Boyzoid's Blog & Stuff

One thing my wife and I are very passionate about, but I rarely, if ever, blog about (I should change that), is that we home school our children.  I can get into the why in another blog post, but suffice to say, it has been one of the most fulfilling endeavors of our lives.

I am going to be replacing my laptop and my wife's desktop with Apple products.  I want to get a Mac Book Pro, and my wife is leaning towards a Mac Book.  While I was looking around at prices today, a friend pointed me to the education section of their site. I was stunned to see this, where Apple offers the same educational discount for home schools as other educational institutions.

It is refreshing to see companies like Apple offering discounts like this.  I hope more companied follow their lead.

I have 7.   If your interested, leave a comment, the first 7 (if I even get 7 responses) will get one.

I really want to be cool and get a Mac Book Pro (MBP). 

I really want to find out what's in the Kool-Aid that Apple sells that makes anyone who owns one of them become a full on zealot.

I really want to find out what the big deal is.

But at what cost?

I am considering replacing my Windows based laptop, and my wife's Windows based desktop with a MBP for me, and an plain ole' Mac Book for her.  I say considering because I went to Apple.com today to just get an idea of how much we would need to spend.  I say considering because I did not expect the 'sticker-shock' I got when I went to the site.

The standard MBP was $2799.00. After comparing the specs with my current laptop I was astounded to find out, there rally isn't a whole lot more, if anything, the MBP offers that I don;t already have in terms of hardware.  The processor in the MBP is a bit faster than what I have, but my current hard drive is 60GB larger.  Also, the video card is a bit more beefy than what I have, but all I do is development on my laptop.  I don't so a great deal of graphics work, nor do I watch DVDs, so this is kind of a waste for me.  Both have 2GB of RAM, WiFI and Bluetooth.

Here is the kicker, I paid over $1000.00 less than the MBP.  I am sorry, in my opinion, the differences in the specs don't warrant that $1000 difference.

So, I am asking for help.  I am having a hard time convincing myself (much less my wife) that it is worth the extra money to get a Mac.  What can I do with a MAC that I cannot do with my Windows machine?  

Help convince me its worth the extra grand.

And please don't say I can run OSX and Windows on the same machine, that's not really a selling point to me.  I am not going to pay an extra $1000 so I can run Windows.

I know this is like opening Pandora's box, but can someone recommend a good resource for learning Java?  If you could include reasons why you recommend the book, it would be extremely helpful.  Also, any resources I should avoid like the plague? (Again, can you include some reasons why?)

Thanx!

I meant to post this last week, but the flu kind of got in the way.

Two weeks ago, we purchased 2 products that had some unexpected features.

The first was a handset for our Uniden phone system at home.  This is one of those systems that has a 'base' that is connected to a phone line, and the ability to add numerous 'handsets' to the system.  One of our handsets needed replacing, and when at the store, saw a handset which claimed to work with 'any Uniden 5.6 MgHz phone system. I was a bit skeptical as the phone system was several years old, but it was cheap, and could easily be returned if it didn't work.

I was amazed that all I had to do was drop the handset into the base for a few seconds so it could be 'registered' with the base, and it worked.  What surprised me most is that the new handset fit into the old base.

The second product was a car kit I bought for a new handheld satellite radio I received for Christmas (It's a Pioneer Inno).  I already had an XM radio in my car, and was not looking forward to having to run a new wire for a new antenna.  Not that it was difficult, just rather time consuming and annoying.  I was surprised to find out that not only could I continue to use the same antenna, but I could use the same plastic base on which the radio is installed.

I was impressed with how easily these new products worked with older equipment, and thought it was very 'forward thinking' of the companies involved.  A co-worker pointed out, though, its kind of sad that something like that would impress me as much as it did, since stuff should work that way anyway.  But, considering it doesn't, or usually doesn't, I am still impressed, and hopeful that other companies follow their lead.

I have been a faithful user of the Web Developer Toolbar  for Firefox for quite sometime.  I will admit, I don't even tap a fraction of its potential.  I typically only use it to edit the CSS of a page where I am still creating or editing the layout.  For those who might not know, the Web Developer Toolbar lets you edit the CSS of any page, and renders the changes you make to the page.  It does not save the changes to the file (now that would be both cool and dangerous), but you can copy and paste any changes into the real CSS file.

Today, I was told about 2 nifty little features I did not know existed.

1. 'Display Element Information' - This is available on the 'Information' menu or, by default, by pressing ctrl+shift+f.  You can then mouse over different parts of the page and see information about the page, such as: the type of element (<td>, <p>, <div>, etc..), and attributes of the tag, any children and the 'ancestors'.  Very cool.
2. 'View Style Information- - This is available  on the 'CSS' menu or, by default, pressing ctrl+shif+y.  You can then click on any element and any CSS specific to the element you clicked will open in a new tab.  Also very cool.

Both of these will likely save me a lot of time when creating templates, or trouble shooting CSS issues.

OK, so I thought the color green that used to be in the navigation menu, and on top of the pods would grow on me.  It didn't.  So here is attempt #2 at some new color.  I think this one is a bit more pleasing.

In case you have not noticed, I have updated the layout of this site.  While I love the way the header and menu look, I am not too sure about the side pods.

This is a layout I got from Open Source Web Designs and modified to work with BlogCFC.  I did have to make a few changes to some of the 'core' files, but most of the changes are from the updating the CSS.

I am not sure where this golf course is, but I really liked the picture, which I got from another site I use a lot for site design, Stock.XCHNG, which has tons of free and cheap stock images.  I will try to find out where it is, and then play there.  If you happen to know where it is, please share.

Let me know what you think.

I was lucky enough to have been able to get an invite for Google Analytics a while ago.  I have used it for on a few sites, and the amount of information collected is astounding.

Google has announced that anyone can now sign up for Analytics.

Oh, yea, and its free...at least for now.