North Western Winds

Read my latest here .

I am beginning to think seriously about making Wordpress my new home . If you are looking for new NWW material that will be the place to look - for now. I still have a few questions to have answered before I commit, but I am leaning that way. In the meantime I'm learning by doing, and that means "doing" over there .

My move to Mac has been very happy except for two issues - gaming and blogging. For websurfing and multimedia, a Mac is of course a terrific machine. Games on the Mac platform are often ports of games made for the larger PC market and that means a Mac gamer will have to wait for the port. I'm not a heavy gamer by any means but I am very happy that the Mac port of Civilization 4 is finally here. Well, my copy isn't here quite yet - but it has been ordered and ought to be here soon. The blogging issue is more complicated. I'm not fond of writing my posts in a browser window. This goes back to when I was first blogging and I lost one or two large posts into the ether. After that I moved to w.bloggar - a great little app that let me compose on my desktop and then click send when all was said and done. I have not been able to recreate that experience on my Mac, and not for a lack of trying! I looked at Marsedit , but that forces you to compse while staring at a bunch of HMT...

Here is another reason to stay away from Windows software - as if you needed another. This came out after Warren Buffett anounced he would give Bill Gates' charity a mountain of money : Fr. Thomas J. Euteneuer, president of Human Life International , issued a statement pointing out Buffett's track record of supporting pro-abortion organizations and related projects in the developing world. He reported that Buffett's foundation also gave a grant to the U.S.- based Center for Reproductive Rights , which fought bans on partial- birth abortion, and Catholics for a Free Choice . "The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have also given millions of dollars to organizations pushing abortion around the world," Fr. Euteneuer reported. I have no idea why Gates and Buffett support the organizations they do, but I suspect it might be something along these lines : Nature is astonishingly cruel. Science, by contrast, has the power of mercy. One can only be dazzled by the inven...

I've been vocal here about how much I like iTunes. It lead me to my first Mac, after all. And that's all good - I love my Mac, and I'm very fond of the entire iLife suite. I do have a growing gripe with the iTunes country music selection here in Canada, however. I know that Americans have a much better selection that we do here because somehow or other I once found myself logged in as a Yank. That allowed me to view a cornucopia of songs and videos that I had not seen available before (and which I could not download). Example... Little Big Town has been on the airwaves around here for months and for months I've been waiting to downlowd a copy of their second recording. What's worse is that I check for what's new fairly often and too often there's nothing at all, or something old. I love a lot of the oldies ( Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Cowboys rocks the house) but not everything that's old is golden. A wider selection is a must go...

Here, Nicholas Carr explains why Google and Yahoo have an active interest in subsidizing the creation of free internet content : The enforcers of the new model are the search-based ad-placement services, mainly, at the moment, Google and Yahoo . Their business comes down to scale - in particular, the overall scale of internet use. To expand the scale of use, they want to ensure that there's as much content as possible available on the internet for free . Think about it. Every piece of content - indeed, every service - on the internet is simply a complement to these companies' ad placement business (and the underlying search business). It's thus in their interest to drive the price of those complements down as far as possible, preferably to zero. Subscription pricing, and any other barrier to the free availability of online content and services, is anathema to them because it necessarily constrains the use of the internet. I am not criticizing these companies. I am simply p...

This is a test post to see how Mozzilla.org's new blogging extention for Firefox performs. It's called Performancing and it allows for posting from within Firefox. It works on the Mac just fine, even if it has an interface that is reminiscent of MS Word for Windows. My first impression is that this is a very good idea. It seems to be integrated with Technorati , allowing you to quickly pull up information about the current website - likely the one you're blogging about. There is also a tab for del icio us (which I don't use). If I could change one thing about this program, it would be to make the editor appear as a tab. As it stands now, it's awkward to get the composer window out of the way so that you can refer back to the web page at hand. powered by performancing firefox