Priceless

Funny how senseless hope can be sometimes. Like a funeral procession I make several loops around my apartment building last night, scanning over the same cars I see everyday. A brisk, 21 degree New England frost creeps up the window as my chapped thumb clicks buttons labeled “PANIC” and “OPTION” because a car alarm clicker I’m friends with had lost its partner. My car was stolen last night. A gorgeous, restored, custom 1995 Acura Integra GSR. 190k miles, but you’d never know it. Bounced you around like a bad pilot on approach, but you loved it. Problem after mechanical problem, but you fixed it.

I believe strongly there are things in this world that you cannot attach a price to. That objects can become more than the sum of their parts, that great design inspires great experiences, that inanimation gains life through knowing, better than the user him/herself, what it is ultimately designed to do. This car had a life. A graduation gift from my father, it was priceless not because of performance, handling or looks, but because it represented something a father I was only beginning to know at the time spent so much of his time and energy to find… for a time in my life that I worked so to make it through… in a way only it could deliver.

Someday science will catch up to reality. Engineers will invent materials that have a life of their own. Steel frames with a heartbeat, locatable by GPS anytime, anywhere. Someday they’ll phone home faster than some chop-shop can isolate and inactivate them. Someday the glass chips they leave behind will tell a story. Someday technology will be smarter.

Till then I wait for a faceless insurance company to put a price tag on a father’s love and a phenomenal five year driving experience.

Priceless.

— Clif @ 11:38 am

Seek Simplicity

What is it about moving that’s so hard? 2 weeks to pack, 12 hours to move, then 2 more weeks to figure out what box you put your life in. The older you get the more stuff you collect. Plus it weighs more. How ironic that in a world where global networks daily tear away at the walls of time and place in our work that we still so held back by time and place in our lives?

My new roommie’s got a computer, a TV, a VCR, and a sleeping bag. Roomie says, “My M.O. is that everything I need should fit in the trunk of my car” Sure, no complaints about the new HDTV, stereo or futon in the apartment, but still… how great is that? He packs and moves like geese - anywhere, anytime. I shoot cross-state 3x/week with laptop, Nano, and cell. Production. Education. Communication. What else do you need, really?

Lao-tzu once said, “Manifest plainness, embrace simplicity, reduce selfishness, have few desires.”

Perhaps it’s time to eBay some complexity.

— Clif @ 11:42 am

Impossibly Small is Just the Beginning

Believe the news people. Yesterday marked my first hands-on exposure to the iPod nano. All I can say is that there are some things that just don’t seem natural. Pick it up and you expect it to weigh 4x more than it does. Activate the screen expecting Timex, you get HDTV. Hold it in your hand and play with it for a while and crazy ideas about sliding it in your wallet alongside your Mastercard emerge. Yes, yes, and yes, it really is that “impossibly small”.

In fact, I did some research and guess what… remember last year’s standard of “thinness” in the tech world (Motorola’s uber-swank Razr phone)? Consider this…

iPod nano’s 1/2 the weight of the Razr
iPod nano’s 1/2 the thickness of the Razr
iPod nano’s battery runs more than 2-3x as long as the Razr’s

Full flavor. Zero fat. Make no mistake about it geek peeps, this is the Jenny Craig of the iPod world. I’m warning you… don’t pick this baby up unless you’re ready to throw down.

iPod nano = geek lust incarnate.

— Clif @ 9:53 pm

Podcast Addiction

As one of my first posts, I thought I would share a little addiction I have. Ever since the release of iTunes 4.9, I have been absolutely hooked on podcasting. Most activities of my day lately are accompanied by one of my many subscribed podcasts.

In the morning, my iPod and my JBL OnTour speakers provide my shower/get dressed podcast. Next is typically another podcast via my iPod while I walk to class. I try to find an especially good one to help me take my mind off of the fact that I’m even at school over the summer. I usually play my last podcast for the day straight out of my PowerBook while I check my email and such for the night.

One of my other secret passions is online gambling. the absolute best resource for finding online casinos is Hypercasinos.com, but anyway, this post was about podcasts, so I won’t go into deatil about that.

If you haven’t tried out podcasting yet, I highly recommend it. It puts you in control of what news you want to hear, and there are a lot of talented radio personalities behind many of these shows. This is a concept that is here to stay, and I am pretty excited about it.

