Gotta Jam More Useless Stuff In There

Well, I've been reading for the past 5 hours or so (and practicing)... Learning all the different ways to move the cursor and all the advanced cursor motions in emacs. Ya, you read right... advanced cursor commands. I have to admit they are pretty slick, they are definitely quicker than the arrow keys and the mouse, but really the emacs manual stressed the importance of learning these commands. Some guy has a lot of love for that little blinking bar! It took me back 12 years to my days in the AutoCAD lab.

Maybe tomorrow I'll finally learn how to colorize my code (that's actually what I set out to learn today) But at least I'll go to bed tonight knowing that I know how to bounce forward in my text 8 lines and go 5 spaces in.

I think it would be a lot easier going through a tutorial that was written for a person used to higher level stuff. I mean seriously when I see sections like this:

If you are using a windowed display, such as X11 or MS-Windows, there
should be a tall rectangular area called a scroll bar at the
side of the Emacs window. You can scroll the text by clicking the
mouse in the scroll bar.

>> Try pressing the middle button at the top of the highlighted area
within the scroll bar. This should scroll the text to a position
determined by how high or low you click.

>> Try moving the mouse up and down, while holding the middle button
pressed down. You'll see that the text scrolls up and down as
you move the mouse.

Seriously... how to use a mouse! WTF

if you click on the slide bar and drag it up and down the text will scroll!

I may be being a little overly pessimistic tonight, but I've been at this most of today and now that I've dumped so many hours into it have realized that once I get over this threshold there is no going back to notepad.

This is GOD's punishment for me for using Emacs, Kenny and him are laughing at me while I study. :)

Mac-tastic

My MacBook came in on Monday, so, as you may have noticed, I've not been doing much blogging. Instead I have been relearning mac and finding/downloading all the software that will make me feel complete.

I have to say that after a week of iPod only "computer" use, the desire to just touch the screen to tell the cursor where to go is strong. I so want to just grab my file images with my finger tips and move them where they should go. It takes great restraint and I'm constantly reminding myself that no matter how much I touch the screen nothing will happen.

My Mac is like all Macs... cute, clean, and shiny. With bright, bubbly, baby-ish icons and a clean yuppy feel. It's a nice change from my cluttered clunky windows monster.

So, I needed to put stuff on my new, pretty mac... Stuff to make me feel all warm and cozy.

Text Editor - I'm going to try out Aquamacs - Emacs, though Kenny says he may divorce me for it (I knew he loved Vi but geesh!). I've used Kate, Kedit, Jedit and even notepad/wordpad! So we'll see how Aquamacs works for me. Shoot, the majority of my editing involves adding and removing text and images from a few websites. I don't need anything special.

Photo Editor - I had Aperture pre-installed for me... it's kind of a gimp/picasa hybrid. Still learning how to just organize the images in it, let alone edit them.

Office Suite - I have used Open Office for the last 8 years, Neo Office is my new Mac substitute.

Finance Software - I wanted software that will allow me to sync my ipod with the computer to keep track of spending. Even though I've been using gnucash, I bought iBank in hopes that one day I'll be recording my mocha purchases from Starbucks.

Oh, and of course, no computer is complete without Firefox!

I need to get a crossover booter like BootCamp or CrossOver. Well, because, Anet just doesn't support Mac stuff yet. I hope they will with GuildWars 2, but I may be dreaming. Luckily, Diablo 3 will be released for the Mac soon and I'll be killing demons for days and days without ever having Windows running. Neverwinter Nights 2 is on Mac, as well as the evil WOW, but with them having monthly payment due, I'm not sure I'll ever get on their bandwagons. I'm a GuildWars fangirl, what more can I say?

Anyway, most of these first few days has just been the MacBook courting me. We're getting to know each other.

Everything is all new and exciting.

It could be love.

Mac Book Comes Today, Better Show You My iPod Touch Before it's "Old" News

I got an iPod Touch, free with the purchase of my new mac book. Which is actually sitting in the box next to me screaming to be unwrapped. The iPod Touch has been here for a week now. Supplementing my computer usage while I waited for the real deal to arrive. I'm actually quite happy with the touch, it preforms quite well as a little portable computer. I can do everything I usually do with the big one... check email, surf my websites, and chat. I can even do stuff I don't usually do like check stocks, visit youtube and check the weather. Anyway I made a little video of the applications I usually use if for. Theres gads and gads of apps for it that I don't have/use so don't take this as a tell all. Just a little view of my new toy.



Time to open my new, new toy!