Monday, September 07, 2009

A wise man once said, “I chose the road less traveled...now where the heck am I?” Which is why I rarely lead on our motorcycle road trips. I tell others that during my 30-year career as a consultant, I led much of the time and now I’m content to follow. But the truth is, when I lead a pack of bikers, I make wrong turns. It’s more efficient when I follow.

My daughter, son-in-law and I just got back from a 9-day road trip on our motorcycles from Seattle to Banff, Alberta, Canada. We chose the roads less traveled, but didn’t get lost. We reprised Dante’s Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso when it came to weather. We encountered plenty of interesting people including an 80-year-old town historian, a lesbian couple, a Luxembourger innkeeper, a helicopter pilot for a smoke jumper team, and lots of bikers ranging from daring to demure.

In the end it was a great trip; everything a road trip ought to be. Recommended if you’ve got a powerful bike between your legs and the time to enjoy it.

But I’m getting ahead of myself … Check out the rest of the story for photos, the meaning of “Les Canards Sauvages,” and, well, the rest of the story. And click here for lots more big beautiful hi-res photos.

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Posted by Digital Quixote in • Motorcycles
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Wednesday, August 05, 2009

Question 1: What do these artists have in common?
Shirley Bassey
Carly Simon
Duran Duran
Sheena Easton
Louis Armstrong
Paul McCartney
Rita Coolidge
a-Ha
Gladys Knight
Matt Munro
Tom Jones
Nancy Sinatra
John Barry
Lulu
Tina Turner
Sheryl Crow
Chris Cornell
Question 2: What makes Shirley Bassey unique?

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Posted by Digital Quixote in • Out and About
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Sunday, August 02, 2009

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Each year we take the boat out to watch the Blue Angels perform at Seattle’s Seafair. This year I also watched the festivities from the pits of the Unlimited Hydro races.Enjoy the photos.

You can view high resolution photos here: Digital Quixote.

Posted by Digital Quixote in • Planes
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Saturday, July 25, 2009

“Destiny is not a matter of chance - it is a matter of choice. It is not a thing to be waited for - it is a thing to be achieved.”

Posted by Digital Quixote in • Quotable
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Thursday, July 23, 2009

First it was “Keep It Simple, Stupid.” Then it was, “It’s the Software, Stupid.” Now I’m thinking “It’s the Data Stupid.”

There are two kinds of people in the world: A) Those who think email is the killer app; and B) Those who don’t. I’m a type A person (in more ways than one, but I digress.) And mostly those whose opinions I respect believe mail is the killer app. My wife has a couple hundred Megs of Outlook email, contact and calendar data squirreled away on her PC. Me? It’s about a Gig. We need to get that into the Mac in a way that it continues to make sense. But the Mac doesn’t speak Outlook. And Outlook doesn’t speak Mac.

We had a choice, move the data to Microsoft Entourage (an Outlook clone) on the Mac or move the data to the Mac’s native mail, iCal, and Address Book applications. For reasons that revolve around synching with our iPhones, we chose to use Mac’s native applications. They are not as capable as Entourage, but they look to be “plenty good enough.” (Check out “The Rest of the Story” to see what pushed us over the edge.)

And to get the data into the native apps, we followed Apple’s recommendation and bought a copy of Little Machine’s Outlook to Mac (O2M) for short. For $10, how wrong could we go?

Pretty wrong as it turns out! Trouble is, out of the box, in its standard configuration … it doesn’t work. It fails to export more than one contact. It destroys calendar data. And exporting email folders is frustrating on a nuclear scale. ARGH! What to do?

Calling Apple, we worked over the issue for a few hours and developed some work-arounds. Mail folders – decide that “frustration is the new bliss” and suck it up. For calendar – export to an ics format directly from Outlook. Easier than O2M, actually. For contacts – using O2M and exporting to a previous vCard format works great. Then use native app “import” functions as is.

It worked!!! We’re done on Nancy’s iMac. My Mac Pro is next. I’m confident it will work there two and more simply - now that I know how.

How are iTunes; Mac mail, iCal, & Address Book; and Entourage related? You’ll have to read The Rest of the Story.

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Posted by Digital Quixote in • PC to Mac
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