— Maurice Cheeks @ 9:34 am

Sharing Time

Budgeting your time, in college it makes or breaks you. As an undergrad my entire life revolved around spending the first week of classes placing every exam, test, and homework assignment carefully into a weekly planner, then going back highlighting key dates on the mini-months for quickie test-checks.

The thing is that planners are great if all you want to do is budget your own time, but these days we’re connected with others in ways never dreamed of even a couple years ago. Our network is key. To succeed as one, we must let fail none. Hey, if I’m going to spend the time to put all my class exams, dates, and assignments down in a calendar, why not share the wealth a bit with the other 30 or so pour souls in my class, right?

This is exactly why I really love Apple iCal. iCal’s so much more than just a planner, it’s also the absolute best way to share the wealth with others, get your classmates in your network, and earn serious brownie points when you’re looking for that ace-in-the-hole study partner come midterms.

To get started, create a new calendar for each class you’re taking this semester. Put in all major exams/assignments. Proceed the same way with each of your classes. When finished, use the FILE -> NEW CALENDAR GROUP to keep all your classes together. Now your secret weapon… use the CALENDAR -> PUBLISH… command to share out each of your class schedules. Send the links provided to each of your classmates. If you don’t have a DotMac account, check with your school to see if you’ve got any web space assigned to you and how to access it. Most schools tie this in with your email account and you can use your email login/pass to post to it via iCal. You won’t get all the great web publishing functions of DotMac, but don’t forget… even Windows users can access the ical file format using Netscape or Mozilla’s Calendar or Sunbird projects.

Get organized, give the best gift: time, and get that Bio 101 geek on your side from day one.

— Clif @ 9:33 am

SweetToothBlue

So I just picked up my first cell phone with Bluetooth last week and after getting it paired up and running to my Mac and headset I have only two things to say:

Bluetooth Rocks.

I’m on the road 3 hours/day and having a wireless headset with voice-activated dialing is just insane. Press a button the side of the headset, “Say a command”, “Call Jane McFane at home”, “calling…” Talk about a great way to stay focused on the road - every phone should do this!

Better yet, click in the menubar, choose send file, and I’m popping my favorite mp3’s to the phone as ringtones and pics as picture ID’s… I can browse all the photos, videos, or voice memos I’ve recorded on the phone, then just drag them to the desktop to save…. All my Address Book contacts are immediately on the phone… All my iCal events synced up perfectly… And the real clincher? I can even dial-up to the internet on my laptop wirelessly while the phone’s still in my pocket at speeds rivaling DSL.

I don’t how they do this on Windows, but no way there’s this level of integration and ease of use. Next time someone says buy a PC if you want the latest and greatest, ask them how to show you how to setup a Bluetooth phone that sync contacts, events, music, and photos with a manufacturer that ships every one of their laptops with Bluetooth built-in and ready to rock with zero driver downloads or hassle whatsoever.

— Clif @ 9:33 am

It’s about that time again.

This time of year always spurs some seriously conflicting emotions. The summer has grown boring, but school seems so unappealing. It’s hard to decide which is more fun sometimes; having a full time job and making money, or lavishing in the poor yet carefree lifestyle of a college student. Alas, it is back to school time. It’s time for a fresh start, new classes, possibly a new living situation, maybe some new gadgets to play with.

It is fun to come back to school and see what things have changed, and what things will never change. This year my campus has been renovating a ton, so that’s pretty exciting to see. Plus with renovated buildings comes new computer labs, which is always fun for those of us who get excited about that sort of thing.

In any event, this should be a great semester to start a great year. Make it your best yet, I know I plan to.

— Maurice Cheeks @ 9:33 am

Infinitely faster

Ever notice how fast life is in this digital age?
Just a moment ago I got an email notification to alert me that someone posted a question about Apple’s new Mighty Mouse on a particular discussion board that I participate in. Since I knew the person, and the question was pretty straightforward, rather than reply on the message board I just sent her an instant message on iChat. Her response was, “Wow you’re fast!� To which I replied, “technology is fast.�

As I sit here instant messaging my friend just a couple minutes after she posted her question, I was forced to contemplate how expedient technology has made us. For communication we’ve got cell phones, text messaging, instant messaging… heck even with email if you leave your Mail application open it is nearly as fast as an instant message. To instantly entertain us we have broadband internet, RSS, podcasts, On-Demand cable, the iTunes Music Store, and my personal favorite - dvds that don’t require rewinding.

