I love my new set up. It is so easy to take photos, plug the camera into the Mac, download and edit the photos, upload to Flickr or our server, and post to my blogs from anywhere where I can get a wireless connection. Very cool!

An early morning walk with the dogs and Ron this morning provided a perfect opportunity for taking some photos of the gardens. I selected some of the best shots to share below. There are many more on my Flickr page, and the full sized jpegs are there as well if you want to see the large, detailed versions of them. I think the close up below of the Grand Primo narcissus is my favorite of the bunch.

Close Up of Narcissus

This Indian paintbrush is also a nice shot.

Indian Paintbrush

Every year we seed wildflowers along our driveway. There are several nice stands of bluebonnets, daisies, and coreopsis finally starting to get established.

Wildflowers Along the Driveway

Click here to see the slideshow of the whole set. You will see the bluebonnets, paint brushes, and other native Texas wildflowers that are growing in the wildflower area on the north side of our land. There is also a picture of my dog Duffer – a very large golden-lab mix. There are close up shots of an Indian paintbrush, our new red passionvine, the Grand Primo narcissus, and a Mexican buckeye bloom spike. There is a feeble attempt at catching a hummingbird at the hummingbird feeder, and a shot of the water lilly in our stock tank water garden. Finally, there are some views of the new garden beds in our front courtyard area featuring the rock garden area, the new copper canyon daisies grouped around a boulder, a shot of my larkspurs, the Mexican buckeye, and a couple of others.

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!