I am glad my Tercel is good on gas, because my 4runner was horrific. I am now commuting about 250km per day to Victoria. Crazy, I know, but the work I am currently doing is interesting, and I have a few friends who live down there, so I was always visiting anyways. Still, my commute time is 3-4 hours depending on the traffic situation.

On the upside, I am tearing through audiobooks at a furious pace. I don’t really mind driving, and I really like the combination of driving and listening to audiobooks. I am currently listening to “The African Experience, From Lucy to Mandela” by The Teaching Company. It is a really good listen.

On the downside, I have not been able to train enough for the Sept 30th MOMAR, and given how I currently feel, I am not so certain I am going to run in it. I will likely do some other races over the course of the winter, and start up on more races again next year, but right now, training properly for the MOMAR takes up too much of my time.

It sounds like Daisy is having a good time in the Okanagan with my Mom. But I miss that annoying little ball of fur. Still, it would not be fair to her when I am gone from home every weekday for 12-14 hours or so.

Kathy Has put up a few pictures and a description of her solo hike of the Nootka Trail. Check it out, hiking the Nootka Trail “backwards” and alone is no small feat.

I told my Mom to buy an intel iMac, and I strongly suggested that she buy a 20″ model. She bought the 17″ instead. Then, while visiting home, I showed her how to watch movies on the iMac, and how it was better than her TV/DVD combo. Right then and there she decided to run out and buy the 20″ model for the better screen. So, I ended up with a 17″ iMac!

Now, I don’t really need an iMac. I suggested that my mother get one because they are easy to use, and will do everything she needs and more. However, I love Unix, and Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) is a true Unix (based originally on Free BSD long ago). As I use the Mac, I am astonished at how easy the GUI is to use, Aqua is what X11 should be for Linux. Indeed, the largest problem I am often faced with on the iMac is I often over think things when the solution is right in front of me.

And under the hood, when you finally find the “terminal” application, you have a true Unix shell. Bash to be precise, although apparently tsch and ksh are there too, but I am a bash fan anyways. I was disappointed reading the man page to see that “ls” did not support “ls –color”, but there again I was over thinking things, “ls -G” has the same functionality. I popped a few aliases into .bash_profile and I was off. Even better for me, pico is included as I am no longer an Emacs fan, or for that matter a fan of vi.

Again, despite the power under the hood, the GUI is just fantastic. Everything you need to do with your machine is right there, or only a few clicks away. And during the setup, the machine prompts you for the proper information, then leaves you alone, just like Linux and BSD have been doing for years. Windows will do this if you first setup an install disc with a program like nlite, but not to the same level.

As I have been fielding tech support calls from friends for years, all I can say for most of them is: “Just buy an intel iMac”. Because nearly everything they need to do on a daily basis is there, there are no virus or spyware worries, and the machines just work. You do what you need to, and turn them off. That simple. And for those that require Windows, there is bootcamp to dual boot the OS’s.

I must say, I am far more impressed with Mac OS X than I thought I would be.