Someday we’ll tell our kids stories about how we had to spend 10 minutes rewinding a “tape� before we could watch a movie at home. Or about having to physically go to the store to buy a “cassette� when we wanted our favorite music artists’ new album. Maybe we’ll leave out the part about having to flip over the cassette halfway through the loop.

— Maurice Cheeks @ 11:45 am

Last Post

Well, everyone, this is my last post. I’ve graduated, and I’m moving to a new town to start a new job, with a new car, a new apartment, and of course, a new iBook.

I hope everyone has enjoyed reading over the past several months, and I hope you’ll continue to read as the other student bloggers try to help you find ways to get the most out of your Mac and your college experience.

For my fellow graduates, I’m going crib a goodbye from novelist and radio personality Garrison Keillor: “Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.”

— Stephen Jendrazak @ 9:20 am

Mobile Learning

So I’m going on a couple weeks with a nice new iPod Shuffle and I’m definitely more impressed than I expected to be. I wear it around work and one of the first things people say to me is the same concern I had before I tried it: “That’s cool, but I need a screen.” Not so fast. When deciding what music player to buy it’s easy to overlook the legendary integration between iTunes and Shuffle. It’s not just about random music fills, set up your playlists right and you’ll always know what’s on your Shuffle and how to get it.

Example: that little shuffle switch on the back.

I’m in my car a lot and I often like to cram up on some audiobooks on the way to/from work. For that, I just setup a playlist with my audiobook right at the top and set Shuffle to play in sequence. However, when I get to work though I want to hear some music, right? For that I just switch over to shuffle mode and Shuffle’s smart enough to know that I only want to hear music. Heading back home? Flick the switch back to sequential mode, tap on play 3x and Shuffle resets to the first track (my audiobook), right where I left off before.

That’s the beauty of the Shuffle system. It’s so small I can wear it wherever I go, the shuffle mode finds music I never knew I had, and (combined with the thousands of audiobooks on iTunes) it’s anytime, anywhere learning.

Swank.

— Clif @ 9:15 am

Freshman Orientation

Freshmen Orientations at my school have been going on for the past few weeks. It’s so interesting to watch the new students and their parents walk through the campus. I am reminded of my own freshman orientation. Wandering through the campus, I attempted to act as cool as the upperclassmen that I saw slowly making their way to their summer classes. Of course, I wasn’t as cool. I was a freshman and still needed the confidence that comes only from experience. I was nervous, excited and had a million questions that I was too afraid to ask (I didn’t want anyone to know I was a freshman of course). I see now though, that the new freshmen coming in act exactly the same as I did. To all you freshmen out there, don’t worry about not knowing where you or going or not looking cool. Remember, you are one out of a class of thousands so you are not alone!

I have tremendously enjoyed talking to these students and informing them of the benefits of buying a Mac. My favorite part is the looks on their faces when I tell them that they Apple even offers a student discount. They are shocked and excited.

So I wish all of you incoming freshmen lots of luck and my advice to you is: Buy a Mac, they ROCK!

— Annie @ 9:11 am

Welcome Mo!

I hope that everyone’s summer is going fantastic. Summer is one of the most fun times of the year, when anything is possible. Internships, cool jobs, traveling all over the world, finding a summer love, and great times with friends. With the summer winding down, back to school is just around the corner.

And, as college goes, eventually everyone graduates and heads off to the “real” world. We’ve had a few of our bloggers head off this summer, and soon we’ll be adding a few new names to the works.

First up is Maurice “Mo” Cheeks, a Career and Technical Education major at Eastern Illinois University in Charleston, Illinois. Mo hails from the south of Chicago and fills his iPod with an eclectic mix of beats featuring: Dave Matthews Band, Thousand Foot Krutch, 2Pac, Bob Marley, and O.A.R. He loves his 12″ Powerbook. Which iPod he carries depends on his mood, 60GB iPod when he feels like color, and his iPod shuffle when he feels like living life to a random soundtrack. If he won the lottery, he’d spread the love with everyone.

Anywhere on his social networking profiles, you’d find the following quote:

“If not You, then Who? If not Now, then When?” - Unknown

— Dave Morin @ 12:48 pm

My Good Friend

My school runs on a quarter system. Each quarter is 10 weeks. It’s brutal. It seems like every minute of my day is spent doing work. Especially week 10. Only my peers know the pain that we all feel the last week of class, and the lack of sleep that ensues. But this quarter, I really have to take some time out to thank a good friend of mine that helped me through the last week and into the summer – it was my Mac.

