Disaster averted....

Had a call this morning from a neighbour whose teenage daughter needed to pass in some coursework to College by 12 noon. Following an all night session producing the final bits of graphics for a project, she was struggling trying to print it out as their printer had decided to pack in!

Talk about bad timing.

As ever the good Samaritan, I said no problem and told them bring the work round for me to print off.

They are not a Mac family but the documents were in word format, so it shouldn't have been a problem.

A few minutes later, the USB stick was in my Mac Pro, I fired up MS Word for the Mac (yes, I still have a copy installed for such eventualities) and loaded the document.

Oh dear!

The formatting was all over the place.

I tried to resize some of the components but it wasn't looking too good.

As time was of the essence, I took an executive decision to close the document without saving and fired up Pages. The formatting looked slightly better (!) but still needed work but I was able to drag, resize and basically pummel the document into shape in a few minutes.

Now baring in mind, this was a native MS Word document, why was it easier to correct using Pages?

Just sayin'

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Honesty is the best policy...

Still not had chance to hook up with my brother to admire his new MacBook, but we've been exchanging emails. Bottom line is that he seems really pleased with it and has been amazed with its cool running and quietness, not to mention just how easy it was to get up and running. I can't take any credit for that although he has watched some of my switcher videos :-) One comment he made in his last email gave me pause to think. Basically, out of the blue, he commented that he was not going to install any cracked.or "dodgy" software on his new Mac. I have to admit, being guilty of such practices myself when I was a windows user (oh the shame), I'd pretty much decided the same myself when I came over to the Mac. I also heard one of my ScreenCastsOnline forum buddies, legion, say the very same thing on a recent Mac20q Podcast. So what is it that makes us take the straight and narrow path when we become Mac users? Is it because good quality Mac software is just so cheap or is there a deeper, hidden reason? Regardless, it's a great feeling to be fully legitmate and I'm sure the Mac community is a better place for it!

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Blogging for bloggings sake...

Not gonna do it!

Up at 6am this morning to have a good run at editing this weeks show. All recorded but it's going to take me the best part of the morning to pull it all together and then the rest of the day to encode, upload and distribute.

So with that in mind, it's probably not a good idea to spend 30 minutes putting together a blog post when there's nothing really on my mind.

Except that the MacHeist guys have just included Delicious Library 2 in the bundle - always fancied that but not enough to spend $40 on it - plus another game! There is only 4 days to unlock the final three applications, but I'm sure they'll get there.

Hey guess what!

I've just done a blog post ;-)

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That time of the week again.....

So it's 9:04am on a Thursday morning and I've just been through all the overnight emails after getting back from my morning swim.

So it's that time of the week where I need to knuckle down and produce this weeks show.

Actually, it's a bit later than normal, as I usually like to start the show prep on the Wednesday, but I've only just finished another commissioned of series of screencasts for a customer.

So here I sit, in the knowledge that I need to have a 30 minute tutorial conceived, recorded, edited and distributed in the next 48 hours, starting from scratch. Now this may appear a bit daunting at first, but it's a place I've been in many times before. At least this time, I know what the subject is (Numbers 09 update) and it's a package I love using. I also have a previous Numbers show to build on, so that always helps.

One of the things I love about doing ScreenCastsOnline each week (in addition to being my own boss and freeing me from the shackles of "The Man") is the fact that I start each show with nothing and end up creating something.

Just some software, some ideas and some empty space on my hard drive to begin with.

Over the course of a couple of days, I formulate and crystallise my ideas, transferring the ideas into digital form as just bits and bytes on my hard drive.

Once these bits and bytes exist, I then move and shape them into a more polished form finally creating a coherent (I hope) tutorial which is sent down copper wires across the Atlantic to reside in a datacenter on the other side of the world, finally being pushed out to tens of thousands of computers across all four continents ready and waiting to be consumed by tens of thousands of viewers.

A scary thought!

But I absolutely love the concept of starting with nothing and creating something from just bits and bytes. Not just something, but something which other people consider of value. All the tutorials are designed to help people with their day to day computing life and based on the feedback I receive daily, the bulk of the tutorials hit the mark.

Some of the tutorials are free, but the members shows I do, some people consider of sufficient value to actually pay for, thereby enabling me to support myself and my family (and an unhealthy obsession with the Mac) but ultimately, enabling me to continue being creative and productive.

My only regret is not being able to do this years ago, but realistically, this would not have been possible years ago. It's only the past few years when the infrastructure has been available to distribute the content, for computers to be powerful enough to play HD, for the ecommerce systems to be reliable and affordable, for the tools and technology to be available to create and produce the content at a price the average person can afford... the list goes on.

So in the meantime, I'm grateful to be at the place I am but I have to wonder what sort of jobs will be available to my kids as time marches on and technology keeps improving in such leaps and bounds.

But enough of that, time to start producing this weeks show....

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My setup updated...

Rather than spend the time creating a new blog post today, I thought I'd spend the time updating the "My Setup and Workflow" page, to take into account the recent changes to my setup (and I've added a brief update to my "Initial thoughts...." post.

Normal blogging service will be resumed tomorrow!

PS Can we please treat this as another days consecutive blogging :-)

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