iChat

I like iChat.  You can use one interface to talk to people on AIM, Google Talk, Bonjour and iChat itself.  I'm sure I could use Yahoo and Microsoft Messenger.  I set it to keep each conversation separate.  You can find out how to use it at  http://www.apple.com/findouthow/mac/#ichatbasics.

MobileMe

This service is great.  For $99/year, you have a 20 GB of back up space that is being sychronized with your computer every hour,  You also have access to your email, pictures, calendar, and backed up files on your www.me.com website.  If you have an iPhone, it updates everything from your computer to www.me.com to your iPhone.  From the website, you can find your iPhone and erase the contents remotely if you think it was stolen.

Login Items

System Preferences>System>Accounts>Login Items

I learned that you can control what programs automatically load right after you login by going to your account and altering "Login Items".  There is a list of programs that will start automatically.  You can click on any program you don't want to run automatically (during the start up) and click the minus (-) under the selection box.  You can also click the plus sign (+) to add a program you would like to run automatically.

For more information, go to http://www.apple.com/findouthow/mac/#appstartup .

Dashboard on the Mac

I've been customizing this.  I've added Translator (it helped the other day when someone called speaking Spanish.  I minored in Spanish and was a little rusty so the Translator helped fill in the gaps.

The converter is amazing.  It converts:

• Money
• Lengths
• Volume
• Power
• Pressure
• Speed
• Temperature
• Time
• Weight

I like the stock list with small chart for each stock.  Flight tracker and New Movies are great.

Parallels virtual Windows environment

When I bought my Mac, I actual never had to give up anything from the Windows world.  I installed Parallels, a software that allows you to run Windows applications side-by-side with Mac applications.  You install Windows on a virtual computer that Parallels creates.  I installed Windows 7 (64 bit version).   Most of my problems still come from the Windows side but it is good for websites that only run on Internet Explorer and applications that only run on Windows.  I'm trying to move everything over to Mac but for those programs that are only on Windows, it is great to have an option to run it right alongside my Mac applications.

A couple things that Macs could adopt from Windows and PCs

There are a few things that I would love from the Windows world to be on my Mac:

• Ability to hibernate.  You don't want to put your Mac to sleep and put it in your laptop case.  With a Windows-based laptop, you can just hibernate.  It saves where you are at and completely shuts down your computer; however, when you restart, the computers comes back to where you left off.
• Resize windows from every corner and every side.
• Delete key (that deletes in back of the cursor), Windows has Delete and Backspace.
• Active Documents - Windows 7 (Vista too) has preview of every document that a program is running when you hover over its icon on the taskbar (Dock).  I substitute with F9 to find what I have out there on the Mac.  (I learned you can click and hold on a icon on your Dock to see everything that is running on that program).

But the stability and speed of Mac, including all the other features the Mac OS X has more than makes up for these little features in Windows.

Apple Training Series: Mac OS X Support Essentials v10.6

I just bought the Adobe EBooks (Digital Editions) from www.peachpit.com for three Apple Training Series:

• Mac OS X Support Essentials v10.6
• iWork'09
• iLife'09

I'm going to start with the Mac OS X Support Essentials

    http://www.peachpit.com/store/product.aspx?isbn=0321635345


Already in the Introduction, I learned about System Profiler (to see if your computer can handle version 10.6).  I already have 10.6 installed but the System Profiler is a very cool utility anyway and it shows you all about your hardware, network and software on your Mac.  You can access it through Applications/Utilities folder.    I saw that my Firewall (local) might be letting in more than I intended.  I'll go fix that in System Preferences.

Macs just work

I bought a Macbook Pro from someone on craigslist.com.  It was the 2006 model but it is faster and smoother than any Windows 7 64 bit machine that I've worked on.  For work, I've bought 6 different Windows 7 64 bit laptops in the past 2 1/2 months and set them up for the owner, his wife and several employees.  Windows 7 is definitely better than Windows XP or Vista, especially with the new Intel processors, but in comparison this 3-4 year old Mac outperforms and is more stable.  3 GB of memory on a Mac is amazing compared to 4 GB of memory on a Windows 7 PC.

