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Mac Corner

Hello, I must be going ...

By Larry Grinnell, Palm Beach Phoenix Apple Users Group

larry grinnell

This is my 90th Mac Corner column for the PBBusiness.com website, and sadly my last. It’s been a fun and challenging nearly two years.

I started this column at the request of the president of the Palm Beach Phoenix Apple User Group, as part of the club’s efforts to get the word out about the organization, and to provide a public venue for an unemployed technical writer, as I was when this all started (since remedied). I learned a lot about deadlines, and was absolutely amazed how people can do a job like this, year in and year out.

The only reason I’m dropping this gig is because I had committed several years ago to edit the third edition of the Grinnell family genealogy. I did the previous one in 1997, which came out at over 700 pages. Well, thanks to the Internet and a maniacal club genealogist, we have added so many individuals and families, that this next edition is going to come in at somewhere around 2,000 pages — the index alone will be around 300 pages (in small type, laid out in four columns per page!).

This project is going to take any free time I ever thought I might have for somewhere between nine months and a year, so there just isn’t room for anything extra — especially if it isn’t bringing in some income. I do have an occasional part-time gig with my former employer doing specialized work, which brings in a few bucks, and I’m going to have to balance that work with the book efforts. But you really don’t care about any of that now, do you?

I’ve been thinking about my ninety Mac Corner columns and what I have learned and what I hope I have conveyed to you, the reader. Here are a few of those items:

— Backups. Do them. Regularly. Expect disaster to occur when you least expect it and when you can least afford to lose everything. A few months ago, I suffered mightily when the hard drive on my web server failed in a rather spectacular fashion, and like a complete idiot, I had never gotten around to backing it up! Like Jimmy Buffet sang in his song Margaritaville, it was my own damn fault.

— The Apple Macintosh is a pretty awesome piece of hardware (and I really hate using the word “awesome,” a word that seems to mostly come out of the mouths of eight-year-olds). The new ones are so incredibly powerful, while being stylish to beat the band, which can easily be an honored part of your living room décor, while crunching through spreadsheets, rendering video, mastering 16 tracks of audio files, and running additional operating systems (Windows, Linux, etc.). The older Macs, as long as you are satisfied with using older versions of software, are still quite viable in the home and even in non-demanding office situations.

— Apple laptops, while not seeming like much of a bargain, come with more useful software out of the box that can make you productive within a few hours of plugging them in for the first time. The displays are absolutely gorgeous (as long as you can deal with reflections from lighting in your home or office), with that much-sought after “pop” that art directors are so fond of.

— The iPod family continues to dominate the portable music player universe because they are just that good, and have something no one else has—iTunes. iTunes makes the job of managing your music, video, and other information so easy, you hardly have to think about it.

— The iPad is so much more than a big iPod. For the vast majority of users, this is the ideal living room PC. You can check your email, surf the web, play games, remotely control things, and so much more, in a beautifully-designed package with incredible battery life, decent performance, light weight, and cool operating (it doesn’t attempt to ignite your hoo-ha like a typical laptop if you are silly enough to actually use one on your lap).

— The iPhone was a game-changer of enormous proportions. There had been smart phones before. Heck, there were lots of smart phones before — Blackberry, Windows, Symbian, and others. Apple truly showed them how it should have been done from the start, starting with a simple user interface, an easy and convenient way to get new applications and games (the AppStore), and fantastic industrial design (shorting antennas notwithstanding). It also spawned a huge new market in accessories — cases in particular.

So, there you have it. Yes, I’m an Apple fanboy. I guess it’s important to be one if you’re writing a weekly column about them. Heck, I’m so much a fanboy, I even appeared in the movie Macheads (you can clearly see me in the audience at around the 5:00 and 6:00 minute mark, at the 2007 Macworld Expo keynote speech when Steve Jobs introduced the first iPhone).

I’ve been using these since the very start, always trying to get a little more out of them, and pushing them for all they’re worth. Rest assured, I shall continue to do so, even though I won’t be reporting about them for the immediate future.

It has been an honor and privilege to share my thoughts with you. I also want to thank David Sedore, owner of PBBusiness.com for providing a venue for my ranting and raving, and special thanks go out to Joerg B. von Veltar (better known as JG to his friends), president of the Palm Beach Phoenix Apple User Group.

JG is dedicated and devoted to spreading the Apple gospel, and is working very hard to make the PB Phoenix AUG a world-class organization, even as other user groups have gone the way of the dinosaur. It was JG that talked me into doing this column. I don’t know whether to thank him or kill him.

Mac Corner runs every Wednesday only in Palm Beach Business.com. Click to read the previous column.

About Larry Grinnell: Larry has been working with Macintosh and Windows PCs for over 25 years and worked as a senior technical writer and IT support professional for a major midwest-based consumer electronics and telecommunications equipment manufacturer here in South Florida. His musings on a wide variety of topics from computers to jazz guitar to strange foreign cars from the 1950s can be viewed at the MyMac.com website. Click here to reach him by email.

palm beach phoenix logoWriters of this column are members of the Palm Beach Phoenix Apple User Group, a nonprofit organization for Apple Computing Device Users, recognized by Apple Inc., with the purpose of providing educational training and coaching to its members (students, professionals and seniors alike) in a cordial social environment. The club meets the second Saturday (1-4 p.m.) and fourth Wednesday (6-8 p.m.) of each month at the Fire Station #2, 4301 Dixie Highway in West Palm Beach (just two block south of Southern Boulevard). Click here to visit their website. Click here to reach them by email.

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mac corner...essential reading for apple computer users
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APRIL 6, 2011 click to go home
 
         
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