Inspirational Cards

My sister is really great. Ever now and then she sends me mail, even though she knows it takes a month for things to get here. She sent me a Darth Vader notepad and pens and some pictures of my nieces, my favorite is from their trip to Disney World where they met Darth Vader and one of my nieces looks putrefied or completely in shock to be standing next to him. She also sends these great cards that are meant to look like those inspirational posters, you know the ones that have an Iceberg on them and say stuff like "Substance in 90 Percent below the Surface", or a picture of a building being blown up that says "Even the most structurally
sound argument can be blown up with enough explosives".

I really like the two that she has sent me, but I just found this one and thought it was worth sharing since there is a region meeting going on here this week

MobileMe

I signed up for a test account with MobileMe so that I could see what the programs look like and how it works. The experience I have had with it so far does not make me want to spend 99 dollars a year on the service as Google is pretty much providing the same services for free at the moment.

The programs are nice and the mail application works like a desktop program, which is nice. It does however not work incredibly on the Windows machine at work. It slow down Firefox a lot and sometimes freezes it for 30 seconds.

The calendar is not as good. On my computer, I subscribe to my Google Calendar so that I have all that information open all the time without having an extra tab open in my browser. Google Calendar syncs with my Outlook Calendar at work and from that I get a digital hard copy on my home computer, all three calendars have the same information. The only problem with this on the home machine is that I cannot update the calendar because it doesn't sync with Google Calendar, it just subscribes to it. The problem with MobileMe and this feature is that it won't sync calendars that you subscribe to. There is not even an option in the Calendar application to subscribe to a calendar, which makes it even more annoying.

Contacts works just like I thought it would and syncs really well to my iPod Touch. Again, it is a great looking program and works just like a desktop application.

I have no need for the Photo Gallery application because I think Flickr does a great job already, so I haven't played with it.

iDisk remains the same and works well.

The big feature that I am interested in trying out, but can't due to my laptop sleeping issues, is Back to My Mac. Once I get my laptop back in my possession I will try it out. I have been using screen sharing with my parents a little bit and assuming that Back to my Mac works in a similar fashion it should be a good feature. In fact it would be nice to use in conjunction with iDisk because if you had forgotten something you can just log into your computer at home, drop it into your iDisk and then download it on the machine you are on. Though with connection speeds over here, I don't think I will be using it for streaming music to my laptop.

UPDATE: Mobileme is now blocked at my office. Seriously getting ridiculous with the whole blocking thing.

Apple's Apology

I am amazed that such a large company has the integrity to stand up and admit a mistake.

From Apple's letter to MobileMe users.

"Another snag we have run into is our use of the word “push” in describing everything under the MobileMe umbrella. While all email, contact or calendar changes on the iPhone and the web apps are immediately synced to and from the MobileMe “cloud,” changes made on a PC or Mac take up to 15 minutes to sync with the cloud and your other devices. So even though things are indeed instantly pushed to and from your iPhone and the web apps today, we are going to stop using the word “push” until it is near-instant on PCs and Macs, too."

USAToday

There are a few columns in USA Today that I like and I subscribed to feeds for them so that I don't have to navigate to their page unless an article sounds interesting. Lately, however, there are a few of those columns that I can't get to during the day. I can't figure out if it is because of some sort of block at work or if it is because they are doing maintenance on those specific pages. Either way it is getting annoying making sure that I check these things in the evening my time.


By lately, I mean for the past 3 weeks.

In Your Face America

I am just cruising around the net today and found out that finally we got a movie here before anyone in the States an I just want to say again . . .

IN YOUR FACE

We have had Mama Mia available to watch for almost 2 weeks now and it doesn't release in the States until this Friday. I wasn't planning on seeing it, because frankly it looks terrible and I am not much for musicals of this nature, but I might just have to go so that I can say I saw a movie here before anyone in America got to see it.

Take that.