Well, I now have an iPhone. I am impressed and disappointed all at the same time. For the first time, I have the connivence of not carrying both a PDA and a cell phone. I love the ability to sync with either my laptop or my desktop. I miss that I cannot sync my notes and that I cannot copy and paste. The latter makes it hard to add incoming calls to the contacts list (I think since I have not really received too many calls yet).

All in all, I am impressed with the device and am looking forward to what will come out during MacWorld and see what I have missed (like 3G).

mjl

Well, I am finally done with upgrading both my MacBook Pro and my Mac Pro to Leopard. While the MBP upgrade went fairly well, I did have some problems with the Mac Pro. Not with the install, but with my personal account. X11 would not work at all. This is not good, but then again, it is not surprising since I have been upgrading and transferring my account since Mac OS X 10.1. So, I bit the bullet and went ahead with a fresh install and just moved over my files a bit at a time. I met with success and now am running 10.5 on all of my personal machines.

My only real complaint is with X11. It is still not working as well as it should and because of that fact, I will not be updating the student labs for a while. X11 is an important part of how the Apple machines are used by the students when connecting to the various linux machines in the department. I will be following the development of X11 and sending my feedback back to Apple.

Most of my other problems are more of a personal nature. Like many others, I am at a loss as to why Apple got rid of some features from previous releases of OS X. I really do not like that I cannot turn off the sidebar. I hate the opaque menu bar. I dislike the 3D dock.

What do I like. Well, NFS seems to perform better. Time Machine so far has worked well for me. I love the calendar integration with Mail making it very easy to add items to the calendar from mail. Spotlight seems to perform better as well. I finally have my virtual desktop via Spaces. What I would love to see next is that each desktop be allowed to have a different background and possibly a different screen resolution.

As I play around more with Leopard, I will be posting my opinions and comments.

mjl

Wow!. What a week it was at the Apple Distinguished Educators Institute. I was part of a language project that forced me to learn the Google KML markup language in just a couple of hours. I am impressed with the project. A lot of hard work by the group and I think we turned out a great project. The project Welcome to My Backyard, has a student collect world language samples (notice not foreign) of phrases that can reflect on the cultural heiratige of the speaker. The student then can place the phrases, a link to the audio sample in a Google Earth placemark. What you have then, is world tour of languages and cultures and hopfully a better appreciation of those friends, neighbors and family that can speak more than one language.

The project will soon be published on Apple's hosting site, Apple Learning Interchange. This site is an interesting site. It is a social networking site for educators that allows for teachers to present material that for class lessons and more. It is also a way for higher ed to showcase research, campus projects and more. Take the time and give it a look.

mjl

Well, after spending the weekend in Los Angeles helping my dad set up his new iMac, I am now in Monterey, CA for the Apple Distinguished Educators Institute. It was great being able to see old friends from the 2005 ADE Institute, which was my freshman year. I am now an alumnus and it has been great seeing folks from my previous institute and also meeting this years new ADE's.

I am signed up for three sessions of workshops: 1) Final Cut Pro introduction, 2) Advance Podcasting/Server and 3) Publishing on ADI (an ADE reporting session that is required). It will be a busy day for sure. I will be up at t6:30 AM PDT, which for those of you who know me, is not my cup of tea. I am the preverbal "night owl".

The one team building activity that we did today was to decorate our suite doors. I am in a suite with 5 other ADE;s, all neat folk. Our door, we decorated as a RAM chip, with a nice play on words using the RAM acronym. I will try and post some picture later this week. It is going to be a busy time for sure, with our off site visits on Thursday, following the workshop sessions tomorrow, oops today.

mjl