What I love is the software just runs.  In 3 months, it has locked up on me once when I had the settings for a printer incorrect.  It reminds me of the stability of Unix when I used it 15-20 years ago.  I guess that is why Macs are so stable.  I never understood the value of controlling the hardware and the operating system when I was only using Windows.  But Windows software has to be written to supports thousands of different kinds of PCs from thousands of manufacturers with hundreds of thousands of different peripherals.  It has allowed the PC market to grow so huge but it has caused PC's and Windows to perform with mediocrity.  Working on these Windows 7 machines, they stall and lock up from time-to-time while I am getting everything installed and working on them.  It is just dealing with all the different kinds of hardware attached.  Controlling both the hardware and the operating system enables Mac software to optimize itself for a short list of different machines and peripherals.  It enables Macs to deliver superior performance and stability that I forgot existed.

Spotlight - I love how fast this finds everything on my computer related to whatever I typed in the search box.  The answers are coming up as I type instead of some whirling icon that spins for many seconds or minutes.  I don't see the same performance from Windows and when Windows software is indexing my computer, I feel a performance drop.  I never even knew when my Mac was indexing everything on my computer to pull it up so fast.

Safari - I really like this browser.  I like the top sites feature.  I like how fast it goes to my websites.  I like how fast it goes to the links.  It doesn't perform the same way with the Windows version.  I like how it works with the key chain to remember my website passwords.  Just smooth.

Droid on Verizon Wireless

Just got a Droid (Motorola) from Verizon Wireless.  It is truly amazing.  I've had PalmOS devices for the past 5+ years and this is on an entirely different level.  You have a really powerful computer in the palm of your hand.  I'll note a few things that I REALLY like:

• Email - I hooked up to my corporate email account on Microsoft Exchange instantly and my emails came into the phone almost instantly.  It has a lot of options in composing, very user friendly and fast.
• Speed - you switch from one app to another very quickly.
• 3G and WiFi - internet access is phenomenal
• Messaging - chat format, haven't figured out how to add more smileys than just a smile but I'll get there
• Camera - amazing 5 megapixel, very clear
• Huge screen - half inch longer than my friend's iPhone
• Keyboard - I do like the on-screen keyboard but I have to type with one finger, my thumbs always get the wrong key, extra slide out keyboard works great
• Maps and GPS - standard it gives you street directions and tracks where you are with satellite imagery, I look forward to what it can do in the mountains with an app for UTM coordinates
• Browser - great on the big screen both orientations, it really looks good with Weightwatcher's mobile website, which I'm already using.  Wish I could figure out how to download flash because a lot of websites are flash driven.  Great resolution and zoom feature helps when website comes up really small.
• Calendar synchronizes with my exchange, which synchronizes with my Entourage, which synchronizes to MobileMe.  I just love it.
• Contacts - I like it.  I need to figure out how to put in a letter so it goes right to a contact and to sort it by last name instead of first.  I like how the contacts start integrating with other applications I download
• Touchscreen - very responsive, almost TOO responsive.  I've called a couple people while on contacts without intending to or typed letters while I'm just thinking of what to type next.  But I'll learn.
• Car Home app - voice commands to navigate, Google Navigate beta works great and turns your phone into a Garmin GPS Unit with turn by turn verbal commands.

I love new technology.  I'm still figuring out notifications.  New text messages and calendar appointments just came up on the screen with the Palm products.  I have to hunt for them when I hear my ringtone on the Droid.

What caused me to buy a Mac after all

Nathanael Brubaker, at Coleson Foods (where I now work), got a Macbook Pro.  He didn't tell me much about it but I knew that he was able to boot to Windows.  Jeff Lingle, from Sequoia Technology (the company that supports our servers) bought a Macbook Pro and told me a little bit about his.  He also told me about some cool software called Parallels, where you could run Windows applications at the same time that you ran Apple software.

A good friend, Christina Ross (another employee at Coleson Foods), bought a Macbook.  She REALLY liked and kept telling me how much I would love it.  I  also had bought Christina a copy of Parallels for Christmas but she ended up not needing it.  It got me thinking that I would hold onto the copy IF I got a Mac.  She also mentioned that a friend of hers told her to tell me that the Mac operating system was based on Unix.  I already knew that but it made me think about how robust Unix was in multiuser and multitasking abilities.  I think Christina pushed me over the edge in what I had been considering since Nathanael bought his Macbook.

