Having Fun with a MAC

Good morning and Happy Thanksgiving from Pocatello, Idaho. Susan and I drove over yesterday, about a 10.5 hour drive from Ephrata. If you are not familiar with Pocatello (and there is no reason you should be), it is in the southeast corner of Idaho near the Wyoming and Utah borders. We are about a 2.5 hour drive north from Salt Lake City and about the same if we wanted to go to Yellowstone National Park to the Northeast.

If you are a faithful reader of this blog, you know that our daughter Aimee and husband Brian moved here in August. Sadly, Brian won't be here to share the Turkey. He is currently in Jakarta, Indonesia with the music group M-Pact. He arrived there today after being in Singapore for a week.

Interestingly, the group was invited to perform for the President in Singapore in their version of the White House, which is more like the Forbidden City than the White House. Turns out that they were the first American musical group ever to perform there. And while they were there getting ready for the show, our own President Bush was upstairs meeting with the President of Singapore. Bush wasn't there for the show, but the show went on very well without him.

Aimee, and now us, are able to keep up with him on a real time basis on their Apple MacBook laptops. They use a program called "IChat" which allows you to not only chat, but to send pictures and videos. In fact, as I write this blog, Aimee is chatting with Brian and looking at the pictures he has sent. When Brian uploads the pictures from his camera to his MacBook, they are automatically sent to Aimee's MacBook.

By the way, the photograph is of M-Pact in Singapore. Brian is the one with the yellow bag. Somebody should tell the photographer not to shoot straight on into a mirror.

When we got here last night, Brian was still in Singapore. Each of their laptops have a built-in camera so we took a picture of the three of us around Aimee's laptop and sent it to Brian. Then Brian took a picture of himself in his hotel room and sent it to us. It was a lot of fun chatting with Brian on the other side of the world.

iChat is only available on Apple computers, but Aimee says we can do the same thing on our Windows PC with AOL Instant Messenger. We may just try it out to stay in touch. But, I will say the way that iChat works and integrates with the built-in camera is very slick and easy to use, which is the hallmark of Apple products.

Another MAC program that I like a great deal is "Dashboard." It sits on the desktop so it is visible when you want. It consists of several different "Widgets," each performing a different function. For instance, there is a calendar widget, a local weather widget, stock market widgets, local gas price widget, music widgets, airline flight tracker widgets and several others. If you would like to see what it looks like, check out the Apple Website.

By the way, Brian is in a luxury hotel in Jakarta, but cannot go outside without escorts. Lots of kidnappings going on. The group is there for the Jakarta Jazz Festival. He will be back here on Monday afternoon for a week before heading to Seattle to do three shows at the Triple Door theater, then off to Denver, then to South Korea for Christmas. In January, M-Pact heads for Italy, then Estonia, and finally Moscow. These guys are getting popular...and its about time. If you have never heard them, it is definitely worth a trip to see them in Seattle...but hurry as they always sell out. And, oh yes, they are still talking on iChat.

I will write more about my impressions of the MacBook in a future as I play with it more this weekend.