Corny? Yes! Realistic? Completely. As an New Media Publishing major at RIT I am constantly working on my computer. This quarter I dabbled in FileMaker Pro, Macromedia Flash, Movable Type, and learned about high-end printers from the Xeikon to the Kodak Nexpress. Is that enough tech jargon for you?

Each project I was able to complete with speed and ease because I had a Mac. During presentation time I wowed all of my classmates with Keynote 2. Suddenly their PowerPoint slides didn’t have the same zing that my preso did. Pages brought my reports to a new level, allowing me to easily produce a good looking report without spending hours tweaking the typography and design of the layout.

So as summer rolls around and I can foresee the endless barbeques and good times in the future, I want to say thank you Apple, and thank you to my Mac for making this quarter a lot easier for me. I know we’ll be hanging out together soon.

— Sarah Friedlander @ 10:35 am

Graduation

I’m graduating tomorrow. I can’t believe it. I can’t remember a single time in my life previously when I’ve felt so sad and so exhilarated at the same time. I am thrilled to be entering the real world, starting a job, etc. But I am sad to leave behind a place, a group of people, and a time in my life that I have loved so much. There’s no getting it back.

I was thinking earlier today about the answering machine message my roommate and I used during our freshman year. It was a quote from “Ghostbusters.” One of the characters is complaining after he’s been thrown out of the university where he taught:

“The university was great. They gave us money and facilities, but we didn’t have to produce anything. I’ve worked in the private sector. You don’t know what it’s like out there. They expect results.”

Of course, we had to remove that message as we got older and needed to sound professional when potential employers called. Still, it sums up for me everything that I’ve loved about college. And having to replace with a bland, traditional message so that I could be taken seriously sums up all the scariest parts of being forced to enter the “real world.”

— Stephen Jendrazak @ 10:04 am

Graduation time! Got gift ideas ready?

Graduation day is just around the corner for both college and high school seniors alike. It’s about time to be thinking of something cool to give for presents for graduating friends and family. Instead of doing the mindless “Con-GRAD-ulations” card and cash bit– or worse, teddy bear with a mortar board hat on, try something that will get loads of reaction for the smallest effort: a photo book using iPhoto 5. My good friend’s little sister is graduating high school this year, so a perfect opportunity is here to give this book-making a spin. She’s digging up some older, memory-type photos that still need to be scanned in, and sorting through her iPhoto library for the perfect shots. (That’s the hard part.) The easy part will be making the book! Once she has all of the images picked, putting the book together is just dragging and dropping the photos into the order she wants and typing little text blurbs. A few clicks later and a completely custom keepsake will be in the mail. Easy to do, totally unique, and absolutely thoughtful.

— Kelly Alford @ 10:04 am

Seniors — Time to Buy!

My graduation is fast approaching, and I know I’m not alone. This message is for all you seniors out there.

Now is the time to buy an iPod or a new Mac. For couple of weeks, you still have access to your student discount. And, since Tigerhas been released, the deal is even sweeter. If you a buy a new Mac now, it should come with the new OS pre-installed. If not, all you have to do is pay $10 shipping and handling to get it.

Tiger will makes a new Mac even better, with features like Spotlight , which can search for information in basically any file on your computer, and Dashboard, which provides a new and easy way to access information quickly.

For all us in the Class of 2005, there will never be a better time to buy.

— Stephen Jendrazak @ 9:58 am

PC Blues

Ever wonder why people are so loyal to their Mac?

I have both a PC and a Mac at home. I use the PC mostly for recording TV. It runs the latest version of Windows XP and I have become accustomed to the ritual of downloading monthly display drivers, updating, and hoping that nothing breaks (as it often does) once I reboot.

My current dilemna is that when the PC goes to sleep it somehow loses track of the video signal. Wake it up and the display appears for a brief second, then goes back to black again. I’ve checked for device conflicts, reinstalled video drivers, run Windows updates, and habitually scan my PC for viruses and spyware on a regular basis. I even sent the PC on a defrag vacation last week because it appeared to be getting a little long in the tooth.

The result? Absolutely nothing. The PC still won’t work right and the common response of “reinstall Windows” just doesn’t fly with me. The sad fact is that I spend more time attempting to coerce my PC to work as it should than I spend using my Mac to actually get things done.

Why are Mac users so loyal? Perhaps the number of switchers out there is larger than we know.

— Clif @ 10:21 am

The Magical Curtain

In my day job I work with mostly Windows users and I’m often asked how to go about doing this or that on a Mac. Frequently such questions are followed up with the statement, ” So why doesn’t it work like Windows?”

