A call came on Thursday from Friendly Dale at little mac shoppe letting me know that my new 17” iMac computer had arrived. After three months of hunching over my little laptop, finally I will again be able to work at a Real Computer.

Part of getting the new machine up and running was installing the software I use day to day in my web development work; I’ve had about 6 months of serious Mac-based worked to put together a toolkit of useful applications that suit the various tasks I face every day. For the benefit of others who may be considering a switch to Mac OS X, here’s a summary:

BBEdit — Simply among the best text editors I’ve ever used. I used UltraEdit on the PC for years and years, and BBEdit is at least its equal. You can download and use a “lite” version for free.

SQLGrinder — An SQL schema browser and query editor that interfaces well with both Sybase and MySQL (using JDBC for both), the two database environments that I live in.

VNCThing — VNC client software that lets me screen-share with Windows boxes (like my old PC in the basement). It’s got a few rough edges, and doesn’t use the Mac OS keychain facility to save passwords, but it’s currently the best of the VNC client breed on Mac OS X.

MacLinkPlus Deluxe — Opens and converts files from any PC application I’ve thrown at it. I use it mostly for converting from Excel, Word and WordPerfect to AppleWorks.

Canvas — I used Xara on the PC for a long time, and grew to love it. Canvas isn’t quite as capable or smooth as Xara, but it’s pretty close. I use it for the tasks that normal, richer people would use Illustrator or Freehand for.

GraphicConverter — An excellent, very mature German program that’s a cross between an image editor and an image format converter, and does both tasks well. It replaces PaintShop Pro for me, which I used on the PC for the same tasks.

MacSFTP — A secure file transfer program from France. Well integrated with BBEdit. I started to use SecureFX on a PC for this task, and MacSFTP is its equal. Can be automated with AppleScript, which is a nice touch when I want to automate file transfers.

Chimera — This is a lean, mean version of the Mozilla browser, tuned for OS X. It’s the best browser I’ve used on any platform: it’s fast, standards-compliant, and has all of the features I need to make it my day-to-day browser.

There are several additional applications that were standalone on the PC but that are built-in to OS X. The OS X Terminal is excellent, and the OS comes with SSH, both client and server (based on OpenSSH) so secure terminal access is a breeze. I use the Apple Mail program for email; it’s got great junk filtering capabilities, and works very well with my IMAP server.

The only thing I’m really missing, business-wise, is a good and simple accounting package. I used Quicken for Home and Business on the PC (basically “regular Quicken with invoices, payables and receivables”, falling between Quicken and QuickBooks); Intuit never developed this for the Mac. There’s strong evidence that they’ll release a Canadian OS X QuickBooks shortly, and if it looks up to the task, that’s probably what I’ll use; otherwise I’ll make do either with a VNC to the old PC-based Quicken, or I’ll downgrade to regular Quicken 2002.

The new Mac has a wonderful wide screen, and is a so much easier to stare at that my work life is bound to improve. The only downside is that I think I’ll need a new chair and light to match.

My colleague Ian from YANKEE signed off an email message to me today “Happy Boxing Day.”

He was making fun of me. Of all Canadians.

Apparently there is no such thing as Boxing Day in the U.S.A. They call the day after Christmas “the day after Christmas” and just go on along as though nothing special was happening.

My American colleagues seem to think its odd and quaint that we have such a holiday here, and yet that we cannot accurately express exactly what the holiday is all about, or what special rituals we conduct on that day (save “putting out the Christmas boxes at the curb,” which is the default answer).

We have the last laugh though, of course: they will be at work on Boxing Day and we will not.

At the tail end of September, my old friend Stephen Southall visited us in New Hampshire, and we took a day trip to MassMOCA. I’ve just been sorting through some of the pictures of the trip…

North Adams, Mass is a mill town, and as such it has a lot of abandoned industrial space. This space is gradually being recycled into MassMOCA’a gallery space.

The top-left picture is arguably MassMOCA’s most well known installation. It’s called Tree Logic, and was created by artist Natalie Jeremijenko. Read about the installation.

If you are in western Mass. (or southern Vermont, or eastern New York), take a day or two at MassMOCA: you will not be disappointed.

I had a multi-timezone orgy of fun this morning.

In the living room Oliver was asleep in front of the television, tuned to KTLA, the Los Angeles affiliate of the WB network. In LA, it was 7:30 a.m..

Meanwhile, here in my immediate reality, it was 11:30 a.m.

And I was in the middle of a conference call with the folks at Zend, in Ramat Gan, Israel, where it was 5:30 p.m.

If I could have conferenced in someone from Taipei, where it was 11:30 p.m., I could have covered the entire world like the dew.

