My New MacBook

I never thought I would be blogging from a Macintosh – ever. I used Apple IIs and Macs in the early days (80s) of the PC, and I thought they were nice machines that had no place in the business arena, but were great for graphic designers and educational purposes. So I stayed firmly rooted in the IBM PC camp while keeping an eye on the Mac world. Now, more than twenty years later, I have finally decided to purchase my first Mac, and I am very pleased with my decision thus far.

From the ease and speed of the selection, configuration, and ordering process on the Apple.com site, to the timely delivery of the machine, to the intuitive setup process and user interface, this has been the most positive and exciting experience I have had in acquiring a new PC. It is hard to believe that I am using a completely new operating system, and was up, running, productive (with my Google tools), and playing (on SecondLife) within an hour of powering up the machine for the first time. I cannot get over how well engineered both the hardware and the GUI are. So elegant and yet useable.

I have really missed not having a laptop for the past year. When my ThinkPad finally bit the dust last spring I decided to replace it with an HP mini tower with a high end graphics card and monitor so I could enjoy my SecondLife experience more fully, as well as for more speed and precision when editing photos and graphics. I have been pretty happy with the HP, but I hated being tied to the office all the time. I yearned for the freedom to work from other locations. I wanted to be able to watch UT basketball while blogging at the same time – as I am doing right now. This is as close to heaven as I have been in a long time.

This OS X Leopard operating system beats the pants off Windows. The networking is effortless and fast. Upon bootup – with an Ethernet cable attached to our office LAN – the OS found the network, found the internet, and attached me to every shared device and directory available without any action from me whatsoever. Try that with Windows. So far, the most annoying problem I’m having that I haven’t been able to resolve is the locating the ‘end’ key or function. But I haven’t cracked a manual yet, or looked at any online help yet either.

Well, I’m off to learn more about the features and functions of my new ‘toy’.

Happy Easter!

I am using this post as a test of the Flickr blog function. I am hoping it will speed up writing posts that use a simple, standard, photo and text layout.

It seems to work quite well, and really simple to set up. You simply configure Flickr to see your blog/s, select a layout for your post (they provide a nice little app for choosing and testing your layouts), then go to the photo that you want to embed in your post. Select the ‘Blog This’ option, (if you set up more than one blog you get a drop-down menu where you can select which blog you wish to post to), and you are presented with a simple interface for creating your post. When you are done, you simply click the Post entry button and your post is posted to your blog using the format that you preselected.

The term “awakened electorate” stuck with me immediately upon hearing the announcement speech, so I went back and read the term in context to try to more fully understand what Barack meant by this term. He seems to be saying that our liberty, and our human rights can only be ensured by our ACTIVE participation in our government. He is saying that we control our own destiny, but only if we participate actively in shaping it.

I think the post by Paul Waldman, Cut the Smear Machine, on TomPaine.com, Feb 13, 2007, is an outstanding example of how bloggers (credible, thoughtful, non-biased, fact-based bloggers) are in the process of taking control of the media machine that is reporting rumors instead of facts in the interest of ratings, and holding them accountable for their reporting errors. Insisting on the public retraction of mis-information, and the publication of the correct information.

These are selected excerpts. Click on the link above to read the entire article.

Today a lie can get all the way around the world in the time it takes a liar to click a post. The good news is that the truth will be hot on its tail.

Consider the first of what will no doubt be many false stories spread about the Democratic candidates: the lie that Barack Obama attended a fundamentalist madrassa when he lived in Indonesia as a boy. When insightmag.com, a website owned by the right-wing Washington Times, put out a breathless report trumpeting the fantasy, Fox News immediately jumped on board, as did Limbaugh, Hannity…Why didn’t anybody ever mention, asked Fox & Friends co-host Steve Doocy, a man who makes Larry King look like Oscar Wilde, that that man right there was raised spent the first decade of his life, raised by his Muslim father as a Muslim and was educated in a madrassa? This sentence contained no fewer than five falsehoods: Obama wasn’t raised by his father, his father left the family when Obama was two years old, his father wasn’t a practicing Muslim, Obama wasn’t raised as a Muslim and he didn’t go to a madrassa ….