I starting thinking the other day that here lies a great irony of technology. The irony that because so many PC users spend so much time in the dark trying to figure out what’s going on behind the magical curtain that is Windows, they automatically assume that using a Mac would be just as confusing. Many never decide to switch because they feel they’d have to learn that awful process all over again. Take the process of uninstalling applications for example…

Windows: Start menu -> Control Panels -> Add/Remove Programs -> scroll to application you want to remove -> click Remove -> click Yes to confirm.

Mac: Select the application you want to remove on your computer -> drag it to the trash.

My point?

The difference between Windows and Mac OS is the difference between a process so complex that it requires a separate process to manage (Windows) versus a process specifically designed from the beginning to be intuitive enough that it just makes sense (Mac).

Technology is complex enough in its own right, the beauty of the Mac is that someone, somewhere actually knew that and went out of their way to make easier on the rest of us.

Who needs a curtain anyway?

— Clif @ 10:06 am

Switching

Ah… the sweet feeling of switching someone. Meghan has been my best friend since we were twelve years old. She and her family have always been PC users and seemed to have no real reason to switch to the Mac. This has been a challenge to me, as I have been attempting to switch them since the beginning of our friendship, however at that time, her parents just laughed at the silly little twelve year old girl that was trying to talk about computers to them. I can’t imagine what was going through their minds… “What is wrong with this girl, shouldn’t she be out playing with the other kids, not trying to sell us a computer??�

Well look where I am now, still trying to sell them a computer, gosh can’t they just buy one! Actually, I have recently found out some wonderful news… Meghan’s parents are going to buy her a Mac!! I realize that this is simply one person, but my thought process works like this… Meghan’s parents will buy her a Mac, they will then see how cool it is, buy one for their younger daughter, and one for themselves, then they will go on to spread the word about how AWESOME Macs are!

So look at that, just getting my friend’s parents to buy her a Mac, will hopefully turn into many, many more Mac purchases. Sweet!

— Annie @ 12:02 pm

RELAX!

Let’s a brief detour from the topic of technology. We’re all college students. Most of us have about a month and a half to finish all of our work for this semester. Projects. Papers. Exams. For many of us, we’re also rapidly approaching the end of our college careers. It’s time to find jobs or graduate schools, say good bye to friends, and prepare to move.

In short, it’s a very stressful time. Here, then, is some advice from Dr. Andrew Weil on how we can keep ourselves relaxed and happy.

Enjoy.

— Stephen Jendrazak @ 12:53 pm

Don’t forget to “unpack” your digital photos from Spring Break!

Around here, Spring Break ‘05 has come and gone. The memories have been made, the clothes unpacked and the dirt and sand swept out of the car. Did you forget to “unpack” something? We take digital photos with the best intentions - to share them with the world the minute you get back to your computer, but instead they sit, not unlike an undeveloped roll of film. I confess. I am guilty! While I didn’t go far for Spring Break, I did take some pictures with my digital camera when I went out to a local bike trail with some friends… And the pictures are still on the card, in the camera and not shared with my friends yet. Before the week is through, I am going to take the few minutes and download my pictures into iPhoto, make some crops and tweaks (you would really be amazed at how good a photographer you are… after a bit of playing around in iPhoto.) and post them on my .mac website for my friends to see and download. It seems like such a simple thing, especially for someone who LOVES to take pictures like me, and with iPhoto 5, you can really make your amateur point-and-shoot photos look good without messing around with exporting to Photoshop and using lots of advanced techniques.
So, did you “finish unpacking”?

— Kelly Alford @ 9:49 am

Welcome Kelly!

This week I’d like to introduce our next rock-star student blogger, Kelly Alford.

Kelly already tackled her first degree as of Spring 2004 in Digital Media at the University of Central Florida. She has since moved on to bigger and better seeking out her Masters in Arts and Culture. Late at night, her iPod belts out the beats of Fatboy Slim, BT, Bjork, The Donnas, and Tergan. She couldn’t even begin to think about a thesis without her Powerbook, iPod and digital camera at her side. And, if her degree doesn’t make her a millionaire, if she won the lottery you’d probably find her jaunting around the US (next up: New Zealand) mountain biking and showing up Ansel Adams with her photography skills.

“Nothing’s impossible for those who don’t have to do it,” she echos.

Couldn’t have said it better myself. Welcome Kelly.

— Dave Morin @ 8:28 pm