Two Cents and a Thousand Words

Would you consider me obsessed if I, say, hypothetically, wrote a script that parses the FedEx tracking page for my iMac and sent a text message to my phone every 15 minutes to see if it had gone out for delivery so I could know when to drive to work to pick it up?

No? OK, good.

(For those keeping score, it’s in Bangor but probably won’t be delivered until Monday or Tuesday.)

I enjoy keeping my friends and family in the loop about up-and-coming technologies. In that spirit, learn about three in this week’s Edge tekk article, Groups, Tweets, and Avatars.

If you follow my Collage, you may have noticed that photos have been strangely absent from my work lately. Tonight I uploaded a few photos I took downtown today along the Kenduskeag Stream. It was hard to capture the magnitude of the water level in photos.

It’s been three and a half years - I think it’s time for an upgrade.

Yes, I’m getting an iMac (again). My new machine was originally supposed to be a delayed partial birthday present that I would receive after WWDC in June. With Apple’s recent delay of OS X Leopard, though, I decided I couldn’t wait any longer. I ordered it yesterday, and it should be delivered within a week or two.

This Intel Core 2 Duo iMac will be my third Apple computer, joining the ranks of iOpener and Cosmos. (Yes, I name my computers. No, I haven’t named the new one yet.) As was the case with my other two Macs, there are a ton of wonderful benefits I’ll be able to enjoy:

• My first media center. The iMac features Front Row, an application that allows you to control and play your media from across the room (from the futon, in my case) with a supplied remote.
• Big screen. I can enjoy Tiki Bar TV, MacBreak, and Galacticast on my new 20″ LCD.
• Can you see me now? There’s an integrated iSight camera in this thing. I’ll be able to easily videoconference with my friends from away or just record short little clips whenever I like.
• Fastest wireless. I’m ditching my 802.11b wireless router for the 802.11g included with my iMac. Get a new computer, and everything gets faster - sounds like a good deal to me.
• And just fast. This is my first dual-processor box, and it’s the fastest machine - by far - I’ve ever had.
• Windows. Wait - Windows as a feature? Well, with Boot Camp, I can finally play a few of my favorite games again… and testing in IE will be a breeze.
• Less of a load. No more carrying my PowerBook back and forth to work. The iMac will be my new computing hub.

Part of the Mac philosophy is the simplicity of it all. Take a look at a couple of before and after (at least, artist’s conceptions of after) photos of my main apartment workspace:

Isn’t it time for you to get a Mac, too?

John Clarke Russ, assistant photo editor and photojournalist at the Bangor Daily News:

If you are a photographer and you take photographs for a living, you don’t do it for the money and you don’t do it for the glory. You do it because, somewhere along the line, in the course of any single day, you find yourself saying, “I need a camera to look at that.” And there’s a point in your life when you find that you’re stuck with it and you only look at life through that rectangle. Hopefully, you see life in a way that is different from how others see it.