Time for breakfast \| lunch \| dinner.

Here are some cools things I’ve been able to easily do with my Mac this week that would have been more difficult, or in some cases impossible, using my PC:

1. I wanted to copy 4GB of files from my iBook to Catherine’s iMac quickly. I connected the two computer together using my iPod’s firewire cable, and my iBook became a disk drive on Catherine’s desktop. Copied the files by drag-and-drop. Blammo.

2. I wanted to run the GnuCash open-source personal finance program. I simply installed XDarwin and ran the program from the Linux server in my basement (the same one that serves this website). The program “ran” on the server, but all of the windows, dialog boxes, etc. were “on” my computer, so it seemed like a local program.

3. Catherine wanted all of the addresses from my Address Book in her Address Book. I used iSync to sync my Address Book with our .Mac account, then did the same on Catherine’s computer. Blammo.

4. I wanted to take a bunch of data files from Elections PEI, process with with Perl, then produce a report as PDF file of the results. A combination of Perl (built-in to OS X), AppleWorks (included with my iBook) and OS X’s built-in ability to print to a PDF file from any application made this quick and easy.

As I’ve written in this space before, I moved my old PC into the basement, and have been using my iBook as my work machine since September. I placed an order for a new iMac, with a 17” screen, this morning because this trial period has gone so well. I guess I’m a Mac user now.

With fall ending in 3 days, it’s time to look back at the season.

In my family, it’s been an autumn of dramatic change.

The season began with Brother Johnny and sister-in-law Jodi returning from their honeymoon in Europe after a late summer wedding on Vancouver Island.

Brother Mike has a new woman in his life, Janine, and Oliver and I were happy to meet her on our whirlwind visit to Ontario two weeks ago. She’s very nice, and an excellent match for Mike.

And Brother Steve has a new city, Montreal, in his life. Mom and Dad made the drive out to Saskatoon in late October to pick him up, and they drove back from Saskatoon to Ontario at 80 km/h towing a U-Haul trailer behind an ancient Honda Accord. If you’re in Montreal, you can hear Steve reporting for CBC Montreal now.

Meanwhile, here in Charlottetown, Oliver is entering the heart of his “twos” and, at least so far, there’s no evidence of terribleness. There is, however, something new every day. This week he learned how to growl like a bear. Last night, while on the phone to Brother Steve, he learned how to click his tongue. And he now has paroxysms of joy every time Santa Claus is spotted, which mystifies us, but perhaps proves the power of the media to carry cultural viruses (not that Santa is a particularly bad virus to catch). Oliver’s “Santa” sounds more like “Dante,” and he has started to use the word to describe both Santa and me. I’m not sure whether this is a good thing or not.

Christmas gifts have been arriving all week from across the country (we caught Oliver trying to unwrap them last week and I had to explain to him the concept of “later”). We will be making excellent use of Canada Post this week to send our own parcels winging west.

All in all, a good fall.

Regardless of your political stripe, you’ve gotta say that Wayne Easter as Solicitor General is proof positive that democracy works.

As everyone and their brother is reporting today, Al Gore is not running for President of the United States in 2004.

This brings to mind a recent discovery: I was delighted to find that, now that I am 35 years old, and as I was born in the United States, I am eligible to run for President but Arnold Schwarzenegger, being born in Austria cannot.

Article II, section 1, clause 5 of the United States Constitution says:

No person except a natural born citizen, or a citizen of the United States, at the time of the adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the office of President; neither shall any person be eligible to that office who shall not have attained to the age of thirty five years, and been fourteen Years a resident within the United States.

My only problem is this regard is that I am not yet “fourteen Years a resident.” So if I moved to the US today, I couldn’t run for President until the 2016. Gives me plenty of time for preparations, though.

I’ve tried very, very hard to resist commenting again on the garish Christmas lights display which again this holiday season pollutes the streets of my neighbourhood. But I can no longer do so.

I’ve reconciled myself to the notion that the “creating a garish lights display will prevent people from shopping in Moncton” meme cannot be extinguished — it’s simply too powerful, in some crazy viral way that I can’t understand.

What makes me depressed, however, is this: after thousands of years of modern culture, of developments in architecture, design, art, craft, after the Renaissance, the Bauhaus, Impressionism, in a world of Frank Gehry and Jasper Johns and Georgia Okeeffe and the Group of Seven, why is it that the expensive centrepiece of our primary secular and religous holiday consists of a illuminated duck drinking from an illuminated champagne fountain?

Is this the best that we can do? Is this really who we are?

Words to live by from our friends at Disney:

People are not always as nice, cute, or funny as they may sound online.

Were truer words ever spoken?