April 2007 Archives

Mike Rohde turned me onto Martin Dugard last year when he was blogging for the Tour de France. It was one of the highlights of following "Le Tour" tour and lucky for me, Dugard found the blogging experience a positive one and decided to continue blogging on his own once the tour was complete. So for the past year or so, I've greatly enjoyed his blog at http://www.martindugard.com/.

The chief reason that I've enjoyed reading Dugard's blog is his writing style. It's almost effortless and yet it inspires me to push harder and do better. Granted, I haven't put my butt in the saddle yet as a result of reading his pity prose, but it has bolstered me to do better in work and in the general sense of my day.

Last week Martin had an article that particularly inspired me. It's entitled "Boston - Roubaix" and I encourage you to take a moment to read it -- it's a good one.

Enjoy!

I'm looking forward to seeing Apple's iPhone is going to look like when it finally ships in June. There are days where I think I'm going to be the first one in line to try and buy one and then there's other days where I think I'll wait for the next version to come out.

Then the other day, I was clicking on links from the Engadget web site and a came across THIS (third image). Do my eyes deceive me, or is that a c l e a r iPhone? :O

I like Sunbelt Software and I have been a fan of their products for years. Additionally, I've been a reader of their blog SunbeltBLOG since it's inception. If you're interested in Windows security, I highly recommend adding it to your RSS reader.

That being said, I came across an article on their blog entitled "Are the Open Sourcerers Selling You a Bill of Goods?" by Deb Shinder, which frustrated me after reading it. The article irked me because it's clear that Ms. Shinder is some what ignorant of exactly what Open Source software is, or isn't, and yet felt compelled to write something on it. She doesn't bash Open Source per se, but she does take issue with it, so I decided to write a response.

That response ended up taking a good bit of time to write, so as a result, I decided to post it here as well. Feel free to "read Shinder's article then refer back to my response. Otherwise it might not make sense being out of context.

I just finished submitting a song to the American Idol Songwriter competition for Holly. She and her good friend Mary wrote the song specifically for the competition in the hopes that they will be chosen as one of the songs used for the top 3 finalists.

If you're not familiar with how Idol works, when the show is down to the final three (I think it's three) contestants in the finale, an original song is chosen for them to sing. This is the first time in the competition when original music is chosen for them to sing and not something that's already been recorded.

The other day I was at my Mom's house and she asked if I could take a look at her MacBook. Everything was working fine, but she found that the fonts were a little small. I went poking around and was able to enlarge the fonts in the Finder and on the Desktop, but that seemed to be the only places, other than individual applications, where I could alter the font size.

So to all my Mac gurus out there, I have a question. Is there a global font option to enlarge all fonts system wide?

In Windows there an option called "Font Size" under the Display Properties that allow you to set the font size for the entire system. Is there a similar option in Mac OS X?

I've had a project for the past few weeks in Downtown Nashville. The bulk of the hard work is over and I'm now in the maintenance phase of the project. Each day I arrive at 7:30am and wait for the users to arrive. Around 10:00am, I've done all I can do to ensure everyone is up and running and I head off to go to other client sites. This is the most routine that I've had in a long time, at least where I had to be somewhere at a specific time. This change in perspective has lead me to thinking more about my transit habits and how I get to and fro.

There's always been a bit of envy when I hear about people who commute to work every day with the luxury of taking public transportation. Of course, those of you reading this who take a train/bus/metro every day are probably scoffing at my use of the word "luxury", but for those of us who don't commute, it does have a certain allure. Taking a daily train to work conveys to me a sense of peace and calm. Something about letting someone else drive, while you focus on something else seems rather rewarding to me. So seeing that my schedule was such that I had the opportunity to experience a daily commute into Downtown Nashville, I was excited. The thought suddenly popped into my head that I could finally scratch the itch and see if it's all that it's cracked up to be.