Friday, July 27, 2007

LDS CIO has a Mac!

When it comes to LDS software in the past, Macs have been pretty much ignored. PAF was available on the Mac years ago (OS 7-9), but fell into disrepair and is unusable on new Macs. All the audio and video was Windows Media which was a huge headache (until Flip4Mac came out, anyway). And I believe at least some of the websites required IE 6 to look right.

Recently however things have started to turn around, and it looks like I may have found the reason. Check out #6 -- that's the CIO of the church mentioning in passing that he has at least one Mac at home. In fact, it looks like that may be their primary machine at home, at least for the kids, since trying "the Vista thing" was farther down on his list than writing that post!

There may yet be hope for us LDS Mac users.

Monday, July 16, 2007

One lightning bolt: $145

This afternoon lightning struck so close to our house that it shook the whole place.

When I got home, the internet wasn't working and neither was our phone. So after about 15 cycles of plugging and unplugging things in different orders, for different amounts of time, I finally decided that the modem was shot. So I drove down to Wal-Mart and bought a new modem. A quick phone call to Cox and the internet was back up.

Whew, fixed!

Oh, except our phone still didn't work. See, our phone service is through Vonage, meaning that it acts like a regular phone except that the call travels the distance over the internet instead of a traditional phone network. That all happens through a little $50 box. Apparently that was blown too. So I drove back down to Wal-Mart and picked up another Vonage/Linksys VoIP box. A quick call to Vonage and my phone was back up.

Note, I didn't mention that both ethernet cables were bad too, I had to replace them to get things working again.

So in summary, that one lightning bolt wiped out my cable modem, my VoIP box, and two ethernet cables. Net cost to me: $145. Ouch.

On the bright side, my Mac was fine. Thanks to my network devices for making the sacrifice.

Tuesday, July 3, 2007

Graphics

Here's an impressive set of graphics by Megan Jaegerman, praised by Edward Tufte who has championed the art of conveying complex concepts in print.

Reading down through all the images, I went from "gee, that's cool" to "wow, I need to save all these..."

Does anyone read this thing?

views since Feb. 9, 2008