Tag: OS X

Back On Track…

Mac OS X Leopard’s Spash Screen

Well, I gave in and wiped the harddrive on the laptop after trying just about every method known to man to try to get any files off it. The file system was completely hosed.

Reinstalling the OS and upgrading to Leopard and then reinstalling Office and Adobe’s Creative Suite took way too long. I’m still missing some stuff, but luckily I had registration codes written down for everything except one and I think I lost the email for that one in the wipe.

Fortunately, I only lost about 5 days worth of edits and journal entries that weren’t backed up on my desktop machine. I’m giving what used to be called .mac or iDisk and is now known as MobileMe a trial. For $99 a year, they’ll back up all the preferences and data from my Apple-centric software. Sadly, I don’t like Mail, Safari, iCal, or Address Book and prefer Entourage. So, if I want that stuff backed up, I have to do a bunch of picky hand-setting of what I want archived. Add to this, if I don’t want to give up my two free month trial, I can pay my money now and upload more than 100mb at a time.

Do you know how small 100mb is?! Sheesh.

So on the whole, I’m not TOO depressed about having to wipe it, but I am feeling a distinct sting where all my contacts, emails and stuff that wasn’t backed up have been ripped from me. Yes, for a digital packrat, this sucks. Oh well, life goes on and more will be accumulated over time.

So the plans this week are to jump back in at the deep end and keep going. At least the writing stuff lost wasn’t new pages, just some edits. It could have been so much worse than having to resummarize the scenes in Revealed, but I’m looking at them closely in terms of subplots and what I can do to expand on Barrington’s story line. I also printed out the whole beast so I can work on the edits from that and know which pages have been revised for sure. Yup, list of pages revised went poof too.

So that’s how my week wrapped up. Dr. Horrible was definitely a bright spot. Joss Whedon is pure EVIL!

Thursday Thirteen: Apps

Thursday Thirteen

 

The 13 Applications I Use Most

 

What computer programs do you use that you just couldn’t get through the week without? Yes, this is a biased Mac user’s list. Anyway, mine are, in no real order of preference:

1. Microsoft Word

I use this on a daily basis. My journal entries have been kept in this as my handwriting has deteriorated to an unreadable scrawl because of typing everything and a decided lack of practice. I can also type faster than I write so, it seemed no contest. I’ve learned to use many of the features that I’d never touched before. I’ve learned to merge files, use the comments and revision tracking, set up different styles and even how to set up a concordance file to generate an index. Unfortunately, I can’t figure out how to jump to those indexed entries automatically within the program. One of the joys of using a Mac is not everything is as advertised for PC.

2. Microsoft Excel

I’m a spreadsheet junkie. I have one set up to track how many words and how much time I’ve been spending on a project. I’ve used this mostly during WriMos to chart my progress. I also use it a lot for Cub Scouts.

3. Microsoft Entourage

E-Mail. Can’t live with spam and can’t live without the cheap, fast communication. I subscribe to far too many mailing lists and newsletters. I would not survive without all my rules for sorting the deluge into separate folders that I can check based on priority or curiousity. I’ve also been using the calendar function and it’s made getting events onto DH’s calendar at work much easier as well. I also use this to organize contacts over the default address book.

4. FireFox

I only use the above Micro$oft products because there aren’t alternatives with which I’m willing to spend the time it would to familiarize myself and not lose productivity. Firefox is just plain better than IE in many ways. It’s not just a religious war, it’s a practical thing as well, since things render correctly in Firefox and NOT IE. *grumble* That and they’ve even stopped supporting IE on the mac, at least the banks and other finicky places are mostly allowing FireFox access now.

5. Online-Stopwatch

Ah, this is my friend for chat challenges. I wore out my kitchen timer last fall. My laptop doesn’t like it as much as I do. It tends to make it run even warmer than usual. You can use this little flash applet on the webpage or download your own. Twenty-minutes of focus, coming up!

6. Adobe Photoshop

Why don’t Macs come with a basic paint progra any more? Oh yeah, they expect people to be more hardcore. I’m learning all sorts of stuff with this one as well. I finally broke down and put it on my laptop.

7. iTunes

I often forget I have music at my fingertips. I used to listen to music all the time, but lately it’s been an after thought. On the laptop I’ve limited song choices to instrumental pieces as I find lyrics very distracting as I’m trying to write.

8. A Cook’s Books

I love collecting recipes. I may never fix some of the ones I’ve got, but I love reading them and getting ideas. This is as powerful, if not moreso, as MasterCook for the PC. What’s better is that it reads MasterCook and several other formats and has a great developer who cares about what he’s making and good food as well.

9. Adium

Ahh… another time sink. This is basically an instant messenger client that talks to all the different servers. You can use AIM, GoogleTalk, yahoo and several others. Everything’s in one place and you don’t have to think about who’s on which service.

10. BBedit

This is a mac text editor. I use it for composing html, Thursday Thirteens and anything that needs sorting lists that aren’t already in excel. This is a holdover from the text game days, but I love it.

11. Quicken Personal Finances 2007 for Mac

Quicken. Yup. I have a bachelor’s in Business Administration and Economics. I hate balancing my checkbook. This at least makes it kind of fun with the fast reports and pretty graphs. They just need to support the Mac better. C’mon, guys!

12. Delicious Library

This is a fairly new tool for me. I haven’t used it enough as I need to. My laptop came with a camera in it. You can use this program and the camera to scan the barcodes on books, CDs, DVDs and computer games to keep track of what you have. I got one bookshelf done. Phew. We have WAY too many pieces of media that need to go in here.

13. Adobe Reader

This is my reader of choice over the mac’s Preview. There’s just something about it’s two-page up view that makes reading e-books on my laptop more comfortable.

Links to other Thursday Thirteens!

1 Lanie Fuller 2 Heather 3 Carol –
4 Talk About My Favorite Authors 5 Savannah Chase 6 amy
7 Susan Helene Gottfried 8 Tempest Knight 9 Paige Tyler
10 Los Angeles Traveler 11 Bernie 12 Winter

Get the Thursday Thirteen code here!

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