However, I remembered my negative experience several years before so I went to www.apple.com/findouthow/mac and watched every PC to Mac video tutorial, actually every 'beginner' tutorial on the website.  That helped me to learn about the dock, how to size windows, finder, system preferences and other features.

I ended up looking for Macbook Pros on craigslist.com and found someone  down in Pueblo who seemed to have taken good care of his.  We negotiated and I got my Macbook Pro 15" with iWork09 and iLife09.  Since that time, I converted my downloaded copy of Office 2007 over to Office 2008.  I've also installed Parallels and Windows 7 (64 bit version), which I run in Coherence or Crystal mode.  I never had to give up anything that I liked in Windows and I get to use the amazing software on the Mac platform.  It is the best of both worlds.

A quick experience with Mac

It was after I had been using Windows for a while, someone had been telling me about Macs and how easy they were to use.  Intuitive and user-friendly.  I don't remember when it was but it was in the very late 90's or just after 2000, but I remember sitting down to a Mac that had just been booted up.  It didn't really have any icons other than a hard drive and no menus (this was before the dock).  I double-clicked on the hard drive.  For some reason, it opened up kind of small.  I double-clicked on the bar across the top to open the window all the way.  However, that just made it disappear.  That was weird.

Then I opened it again, I tried to resize the window by going to the sides or corners.  I think I must have tried every side and every corner but the lower right.  So I thought,  "You can't resize windows?  That's dumb."  I figured that something is intuitive and user-friendly if you KNOW how to use it already.  But because it wasn't doing anything that seemed intuitive and user-friendly within Windows, I gave up.  I probably left the Mac running because I couldn't figure out how to turn it off.  I never looked at another Mac for probably 9-10 years.

I came so close to what I now love just because it wasn't what I expected.

What I liked and disliked about Windows

Since I was an executive with Teen Mania, I'm sure I got a PC while everyone else was still only using Unix terminals.  I do remember using a terminal emulator to connect to Unix.  It must have been the early to mid-1990's that I started working in both the Windows and Unix world at the same time.  I don't really remember why we chose PCs over Apple computers.  I think Apple was going after desktop publishing, education and music.  Personal Computers seemed to be going after the business world.  I might have gotten a Dell first or another computer from PC Designs, maybe even a Gateway.

I first remember how slow I thought Windows was compared to Unix.  It was the GUI (graphics user interface).  There was so much more data to process versus characters.  I remember printing something and my entire computer wouldn't work until the print job was complete.  I compared this to 96 terminals being connected to basically the same computer running Unix, all of us running spreadsheets, databases, and word processing.  People were printing all over the building and nobody even felt it.  If I was the only person on my PC running Windows and I printed, I couldn't do anything else until the print job was finished.  And it took about 30 seconds after I clicked print for it to start printing.

However, I could CLICK to get the computer to do things.  What would have taken me 3 type written commands in Unix, I just completed with a click.  It was wonderful!  Sure, you had to jump over to DOS directly to do anything that hadn't been anticipated in the GUI but I was used to that.

There was also fun software available for Windows that had a lot more versatility than their character- based counterparts:  Word Perfect, Word, Lotus 1-23 and Excel.  The software I really loved was Microsoft Access.  I had already fallen in love with databases using Smartware's database on Unix.  But the GUI made developing queries so much more fun.

Plug-and-play really caused me to fall in love with Windows versus Unix/DOS.  You could load a driver, plug in your device and it was recognized by the operating system then worked.  You didn't have to edit config.sys and autoexec.bat OR some crazy set up files in Unix, it just worked.  Wonderful!!

I remember trying X-windows on Unix after I had been using Windows for about a year.  It just didn't do what I expected it to do so I didn't even try to use it.  I just went back to Microsoft Windows.

100's of Windows PCs

In 1996, Teen Mania moved our entire corporate offices with 30+ staff and 600+ interns from Tulsa, OK to Garden Valley, TX (NW of Tyler, TX).  We built a big call center with state-of-the-art phone system and 70 brand new Gateway computers for about $2000/each.  My family and I moved down to TX a month ahead of the rest of the staff to install all these computers and be there for Lucent Technologies to install our G3 phone system and about 250 phones.  We basically sold all of our Unix terminals and completely converted over to a Windows Server environment (except for our accounting server which stayed on Unix until sometime after I left Teen Mania).  We bought 3Com SuperStack network switches/hubs within days of them being offered to the public, saving over $50,000 in networking equipment.  We soon added another 55 Acer computers for $1800/each.  Here I am with one of the 70 Gateways in the Call Center.

