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I always loved getting new toys as a kid, on the ride home from the store I could not wait to get home to open up my new Hot Wheels car. My mom and dad would always yell at me to wait until I got home, so I mastered the quiet art of opening up packaging without making a noise. :-p Of course, now that I’m on my own, I don’t have to wait. So when my new MacBook Pro came in, did you expect me to wait until I got home from work to open the box up?
Pfft, of course not.
I didn’t get any photos like I wanted of the unboxing, cause well, I wanted my new Macbook!
I started it up, went through the opening video of OS X, and I noticed how much faster it was, and cleanier, and well, better looking than my old trusty MacBook. But of course it would be, even though it’s the low-end MacBook Pro, it’s still a bit faster than my 2 year old MacBook.
Am I pleased with it? Of course I am, this will last me until I get back to the states, or even a few years after that if I take care of it. I’m sure once the weather warms up a bit, I’ll post a better review of it, but right now, it’s lower 60s and the wind is making it colder!

For the longest time I have had issues with trying to write anything with length. At some point in life, everyone of us wanted to write a novel, and I’m no exception. I started in 1997, the begining of seventh grade and as of a year ago it was about 120 pages and it was total crap.

I love the fact that when I do write, it just comes out easily with little to no preperation, just not the length of it. I can think back to English class to where we learned how to write stories and the thing that always, *always* killed me was that they set the length of the story to like two or three pages. I could write the story, I’d have some problems, and it’d go once I get in the groove. But, I guess my imagination was never really in tune to write fiction, meh, that’s life.

Whenever I blog, you’ll notice that the mass is only a few paragraphs long and even then a paragraph is a few sentences. I don’t like being long winded, I’d rather say what I need to say and go on. The only real time you’ll see me get long winded is if you’re in a relationship with me and I write a letter. Beyond that, I think the last thing any body wants to read is some lengthy diatribe about someone’s day.

I don’t plan on using the blog to write about every little detail of my life at the moment, just the areas that inspire me, and that I find interesting. Some areas will have more than another, but it’s not because I’m not thinking about it, but it’s because I’m not that interested. (Between the failing auto industry, the Nikon D90 and D700 and the random techno bits I have, who would’ve thunk it.) So in lieu of of the blog, there is my Twitter site: http://twitter.com/ianmunroe

Twitter has a 140 character limit so it can be a little challenging to do a quick little blup of the day or of the event. But, that can also be the fun part of it. There a multitude of ways to be able to post to Twitter, via txt messages or if you have a smart phone there are applications like Twitterific that can allow you to post but also check your friends Twits to see if anything is going with them.

I love Twitter for the 140 character limit, I try to write about a 80 character line and then put at the end that I’m gonna make the day better or I’m gonna keep the groove going. And then, that’s it. Anything else I do, like the fact I updated my Flickr account, or I’m trying to organize a get together at the diner. So I’ll post in there and then it’ll go out into the masses. It’s pretty neat, and you’d be surprised at how useful it can be, like for example help you get out of jail or let you know about local disasters pretty darn quick.

Check it out, seriously, all the cool kids are using it. (When in doubt, always go with peer pressure)

Letter writing is a dying form of communication, thanks to computers the notes we write to friends and family are in a inpersonal font. Cold, mechanical emails, even with a curvey script font they are still inpersonal. Anytime I had to write a serious note, I would bust out the pen and paper and write it out and either deliever it or mail it. Remember when letter writing was a required part of English class in school?

When you write letters or notes, it just seems like you care more. I know I used to write out my letters, scan them and send them out. I like adding that extra layer of personality, you did that extra little work just to send a simple note that probably really didn’t require it. When I was a kid and I was doodling in Microsoft Paint I always wished I was able to use a pen to write out notes and send them to friends and family.

Now it’s a lot easier, now you can go out get a 100 dollar Wacom Bamboo tablet and be able to open up Photoshop or Pixelmator and ‘draw’ out your notes, save them as a jpg file, and send them off to friends and family. Your only limit is the size of the file and what you have to say.

I went out and bought a tablet the other day, a Wacom Bambo Fun CTE-650, the 200 dollar tablet. It’s got a nice, large writing area, a comfortable stylus, extra tips and a neat mouse that doesn’t require batteries. When installing one of the menu’s dropped behind the screen and I sat there for like 5 minutes wondering why it was taking so long to install. :s

But as I was waiting for it to install, OS X recognized it right away so I opened up Pixelmator and started going to town, testing out the pressure settings and everything. Needless to say, it all really worked well, I just had to get used to the screen being portioned out onto the tablet. The handwriting recognition worked, as long as it recognized my chicken scratch of hand writing, but to be honest, that’s not really why I bought the thing for so it doesn’t bother me if it did or didn’t work.

The only real hard part I find is that you have to press down hard to be able to use the full size of a brush in Photoshop CS4 and in Pixelmator, but I’m fairly positive there’s a slider in the Preferences tab that I’m just not seeing or getting, but other than that, it is a solid tablet. Some people might have to get use to using the stylus like it’s an actual pen or pencil, once you get past that (if you have too), it’s cake. (Then again I am on a Mac, so that might be it easy ) There are also two buttons on the side near the tip, which act as left click and right click (set by default) which is really handy if you wanna click and drag the layer and switch to a different layer or option. Then just flip the stylus over to erase any mistakes you just did, just make sure your eraser size is a little bigger than your brush.

The mouse that comes with it is pretty neat, it’s pretty light so don’t have to throw it around like you’re daily mouse. The best part about the mouse is that it doesn’t require batteries. So when you’re stylus is in it’s little holder you can just use the mouse on the tablet like an actual mouse. And with the screen portionalized on the tablet, you never have to lift up the mouse if you run out of space. One slide across the tablet is one slide across the screen. The mouse is a bit on the small side, even in my danty girl like hands, so for some you might wanna keep your other mouse handy.

The function buttons at the top are pretty neat, the forward and back buttons provide easy ways to undo and redo. The touch sensitive button in the middle is a nice way to zoom in and our and scroll around the image. But all of four of the buttons are programmable to what you want them to do, and the options you can use them are pretty good and should have you covered pretty well.

Is it worth the 200 dollar price tag? Yeah. There is a smaller one, but I would opt for the bigger one just for the extra real estate. I can imagine that smaller one would grate on the nerves of some, including myself. But, the one I bought is gonna do what I want it to do rather well, and that’s it. So while I’m out and down in Qatar, those of you in my address book can expect a lot of hand written notes with the translation from my chicken scratch below.