honest, I didn't reply to diddly. I did reply to a couple of e-mails during the week from my Treo 650 logging into Gmail though). Offline news reading (RSS) As for RSS info, I used my limited connectivity as an opportunity to try two tools for offline reading - the offline option in Google Reader and the latest version of NetNewsWire (NNW). Not surprisingly, NNW kicked ass in this case. The only thing missing from the newsreading experience while using NNW as an offline reader was that the images in posts weren't rendered along with the rest of the post, as they normally would be if I were connected to the Net. Otherwise, the beauty of reading offline with NNW is that if I mark a post as read in the reader, or I mark an entire folder as read in the reader, it will be marked as read when I next sync my news feeds when I can get online. Meanwhile, I simply flag any posts that I want to read with full images or that I want to get back to for reference in upcoming blog posts and NNW will keep those around for me to use later. The offline reading experience is more compromised using Google Reader. Like NNW, Reader doesn't give me offline access to images in my feeds, but worse yet, I cannot do a standard Shift-A to mark all of the posts as read in a Reader folder if I am not online. So the only way that I can see to make sure that Reader marks things as read is to actually open the post in the offline version of Reader and then it will be marked as read when I reconnect later. That's a waste of my time. As an aside, if you spend much time doing offline RSS reading you will quickly come to appreciate sites that offer full text news feeds. While there is no way to get the full benefit of a well-written post with tons of linked references (other than flagging it and going back later with NNW), nothing is worse than being able to just read three of four sentences of a promising news item and then having to wait to read the whole thing later. Offline Web reading The last piece of the offline picture is how to read standard Web articles in a browser while offline. This one is a no brainer. Just load the articles you want to read later in separate tabs in the browser of your choice - Safari, Firefox, OmniWeb or whatever - and then disconnect from the Net and read them when you have the time. The caveat here is that if your machine crashes like mine did at one point during the week, you cannot simply open up your browser and expect to be able to resume reading those "saved" articles in the tabs where you carefully loaded them while you were connected. Offline blogging As for blogging and writing tools while offline, there was no adjustment here for me, since I use Tinderbox to do much of my writing and all of my blogging. Tinderbox doesn't care if I am connected to the Net. I just save my files locally, then export them and fire up Transmit to upload them to my Web server when I get connected again. Of course, a healthy human being would just accept completely disconnecting from the Net for a week and not even think about these issues. Trust me, I spent most of my time offline enjoying real life and doing a lot of reading and writing, but a week is a long time to be offline for a true addict. Don't worry, I am looking for a 12-step program...

I've added notes on a few recent books I have read while on our December vacation trip to Sequim to my reading page. This morning I finished reading The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson, which was an inspiring piece of writing by a Pacific Northwest writer. What a way to weave together a historic tale in a truly riveting manner!

Our week-plus vacation in Sequim, Washington, on the Olympic Peninsula comes to a close tomorrow, when we will drive the two hours back to Tacoma and slowly slip back into a reguar life full of work and friends and holiday preparations. This last full day in our small rented vacation cabin we are indoors, watching light snow fall and stick to the shorelines of the Strait of Juan de Fuca just outside our windows. About a quarter of an inch of the white stuff fell before the clouds lifted and revealed the long arm of the Dungeness Spit and its lighthouse across the bay to our sight once again.

I can't resist putting up a photo I took this morning before rushing out the door to work. The image was taken during a bright pink and purple sunrise, and if you look carefully at this viewpoint from one top of the back roof of our house you can see the pointy top of Mt. Rainier at the tip of the shadow that it is casting across the sky. Simply awesome. I was simply compelled to rush up to the roof on an icy morning to preserve the image.

