Monday, March 1st, 2010
Last night I watched the closing ceremony of the 2010 Winter Olympics, and what I felt and thought was truly remarkable. Dozens of celebrities stood up and proudly proclaimed they were Canadian. The highlight of the night for me was Michael J. Fox standing in the center of the stage, telling the world that just because he has lived in the US for the last 30 years, he is Canadian and proud of it. I am proud too!
I don’t often advertise on this website that I am Canadian, and I try to stay clear of geographical specific information so not to leave out anyone. However, I felt the absolute need today to tell everyone, and remind others, I am Canadian. The last two weeks have been absolutely magical. I’m not talking about the record setting 14 gold medals (although that was nice too). I am talking about watching my country come together and cheer as a single nation united. In my lifetime I have never seen this in Canada. It was absolutely magical, heart warming, and has left me with a lifetime of memories.
Canadians are a very special group of people. We have such a diverse country, both geographically and ethnically. We are a bi-lingual country (french and english), but a large percentage of our population speaks other languages. Quite often Canadians talk about their heritage proudly, whether it be from Franch, England, China, Jamacia, Finland, Italy, etc, but the last two weeks, everyone was Canadian, and no other flags were waved. It didn’t matter if you were not a sports fan, or didn’t care for the Olympics, everyone wanted to be part of the winter games. We dared to believe, and believe we did.
There were so many moments that made these Olympics stand out for me. There was the incredible story of Joannie Rochette, who was set to compete in woman’s figure skating before her mom sadly past away of a heart attack while on her way to see Joannie skate. Joannie decided to skate anyway, and carried the country on her shoulders as she won the bronze medal. She was given the honor of holding the flag during the closing ceremonies and I believe no one else deserved it more than she.
The moment I will remember the most was not one of victory, but one of loss and selflessness. Mellisa Hollingsworth was one of the favourites to win gold in the woman’s skeleton race. Unfortunately it was not meant to be and she ended up with a 5th place finish. Hollingsworth was in tears after her 5th place finish. She told Canada with tears in her eyes,
“It’s really hard. I feel like I’ve let my entire country down.”
She didn’t.
Tags: 2010, Canada, Olympics, Vancouver
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Saturday, January 9th, 2010
Another year has come and gone, and another set of applications have made there was into my everyday work flow. This was an amazing year for applications and four new applications have made it into my top ten list, including taking the top one and two spots away from previous top applications.
- Dropbox (new for 2010) No application or program has changed the way I use my computers more then Dropbox. The days of worrying about file changes and transferring files between computers are over! Dropbox syncronizes all your files in your Dropbox folder to all your Mac, Windows and Linux computers. The synchronization is so fast both ways that most files take just seconds before the changes appear on all your computers. All files are kept locally as well so you can access all your files even when you are offline. This is the one application I believe that everybody can benefit from.
Price: FREE for 2GB, $99.95/year for 50GB
- LaunchBar 5 (new for 2010) is an application and file launcher taken to the next level. I was a little bit hesitant to try LaunchBar because I thought Spotlight did a good enough job, but when I finally took the plunge, I got hooked. LaunchBar can not only launch applications, but can access data within them, go through your contacts, add events to iCal and so much more. Any power user must check out this application.
Price: 30-Day Free Trial then $35.00 USD
- FireFox (1st in 2009) web browser is still my favorite browser of choice. Though I am really starting to like Google Chrome, my day to day web development work is done in FireFox. The extension library is what I love most, and I would be lost without extensions like FireBug and Web Developer Toolbar. The browser is made by the company Mozilla which is dedicated to providing free open source software to the general public. FireFox has a huge community base and has thousands of extensions that are available to add to the functionality of the browser.
Price: FREE (Open Source)
- TextMate (3rd in 2009) is the text editor that has been missing all my life. I just discovered this little jem last year and I still can’t believe how I ever lived without it. TextMate provides syntax highlighting for just about every programming language in use today. Using a simple drop down menu on the program’s bottom bar, you can change between languages on the fly. TextMate also comes preloaded with hundreds of code snipplets too for quickly adding text or special character encodings in. There are simple too many features to fully go into detail in this post. Please give TextMate a try today if you do anything but edit the most basic forms of text.
Price: 30-Day Free Trial then ?39
- 1Passwd (2nd in 2009) is a program that keeps track of all your usernames, passwords, and form data. The program not only keeps track of all your secure information but it also includes a secure password generator that automatically fills a password request field with a very secure password and then is remembered by the program. This allows you to do what you should be doing all along which is use a different password for each website. All you have to remember is your one master password and 1Passwd will remember the rest. It is completely encrypted using the keychain and can even be synced between your various mac computers using Apple’s Mobile Me.
Price: 30-Day Free Trial then $39.95 USD
- Things (new for 2010) is a personal to do manager based on the principles from David Allen’s Book, Getting Things Done. Things allows you to create Projects and assign tasks and due dates around those Projects. You can tag your tasks for quick access later, and sort them by areas of responsibilities. Things also syncs with iCal so you can have all your tasks in your iCal and Mail for easy access. There is also an iPhone application for Things so that you can carry all your task along with you, and sync when you get back to your home or office. Things has made my life so much easier and I love the simple UI of this application and highly recommend for anyone who wants to really take control of their working life.
Price: 14-Day Free Trial then $49.95 USD
- Transmit (5th in 2009) by Panic is simply the best FTP program I have ever used on ANY platform. The ability to upload to Amazon S3 and Apple’s iDisk is fantastic. Transmit also allows you to sync between different folders, use tabbed site management, has dock status updates, and syncs your saved FTP sites with Mobile Me. This is a must have app for anyone who manages websites or needs remote file management.
Price: $29.95 USD
- Text Expander (6th in 2009) is a tiny application that runs quietly in the background of your Mac. It allows you to enter snipplets (small text phrases) that will expand into preset text or graphic strings. For example; say you keeping having to enter your email address like bob@something.com. You could setup a key so everytime you type bob@ the text is automatically replaced with bob@something.com. You can even program in complete email signatures, and photos to pop up, just about anything you can think of. This is a great time saving application that has saved me from a lot of excess typing.
Price: 30-Day Free Trial then $29.95 USD
- Tweetie (new for 2010) is a Mac only Twitter client. Twitter broke out in a big way in 2009 really going mainstream, and that in turn gave us more and more people to follow each week. Tweetie uses a very Mac like UI to help you follow your Twitter peeps. Tweetie is really good for tracking conversations between different twitter users, and a double click on a reply will bring up the entire conversation thread so you can learn what they have been discussing. This is a must have for any Twitter user who wants a more powerful way to use the Twitter stream and take the Twitter experience to the next level.
Price: FREE (Ad Supported), $19.95 with no ads
- Super Duper (4th in 2009) takes care of the task that all of us seem to avoid, BACKUP! SuperDupper can be setup to make a complete screen shot of your computer?s hard drive so you can be backup within minutes of a complete system failure. SuperDuper also allows for incremental updates so you don?t have to make a huge backup file every night. Super Duper was updated last year to work with Leopard’s Time Machine.
Price: Free for regular backup, $27.95 for advanced features
Tags: 2010, Apple, Applications, Mac, Open Source, OSX, Software
Posted in Apple | 16 Comments »