Tuesday, January 22, 2008

what did you do today?

I heard on the local radio that on this day in 1959 Fidel Castro was washed out of the baseball league in the US because of his wild pitching (he had beaned someone). Makes you wonder what would have happened if that pitching coach had seen a potential and decided to work with a young Fidel to become a National League pitcher.

What little thing do you do that may effect the world in years to come?

Friday, January 11, 2008

Grandkids

I don't know if I have mentioned this but I have four grandkids, 3 boys and a girl. They are wonderful and give you a chance to relive a lot of times that you were too busy trying to make a living instead of enjoying your children. You should enjoy your children as they grow up, but I don't think anyone realizes how fleeting that time is.

Two of my grandsons live in the same town and come over every morning and have breakfast prior to going to school. It is always interesting to listen to them and wonder how their thought processes work.

This morning the younger one started stating random words, such as "icicle, chicken, orange" one right after another. His brother finally said "what?" and the younger looked at him and said "Haven't you played this game before? Now it's your turn." which completely confused everyone. He then explained the rules, you say random words, until someone says what, then it's their turn to say random words until someone else says "what."

It's interesting to see how their little minds work.

Saturday, January 5, 2008

New Computers

As I have mentioned before I work for a quick printer and we are basically a Mac shop. I do have a couple of lame PCs running XP that I print from M$ but the real work is done on Macs using mostly Adobe programs. I will write more about that later, but the reason for this post is the two new Mac Pros I just installed: 4 gigs of ram and duo 2.66 gig processors both running Leopard. I have been a little hesitant about going to Leopard. I need things to work, customers don't understand why my computers need rebooted, and ppds aren't working, so it needs to be seamless.

First let me say the new Mac Pros are an excitement to behold and have blazing speed, but I seem to think that with every new computer. Leopard does have some great new bells and whistles that make it fun, particularly spaces and stacks. Learning a bit about Quick Look and hope to take advantage of Time Machine ( looking at a Drobo (http://drobo.com/products_demo.aspx) right now. Will let you know if that happens.

The trick this time has been the combination of Intel and Leopard. Several of my printer drivers (especially Xerox production systems) require special drivers. The wide format printers (510 and 721P) don't have a PPD for the Macs (even tho Xerox's newest toy is the Access Printing system for OSX - they can't seem to decide if they are going to support it or not?). But after a couple of days of install and reinstall I think I have all machines talking.

I have been running an Intel laptop for a few months now, using Tiger. As I mentioned I was hesitant to jump to Leopard, but with these new machines and the upgrade to .1 I think it's about time to take advantage of Apple's latest offer.