White Wizard

Google Calendar

I’ve been playing with Google Calendar and I found out that I like it, a lot. At work I have a Microsoft Exchange account, and that is nice and all. But I never figured out how to easily update and share my schedule besides exporting it to html, constantly.

With Google Calendar, I can now just update everything in one place. It also does a pretty good job of letting me decide what to share and who to share it with. In fact, I even created a Marriott School of Management Graduation calendar to help those people that are graduating and can’t remember everything that is going on (that link is in ical format).

Furthermore, I’ve created a “Given Family” calendar to keep track of everything we are doing and all the plane flight information (right now, there are 6 plane flights we have to keep track of for this upcoming summer). I think it is great to be able to track and access all of this information online.

Mac Apps: wget for Mac OS X (intel Based)

So, I’m a true geek at heart: I love command line tools. So when I found out “wget” didn’t come pre-installed on my intel mac, I set out to figure out how to install it and get it to work. Here is what I came up with:

1. Install the xCode stuff from your Mac Installation Disk (this will install some compilers and stuff)
2. Download wget (just get the latest version)
3. Untar it (just double click it on your mac)
4. Open up a terminal and go to the new directory that was created (most likely somewhere desktop)
5. Type these commands:
1. ./configure
2. make
3. sudo make install
6. That’s it! wget is now in /usr/local/bin

You have to install it as super user so that is why you use the “sudo” (super user do) command. Also, if you want wget to be in your path, you’ll need to add the following lines to your .bash_profile located in your user directory:

export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin

Have fun!

Pandora

So, Kurt Kirkham told me about pandora.com. It is a music site that acts like a radio station, except ituses the Music Genome Project to tailor music to your tastes. It takes into account tones, singing, background music, a whole lot of stuff.

So far, some of the songs it played for me were really dumb. However, I simply gave those songs the “Thumbs Down”, pandora then takes the aspects of that song into account when it plays songs in the future. Quite a neat system actually.

My New Intel Mac (iMac)

So, Andrew Jacobs suggested I blog about this new iMac I got and how my experience is. You may ask, “Why are you going to do this, Nathan? You haven’t blogged about anything in a super duper long time. Why Now?”

Well, I’m not going to answer that

I recently got an intel iMac. I picked out the following:

• 2GHz 20″ Intel iMac
• 2 GB Ram
• 500 GB SATA Hard Drive
• Software
• Macromedia Studio 8
• Adobe Creative Suite
• Micosoft Office
• 60 GB Video iPod
• eyeTV 200/250

Yeah, that’s a lot of stuff. Let me tell you, it runs great!

So, whenever I install something, I’ll work on posting it to my blog so everyone can see how I get things running.