But then, perhaps spurred by their more or less constant feud with Fox, CNN sent a reporter out to get this checked to see if the story was true. ABC and the AP followed suit, and all reported to their audiences that what Obama had attended was nothing more than an ordinary public school. In other words, they did what journalists are supposed to do when confronted with a potentially scandalous story about a candidate: investigate before reporting it, then tell the public the facts. That those news organizations doing the right thing seems so remarkable is a testament to how debased American journalism has become.

After the madrassa story, it was rumored that Obama was now refusing to give interviews to Fox News in response to their appallingly irresponsible behavior. This kind of hardball is long overdue, not because Fox itself can be shamed into exercising some journalistic responsibility (shamelessness is one of the primary employment requirements at Fox) but because it sends a message to other journalists: We will hold you accountable for your actions. If you spread lies, we’ll treat you like a liar, and we don’t talk to liars.

(There are several paragraphs describing the Edwards’ blogger situation that preceed this paragraph)

…Despite there being some factual elements buried deep within the story, the two bloggers, Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan, were, in fact, working for John Edwards, and they had previously written strong, even intemperate words criticizing the Catholic Church, this controversy was at its heart no different from the madrassa fiction. Both were attempts by right-wing operatives to create a scandal out of nothing in an attempt to damage a Democratic presidential candidate; in both cases these right-wing operatives sought to enlist the help of the media to do their dirty work.

And in both cases, the liberal blogs fought back (albeit for slightly different reasons; it wasn’t Edwards they were defending, but two of their own). They spread the facts, they put pressure on the media to report them accurately and they generally made the kind of ruckus the right wing has been much more effective at creating. In the end, Edwards did the right thing and refused to fire Marcotte and McEwan. Still, Donohue got the scalp he wanted: Marcotte quit the Edwards campaign this week. (You can read her explanation.)

The 2008 election will be a test of whether blogs have the power to enforce some standard of truth and shame on those news organizations that buy into made-up tales like the Obama madrassa story. During the 2004 campaign blogs were still a novelty, an emerging information source and organizing tool with mostly unrealized potential. Four years later they have become a major player, and journalists, terribly threatened though they may be by the idea that ordinary, uncredentialed people might be checking their work and calling them on their mistakes, have finally realized that blogs can’t be ignored. And if there’s one thing bloggers don’t hesitate to do, it is calling journalists to account when they have sinned.

I also built some rather basic navigation to get back and forth from the blog to the home page – see the page links in upper left of the sidebar.

Feel free to comment and provide feedback.

Have a great weekend!
Carol

I had a more ‘restful’ holiday than I had planned due to a minor, but annoying, health issue. The result was positive though. I had alot of time to sit on the couch and blog and do research on the web. One of the more interesting developments that I have been paying attention to is how the presidential campaigns are using the internet to support and facilitate their efforts. I anticipate that the web will play the most significant role that is has to date in the upcoming campaigns. This is a result of the viability of the new web 2.0 technologies, and the new applications and tools that are taking advantage of them.

I have also been giving thought to what I want to do with my web site this year. My current site, shfwilf.wordpress.com, was intended as a personal site where I could blog about any topic of interest to me, and where I could organize my links and keep a journal. I have also used it as a tool to test out WordPress (to see if I want to stick with it as my blog app), and to build my basic blogging skills. My current blog has satisfied all of my short term objectives, and I have decided to take the next step in my blogging ‘career’. I have purchased web hosting services, and have begun to construct this new site with WordPress as my blog app.

Net is, I may not have much time to blog here for a few days/weeks as I am building my new site. I just started building it yesterday, and I have made good progress, but I still have quite a ways to go. For example; if you go to the home page for the site (lifeisanongoingprocess.com) you will see an ‘under construction’ page that does have a working link to the blog page, but once you get to the blog there is not a link back to the home page….yet – I am working on it….

This is a big step for me in my blogging learning process, so the going may be slow, and the results may be shaky at first, but I feel it is time for me to ‘take the training wheels off’ and to master more of the underlying technical skills I need to take full control of my web site presentation and functions.

I plan to keep both sites operational for the short term.
Blog on,
Carol

BTW, I am using bluehost as my hosting service. I am delighted with their service thus far. It is affordable, easy to use, good support (phone & on-line help desk), good performance, and fairly good documentation. I even got a phone call from them yesterday making sure that I was satisfied with their service, and directing me to their support phone number if I had an questions or problems.