The news always seems to be carrying some story about a cyclist and a driver getting into a fight or of a cyclist being struck by a car while they are riding. When these stories are discussed in the comments section of a news site tempers flare and heated arguments about sharing the road break out. The pattern is so consistent that you can predict it pretty accurately…

Back at home my wife’s MacBook sat at her desk, left on overnight like she often did so that when she woke up in the morning a quick shake of the mouse would brighten the screen and allow her to check e-mail. From what I can tell in the hourly backup logs, at roughly the same time my aircraft lifted off the runway the 120GB hard disk in her MacBook crashed.

When Steve Jobs announced the iPad a few months ago I didn’t think “Wow, I gotta have me one of those…”. Though I was intrigued by the form factor and slightly motivated by Steve Jobs’ demonstration of the device, it didn’t scream out at me as something I needed. I was actually more amused with all the criticism surrounding the choice of iPad as the name for the device.

The other day I was sitting at my desk when I started to hear a faint clicking sound. I pushed the noise out of my mind for a while and continued to work on the task at hand. Before long the clicking started to get louder and louder; it was clearly a consistent mechanical noise and was coming from under my desk, right where my Mac Pro is parked.

It’s now the two year mark for my switch from Windows to Mac. Over the last two years I’ve gone from a Windows developer exploring the Mac as a compliment to my Windows and Linux machines to a full time Mac user that spends the vast majority of my time in OS X.

I generally like to put up blog posts that talk about cool things I’ve discovered on my Mac, or problems I’ve overcome and how I did that. This time it’s about a pet peeve…

After finding that my MacBook Pro’s battery required service and would no longer hold a charge I made an appointment with the Genius Bar at my local Apple store in Reston, VA. After a short wait Vilma (the Genius) called me up…

I’ve gotten a lot of e-mail lately asking why I haven’t been updating my blog. Frankly it’s because of two reasons: my business has kept me busier than a one-armed wall-paper hanger and …

The UPS truck pulled up yesterday and delivered my family upgrade pack to Snow Leopard . Though I’m a software developer I really stick to the web side of things and have not participated in any of the developer versions of Snow Leopard. As a result, I’ve only done…

I was chatting with some friends yesterday, some folks I hadn’t seen in a while. As they were getting ready to leave Donna looked over at my MacBook, propped open and sitting…

I was sitting on the couch the other day and relaxing when my wife yelled to me from the other room: David! My Mac’s not working! I love those highly specific descriptions of a problem. I asked for a little more clarity. I’m trying to watch a video and it’s…

One of my favorite–yet least mentioned–free utilities is Growl , a universal notification service for Mac that lets applications notify you of events. Now instead of each application deciding on how they want to present notifications for things like new mail, incoming tweets, etc. you can control it in a single…

I’ve now been using Ruby on Rails for a little over a year and have found it to be a fantastic environment to build web based applications. The last year has not been without some serious pain and learning curves and while I…

When I blog about applications that I’ve found I generally wrap up my posts with an open invitation to readers: Got any you like? Many folks have been generous and shared links and applications that …

The best part about writing a blog where I talk about Macs? People give me some great tips in the comments and yesterday’s post on apps for making users more productive was no exception. While I love the shortcuts available on my Mac I…

Many people are obsessed with speed and I happily include myself in that category, at least with respect to the performance I get from my computer. Whether it’s a faster processor, more memory, a quicker graphics card or a new high-speed hard…