Them there internets are all abuzz about iWork now that it has a spreadsheet. "Now Apple can challenge Microsoft Office!", sez the Apple faithful. "Not so fast.", sez I. "First off, have you ever tried to do any word processing with Pages? Pages has some neat features, but it's not a competitor with Microsoft Word." "Ah, but now Pages has a word processor mode!", sez the fanboy, his eyes alight with glee and fanaticism. Look, I don't think anybody out there hates Office anymore than I do. (Well, OK. Eric S. Raymond and Richard Stallman do. But nobody else!) I've tried to use Pages in the past. And I hated it. I have this iWork '08 install package sitting here on my desk and I need to print a couple of shipping labels. Let's review how this works in Word. You start up Word, the stupid Project Gallery thing comes up. you click Labels, click Label wizard (the only choice in the category but Microsoft loves the clicks!). You pick out the Avery label number for the type of label you want, decide whether you want a full sheet or just a single label, you paste in the address you want and you hit print. It's great. Again, I love to hate on Word but if you want to print a label it's pretty damn good. So I fire up Pages '08. No label support. Nothing. Nada. I can print some lovely looking envelopes but I need a label to put on a box, not an envelope. Search the help for labels. Nothing relevant. <sigh> Close down Pages and start Word. I'm all excited about Numbers (the new spreadsheet) and it looked like Pages did have a bunch more word-processor-y things than Pages '06 did. But I print labels reasonably often and I don't think it's that strange of a task. I realize there's a quagmire of "nobody needs 100% of Word, but everyone needs a different 80%", but I really think labels are probably more common than that. And ironically it's one of the few things Word does where the "wizard" does just what I want and stays out of my way. You could almost believe it was an Apple application, if all you did was print a few labels . . . .

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Tags: iWork08, Pages, MicrosoftWord, labels, MicrosoftOffice

Our landscaper was here today planting another round of plants in the front yard. I was going to take some photos for Karin (who's still out of town for another few days), but then my copy of iLife (and iWork) '08 arrived. So I figured I'd poke at iPhoto '08 and try out the new fancypants Web Gallery stuff. So . . . here it is: Pretty neat. I cropped the pictures in iPhoto, and then did a variety of tweaks - mostly reducing shadows and boosting the color temperature although I also played with the sharpness in the close zooms on flowers.

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Tags: FrontYard, Flowers, iPhoto08, iLife08, Landscaping

Spook Country.JPG

Ask yourself this: "Is Tim the sort of person who would gloat over getting a book that somebody in Japan might really want, but maybe wouldn't have paid the shipping to get it?" Then ask yourself this: "What am I freaking new here?" I haven't finished it yet, I'm a bit less than halfway through. I did go back and reread Pattern Recognition in preparation earlier this week because I had read that they shared at least one character. It goes a touch deeper than that. Not that you'd need to read PR to understand Spook Country but there's been one clear reference that says the events of PR precede SC. Gibson books are often difficult to get into, I personally find it a struggle to establish empathy with the characters. It's worth it to do so but it does take some effort. Spook Country aggravates this because it starts with three different stories and three different POV characters. Initially Gibson rotates with each chapter being a different POV, so there are THREE characters to struggle with identifying.

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Tags: Books, WIlliamGibson, SpookCountry, PatternRecognition

Back in the misty prehistory of time I mentioned SFNovelists - the web site for a group of Science Fiction and Fantasy authors that I happen to be a member of. The web page has languished a bit over the last year, but Tobias Buckell has recently been jamming like a fiend on pulling together a great new site and it relaunched today. Instead of the simple blog-joining that the old site had now we've got daily blog posts created for the site by a rotating list of posters, the combined RSS feed, free samples from books and short stories, and all sorts of goodness. Stop by and check it out! I don't think I'll be posting stuff there right away, mainly because my professional promotion is lagging behind my actual writing these days (my current writing plan is in the dictionary - it falls somewhere between "dubious" and "dysfunctional") but it's a great site. I've been trying to kick in some help on behind-the-scenes techno-nerdery, so that's my contribution for the short term. Long term, we'll see.

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Tags: SFNovelists, writing

In a comment on the last post Tony suggested that I should go with a large god name for the Mac Mini. I though that was a good one, but as I kicked it around I decided that what I really wanted an elephant. It's a file server, so the elephant appealed to me. So I've named the machine Horton after Horton Hears A Who. An elephant never forgets, don't you know? I grabbed a nice Horton image from the web and embarked on some basic setup. I got Quicksilver, installed, along with Firefox and Flock. I'm posting this from Horton - an inaugural post as it were. At the moment it's busily copying a metric ton of data from my linux box. I'll get all the files moved over, then worry about moving the software services. I might get to mail tomorrow, but I doubt it. Web probably won't happen until mid-week. Among other things in order to move the web stuff I'll need to get Ruby and MySQL running on Horton. I'm still debating about trying to upgrade to MovableType 4 as part of the move, I might go ahead and just install MT4 on Horton and then see about moving the content across.

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Tags: OSX, MacMini