I went to lots of Lucent phone system classes in Pasadena, Denver, Atlanta and Dallas to learn all about our phone equipment.  And I learned all about Windows Servers.  Managing Unix servers served me well and everything seemed a lot easier from a GUI interface rather than command line entries.  The Lucent phone switch was run by Unix so I was right at home managing it.

I managed an incredible team of interns for our Help Desk and a few exceptional staff members who did database programming and network administration.  It was incredible to work with such talented and committed people.

Discovering Windows

Sometime around 1994-1995, Tim Lavender, Teen Mania's Executive Vice President at the time, asked me to help him create a call center of 8-12 stations, each with their own phone and computer.  However, we were having trouble finding cost-effective software on the Unix platform.  At that time, companies developing for Unix were charging $1000/seat for Call Management software or any kind of customer service database.

However, there was inexpensive software being developed like mad for PCs and the Windows environment.  Personal computers had come down in price to bargain levels of $1800-2000.  Windows 3.0 or 3.1 was around $100 per copy and network cards were down to about $150-200 by this time.  So we purchased 8-10 personal computers and started our Call Center.  I think they were Pentium processors, probably not faster than 50 Mhz with 4-8MB of RAM (still with less processing power and memory than your modern Smartphone or iPod).  I think we got some Windows PC's for our executives as well but most everyone was still using Wyse terminals connected to a more robust PC running Unix.

I had been focused solely on accounting for Teen Mania for the past 5 years.  This opportunity to create the computer infrastructure for a call center plus the move of our Computer Manager, Bob Coleman, to the Christian Broadcasting Network, I left Teen Mania's accounting in the more than capable hands of our Controller, Randy Collins, and moved back into the world of computers.  I had no idea how Windows PCs and the incredible growth of Teen Mania would pull me into the world of computers so deeply.

Unix

Somewhere between 1986 and early 1988, I was attending graduate business school at Oral Roberts University, working full-time for a market research firm (MPSI Systems) and volunteering 15-20 hours a week at Teen Mania Ministries (www.teenmania.org).  I wasn't busy enough so I took a programming class in "C" at the local junior college.  Personal computers were $3000 back then so they weren't very personal so I had to go to the computer lab to do all my programming.  We were programming on a Unix mini-computer.  It was amazingly quick and responsive (character based even made it amazingly faster).

Teen Mania was just getting off the ground.  We were still in Ron Luce's den but we were getting ready to move to an office after the summer trip of 1988.  We were also going to start our internship (when internships were considered insane rather than the thing every ministry or church did) after that summer.  We wanted computers that all of us could work on but we didn't have the money to buy each of us computers, even network cards cost $1000 back then.  The 386 chip was just coming out and I found a version of Unix that would run on it (Santa Cruz Operation Unix).   We bought a 386 computer from PC Designs running at a blazing 20 Mhz with 4 MB of RAM.  This SERVER was $3500 and I paid an extra $500 to get a 40 MB hard drive.  And the RAM was $1000 per MB.  In comparison, a 4 GB memory stick of today would have cost $4 million back then.  We connected 8 $400 character-based terminals into our blazing monster of a server and we could have 9 people working at once out of one computer.   Your phone or iPod is a 40-50 times faster with 250x more memory than our server had.  Unix made us be able to have 9 people working on word processing, databases and spreadsheets all at once.  We could print and no one knew by a drop in performance on their individual terminal.

http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/80386/

Within 5-10 years, we had 96 terminals running off one PC Designs 486 computer running at 66 Mhz with 16 MB of memory.  Pretty crazy what you could do when everything was character based running on Unix.

History of Unix

Next, I'll talk about the return to DOS and eventually Windows.

Where my love for computers began

In 1985, Ron and Katie Luce started Teen Mania (incorporated in 1986 as Teen Mania MInistries - http://www.teenmania.org). We bought one of the first personal computers, a XT 10 Mhz with 2 floppy drives. With some software called First Choice (had word processor and a small database), we generated letters, tracked our expenses and posted our donations -- all taking turns on this computer that probably cost us $2500-3000. What a bargain! This is where my LOVE for computers was born.