Yes, I did remember I have a blog. I’ve been busy lately...more on that toward the bottom.
Every so often, I slow down and take part of my work day to run virus checks, malware and spyware checks, battery checks, and updates on the trusty MacBook. I do this during the week in case something goes wrong; I feel like I get better customer service during business hours than on weekends. (Not to mention I was camping this last weekend, and thus, not able to do the updates.) These updates inevitably take the better part of a morning, but always ends up giving me a laptop I can trust to do what I ask of it.
The other day was one of those days. I’d put it off long enough, but with the update to my checkbook program, I didn’t have an excuse to put it off any longer.
Now, before you all snicker at me and remind me that “I thought Macs don’t have a lot of issues”, you need to understand: I work online, opening things that my students send me. Sometimes as many as 40 of these things daily. And bless their hearts, a fair number of them would be horrified to find out that there’s a nasty bit of code-a virus-attached to their homework, a little gift they don’t even know they have. While that code doesn’t affect the MacBook, it can reside on it-and then get sent to others with a Windows based computer. With as many students as I deal with, that could translate to a large number of computers that could be infected pretty quickly...plus some of the school’s units.
Add to that all the e-mail I get from barbershoppers, friends, loved ones and so forth-some of whom have admitted they don’t know much about computer viruses, much less computers-and you can see why I carry malware, spyware and anti-virus programs. It’s more to protect everyone else than myself.
Those all got updated because the operating system was updated. That means I am now running Mac OS X 10.7.4, otherwise known as Lion. That little chore-updating just the op system-took me the better part of two hours. Most of that is because I had to download Lion from the App Store...the download alone ran nearly an hour. I went and got some tea while it downloaded, came home and installed everything.
I like it well enough...though I have had to make a few adjustments to my workflow. The two most obvious changes are Mission Control-the replacement for a switching program called Spaces-and another program I like better, called Launchpad. Launchpad lets me find my applications a lot faster. Mission Control-now that I’ve tweaked a few things-will actually be an improvement over Spaces. It’ll take me a few days to get used to the new op system, but it will be worth it as the MacBook seems to be running cooler and a little faster.
I still have one program to update, but that will have wait until my next paycheck. Fortunately, the programs I use the most were the latest versions, so I didn’t have to upgrade those.
The nice thing about all this updating is that I don’t have to patch everything every week. The downside is when I have do have to update, it can take some time and money. But it’s well spent in that I have a MacBook that can run rings around a Windows 7 computer, even now.
The added benefit-and the one I’ve been the most wanting to play with-is a little gem called iBooks Author. A few of you know that in addition to writing a dissertation over the last year, I’ve also been writing some fiction on the side. It’s more science-fictionish than Christian, for various reasons. The main thing here is that I now have the ability to create both an iBook and an EPUB version of my books. I’m working on the iBook formatting for book one now; editing is taking some adjustments. Font changes, text size, and a few other tweaks that can happen now that I can see what a finished product will hopefully look like. It should remain about 300 pages in length, if all goes well. The EPUB version will have to be re-edited, and may end up about 350 pages plus.
More about this little project when the first book is ready to go. I have three volumes completed that need to move into the final formatting, and am still writing a forth volume as well.
Enough for now.
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