The lesson that keeping up-to-date backups of all of your files can save your bacon came through for me today. I was at work this morning, taking notes during a meeting on my MacBook Pro, when the battery ran completely out of juice in about 45 minutes, forcing me to shut the lid and work on paper until my meeting was done. When I plugged in the machine back in my office, things weren't working right. So, I started shutting down applications before rebooting the machine, in hopes that a fresh restart after the machine had been running for 10 straight days would help cure whatever was wrong. Everything went well for a while, until I tried to quit Tinderbox. The program simply would not quit. It wouldn't even respond to force quitting. And so, since the machine was unresponsive, I opted to force a reboot. Bad move. When the machine rebooted everything was working except the two Tinderbox files that were running when my I did a forced reboot. So, I lived without Tinderbox for the day. Once I was home, I hooked my machine up to the external hard drive that I back up to each night using SuperDuper over a wireless network connection. It took a little while to open the sparse disk image that I back up to, but once it finished opening I double-checked that I could open the file with Tinderbox, then I dragged yesterday's copy to my MacBook Pro and I was back in business. The last step was to re-create one post to Mac Net Journal that I had made last night, after my daily backup, and everything was back up and running as if nothing had happened. As it turns out, the only data I lost from the crash was the notes I was taking in Tinderbox when my machine locked up. No problem. I'm back in business and happy to know that the very basic daily backup system I use, which runs automatically every night as long as I have my MacBook Pro running within range of my Airport base station. It's backing up again right now. It's a good thing...

Gizmodo has a post that will be pointed at by many Mac sites tomorrow. I get a head start tonight, before the comments on the post become a completely tired Mac vs. PC slash fest. Go read Desktop Evolution - Windows and Mac OS Comparison

Seattle Times editor-at-large Mike Fancher offers a Pacific Northwest twist on national statistics from the National Endowment for the Arts (PDF) that Americans are reading less: Local reading figures offer a bright spot.

I learned over this holiday weekend that the Washington State Library highlighted our latest book, Washington Disasters, on its fall reading list in the Young Adult category. Very cool! This is a nice bonus that comes roughly a year after the book was released. It is interesting that we included chapters in our book that are covered in much more detail in five out of seven of the Adult books listed above our Washington Disasters book. I have added a number of those books to my wish list for this coming Christmas...

Tonight I watched the documentary film "Helvetica," and it turned out to be a well-filmed and intriguing piece. As I watched I was reminded of the days when I used to do more tangible work with fonts - desktop publishing, working on a college newspaper at the University of Puget Sound and then writing for newspapers in the 1990s. When I left the world of physical print work in 1994, I stopped playing with fonts and using many of my old friends like Palatino, Garamond and Bookman. On the Web, most fonts are based on Arial or Verdana. One interesting although not surprising note about the Helvetica movie is the number of Mac users among the many typographical designers interviewed for the film. It has always been that way. When design matters, users choose Macs.

Yesterday, on the day after Thanksgiving here in the U.S., Natalie and I took to the road for some birding at the Julia Butler Hansen National Wildlife Refuge for the Columbian White Tailed Deer here in Washington state, and one of the highlights was a close encounter with a Short-eared Owl. The shot above was taken with a Canon 20D at a distance of about 20 feet, using an image stabilized 70-300 zoom lens. We saw 47 species on an oddly sunny day that was so warm that dragonflies were out and flying.

Happy Thanksgiving to all. May this be a day that we don't live on our Macs. There's more time for that tomorrow, when we can avoid shopping...

Information Week has an article about others who are seeing dramatically shorter battery life on their portable Macs after upgrading to Leopard - Apple's Leopard gobbles up batteries, users complain. I need to do more testing on my machine, but so far I have seen battery run times as short as one hour. Some of that could be because the battery on my MacBook Pro is more than a year old, but that can't be the whole answer...

This has been an interesting day to read Scripting News and Robert Scoble's blog. Both Dave Winer of Scripting News and Scoble are having issues with Apple software. Winer has issues with the networking functionality in Leopard, and apparently Scoble and some others are having issues with the latest update to Tiger, 10.4.11. I'll admit that I am not in awe of Leopard, but it has been a pretty solid OS upgrade for me so far. It isn't perfect. I am a little baffled by what is happening to folks like Scoble who installed the latest update for Tiger. What isn't clear to me is whether the update is truly making people's machine's unrecoverable, or whether the issue can be solved by back-tracking to a previous bootable version of Tiger created by a tool like SuperDuper? Meanwhile, I do find it interesting how blogging has made it easy for high profile folks like Winer and Scoble to react to problems they encounter and how other Mac users rip into them when they point out problems with Apple's hardware and software. I think the truth in these matters is that we all have unrealistic expectations, and maybe Apple has helped create or perpetuate those expectations through its marketing campaigns. It is also clear that Apple is missing opportunities to do the right thing and work with these high profile bloggers to ensure that they have a good experience and perpetuate the myth of perfection. Update: Thanks to the MNJ readers who pointed out my mistake in this piece from last night, where I referred to Mac OS X 10.4.11 as Panther. Of course, that is the latest update for Tiger. I had the wrong cat all together...

