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I hope you’ve seen Pulp Fiction.

You know what the funniest thing about the Mac is? It’s the little differences. I mean, they got the same stuff over there that we got here, but it’s just, with a Mac, it’s a little different.

Example:

 Well, the first time I started a program on the Mac, I couldn’t figure out where the menu was. There was a menu at the top of the screen called “Finder,” with the familiar file, edit, and view commands along with others, though clicking those wasn’t bringing up anything I understood. I saw a program called “TextEdit” on the dock, a shiny shelf at the bottom of the screen. I clicked it, and a text editing window came up. Cool. But it had no menu at all. I spent an hour opening programs with the finder window, but then having no idea how to run them. It was like there were no menus in this strange world.

“How the hell do these people open documents and save them and do all the stuff you have to do?”

I finally figured out that in the Mac world, the menu bar is always at the top of the screen, and it’s not connected to the program window. This single menu CHANGES depending on which program window is active. Mac people, who have never known anything different, don’t understand why this is hard for us. But I’m telling you it took me a solid hour to figure it out.

So the disembodied, disappearing and reappearing menus would be one of the little differences.

I have one Windows 7 PC so far, its running very smoothly in the 64 bit edition on a core i7 extreme chip, 6 GB of DDR3 RAM in a X58 Motherboard with 2 BFG 8800GTX Video cards in SLI.

I am so impressed with the improvements in Media Centre I am about to reinstall my Home Theatre Media Centre with it. I am also considering rebuilding my main development PC using Windows 7 and using a Virtual Machine to launch the old machine.

Now here’s a round up of news tweaks, themes and other Windows 7 links I have come across recently.

• Sarah on Channel 10 has links to a bunch of Windows 7 themes
• She also shows you how to change your logon screen – and use a utility from Tweaks.com to do this easily.
• More from Sarah - 7 tools for tweaking Windows 7
• Tech Radar has 50 seriously useful Windows 7 Tips, Tricks and Secrets

This shows off some awesome skills –either with a ping pong ball or a camera – or both!

Thanks to Caffeinated Thoughts

After over a month of waiting I finally collected my new camera yesterday.

I had to wait because the lenses I wanted were not in the country and I had to wait til shipments came in. Even then, the wide angle lens I was trying to purchase wasn’t available so i ended up with a somewhat cheaper lower specced lens. I did however get my good telephoto lens.

  Equipment list:

• Canon EOS 50D
• Canon EF-S 17-85mm f/4-5.6 IS USM Lens
• Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8 L IS USM Lens
• Manfroto 190XDB Tripod
• Manfroto 804RC2 three way head
• Gorillapod SLR Tripod
• LowePro Nova 140AW bag

Equipment reviews that I used to make my choice from:

• Canon EOS 50D – review from Digital Photography Blog
• Canon EF-S 17-85mm f/4-5.6 IS USM Lens – review from The-Digital-Picture
• Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8 L IS USM Lens – review from The-Digital-Picture

The-Digital-Picture website also contain sample photos taken with the lenses – made the choice a lot easier.

Now I need to get going with my photography. I have a willing subject in Kitty, and plenty of landscape shots I want to take. I will be posting photos on Flickr as usual and the best ones will get to my Red Bubble account where they will be available to purchase in various formats.