Experimental
Ok. This is my first crack at using Google documents. I don't know how it will react to HTML, but the cool thing is that I can start working on something at 0100 at home in my underwear on my futon and it will beat me to work in the morning.
I'm also testing an idea that Howton gave me via an AIM session. He said that he kept his "Post to Journal" tab open all day at work, writing a sentence or two at a time and then at the end of the day he had a post. We shall see.
I should add that I'm using Opera for this task, so this is yet another example of things that Google got right. Now, if only they'd amend Calendar appropriately, we'd all be happy.
Speaking of Calendar, I must say that Apple took a page straight out of Google Calendar with advanced logic for determining when a string was a date even when it wasn't in the typical mm/dd/yyyy format. I'm really liking what I'm seeing with Leopard--I can't wait to own my own Mac.
So yes, Eric finally talked me into a mini and he did it over the phone no less. Imagine that! He took time out of his day with his family to hold my hand and guide me to the proper conclusion. That isn't to say that I think he has everything right; I think I'm going to see the performance hit of only have 1 GB of RAM, but my mini should be rather steppy...for the first 24 hours. Let me get my *nix services configured, download the Adobe software, Open Office, Opera (those of you who are worried that I won't take Eric to task about Opera being my first download on the Mac, don't sweat it. I might even make a big presentation of it if I can plan far enough in advanced.) and finally my music and files going and I'm sure that there will be considerable drag. Of course he's right: I've never worked on the platform so I don't know what to expect. What he's wrong about is the fact that I'm not happy that only the 24 inch iMac and up does full 1080p. Granted, the only thing that I have that is 1080p are a few trailers from Apple, but still, my ATI 850 XT Pro could render them, so why not the Mac? Oh, will someone in the Mac community tell me where I can find Quick Time Pro to download for free?
You might ask when I plan to purchase my Mac. Well, it works like this: I applied for the card that Apple offers on their website. There's just enough credit to get the low-end mini without the keyboard and mouse, forget about the warranty. What I'm going to do is buy the bigger mini that is offered for many reasons, the ultimate being that if selling the laptop is in the future, it would be nice to retain the DVD burning capabilities I've had for the past 4+ years, especially if I may get to the point where the mini is my only machine. Also, I wont' lie; the additional hard drive space will be nice. I really wished I had the do-ri-me to get 2 GB out the door, but beggars can't be choosers.
Back to purchasing. So I've got a CompUSA card and now I'll have the Visa. I can split the cost between the two and the machine should be payed for before I get my tax returns. I'm waiting for the card to come in the mail (which I hope will be sometime this week) but more importantly for Leopard to come out this weekend. I've already purchased a hard drive enclosure, a 7-port USB hub and a line conditioner in anticipation of the mac. All that is left is to get the machine itself and set it up which will make for a nice weekend project. Oh yeah, I'll have to learn then interface too. I'm looking forward to that challenge and conquering it in record time.
It looks like I'm going to drink the Kool-Aid and get an iPod. My MP3 player was on my desk playing tunes in lieu of Samba being unavailable, but the little bugger got pulled off the desk and onto the floor. It continued to play tunes until I let it sit and the power management tried to kick in. The unit froze. I tried to reset it, but all I would get is a menu that would allow me to clean the files (which did nothing) format (not doing that without access to my files) reload the OS (which, when selected gave a hard disk error with a cute graphic) and finally reboot. I want the 80 GB classic to replace my 60 GB Creative Zen Xtra Jukebox. Donations accepted.
P.S. I wrote this whole entry in Google Docs. I think I can actually publish it to my blogs via the interface. I'm going to test that now. Perhaps there will be another post sometime today from work via the afore mentioned method.
P.P.S. The publish to blog feature was not quite what I was hoping it would be, but it worked reasonlbly well given that I was attempting to post markup into the blog itself.