It was good news to see the announcement yesterday from Ken Case at the OmniGroup in Seattle that OmniFocus - the GTD or task management tool I have been using for many months on my MacBook Pro - is about to have an official release and move out of beta status on Jan. 8, 2008. OmniFocus will sell for $79.95, but it can be pre-purchased now for $39.95. The OmniFocus Web site is also worth checking out if you are curious about this application - especially the 15-minute video of how OmniFocus can be used.

Check your Software Updates panel for the latest update to Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard). Apple offers this scant info about the update in the panel: The 10.5.1 Update is recommended for all users running Mac OS X Leopard and includes general operating system fixes that enhance the stability, compatibility and security of your Mac. For detailed information on this update, please visit this website: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=306907. For detailed information on security updates, please visit this website: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=61798. More detailed information in the release notes mention a number of key updates to core programs such as Airport, Disk utilities, iCal, Mail, security and firewall functionality, networking, Time Machine, and the system itself. I am downloading the update now...

Just in case you hadn't already heard, you should check Software Update under the Apple menu to grab the latest updates from Apple.

TidBITS's Jeff Porten isn't impressed with the preview version of Bento. I still haven't dug into what the lightweight database tool can do, but it looks like Jeff makes some good points... John Gruber is not nearly so dismissive, however. I just pointed out Bento to Natalie and she wants to give it a spin when she gets back home from Washington, D.C.

Bento is a "new personal database from Filemaker." It should be interesting to see how this lighter weight database application will fit into the mix of Mac OS X apps. I will be downloading and giving this tool a spin....

I haven't written much about Leopard since installing it a couple of weeks ago, because so far the new Apple OS has been working pretty well. But I have run into a couple of oddities today that are worth mentioning. First, I had my first signs of an OS issue today when my machine went into overdrive, redlining according to Activity Monitor, and I couldn't figure out what process was running away with all of my CPU and memory capabilities. I quit one application at a time and couldn't find the culprit. So I restarted the machine and so far everything is working fine once again. I'll be keeping an eye out for a repeat of this issue. Mac OS X Hints wrote today about something similar related to Time Machine... Second, ever since installing Leopard I am getting shorter times on the battery life for my slightly more than a year old MacBook Pro. I ran my battery all of the way down last weekend, to do a complete cycle of the battery as Apple recommends you to do every few months. I am seeing slightly longer run times on the battery after running it through a complete cycle, but the battery life is still pretty short. I am not sure if the graphical interface in Leopard is just CPU and battery hungry or what. I do need to note that I am not a Leopard hater. It seems that some Mac users I have read in the last week or two consider Leopard such a step back that they think the Mac is suddenly no more dependable than a Windows machine. I know that change hurts, and I know that every install can have issues, but I am not comfortable with trying to write Leopard off as a dud just yet.

Kirk McElhearn offers a review of the newest version of the mind mapping tool, MindMap 4 Pro.

One the arguably most innovative features of Leopard is Time Machine, but I haven't been convinced yet that Apple's new backup tool has anything to offer that I can't already do with SuperDuper. Dan Frakes reinforces the reasons that I haven't tried Time Machine yet in this piece - Revisiting the OptiBay with Time Machine. Why not use Time Machine? Here is a list: Backups made using Time Machine are not bootable At this time, you cannot do Time Machine backups over a wireless connection, as I do automatically every night now to a virtual disk image on a hard disk connected to my Airport base station Although I have not tested Time Machine's possible settings myself yet, I understand from what I have read that the preferences are pretty limited. I only want to back up my machine once a day, not hourly. And I don't want to do manual backups instead, which it sounds like is the next available option in Time Machine. I may try Time Machine when it gets the ability to back up over a wireless connection. Until then, I will keep reading the reports of others...

Paul Boutin offers a very usable list of tips about how to make your writing more effective in Everything I know about writing...