Great Links for the First Time Mac User

The Tao of Mac - How To Switch To The Mac - This is a must read for anyone turning on their first Mac for the first time. It tells you exactly what to expect and some gotchas you might want to be aware of. It also details many of the ways you can use the Unix layer of Mac OS X. What is Mac OS X? - This is a well written discussion of what to expect out of the Mac OS X operating system. Fink - Home - This site has Unix software packages for the Darwin "flavor" of Unix (the Unix that the Mac is built upon); the packages are built so that they will not interfere with the Mac portion of the OS.

Picasa 2 vs Photoshop Elements 3.0

Danny Sullivan at searchenginewatch.com has written an interesting article comparing the features of Google's new Picasa 2 and Adobe's new Photoshop Elements 3.0. The executive summary: photo management software should embed it's tag/label information in the image IPTC data of each image. Picasa 2 does not do this, so you're labels are lost if you move to a different management software. Photoshop Elements 3.0 does this (but you cannot change the labels later -- bummer). Picasa is, overall, easier to use, and it's free, while Elements is more powerful and $100. Mr. Sullivan is staying with Adobe's offering for now.

Cannot create a gmail contact without an email address

I attempted to create a gmail contact for a friend of mine who doesn't have an email address (yes, there are a few people left who don't have email addresses). When I click on 'add contact' the 'Add Contact' window closes, but the contact is not saved. Since gmail's contact list is still in it's infancy I'm not too concerned -- I hoping that they'll get their contact list up to the same level as their email interface.

Gmail wish list

• I wish Gmail had the ability to "label" contacts... Gmail could then automatically label incoming email. (Contacts could then be organized and managed the same way as your Gmail!)
• I wish Gmail had a 'you have email' icon that shows up on my computer when new email arrives.
• I wish Gmail had a time out on the login (I have mixed feelings about it's 'always connected' mode).
• I wish Gmail had a "Save Draft" feature.
• I wish Gmail had signatures.
• I wish Gmail's "contacts" window didn't pop-up and then goes behind the Gmail window. (perhaps this is an IE setting I can control?)
• I wish ALL of Gmail's "from" and "to" fields would "auto-fill" the same way the "from" and "to" fields in the "compose mail" screen do (a very cool feature!).
• I wish the spell check on Blogger would work the same as the spell check on Gmail -- it rocks!

Guitar for Dummies

This is NOT a learn-to-play-guitar book; it's a book about guitars. I ordered it from Amazon before finding this out (I should have read the user comments better); I returned it shortly after it arrived (returning things if very easy with Amazon).