Blog Relations

Storynory has developed a friendly alliance with an ecommerce site called Wicked Uncle.

Wicked Uncle sells children’s toys. It’s not aimed at kids, or even at parents, but at uncles and god parents who are terrible at remembering birthdays. It remembers the date for them, and even suggests a selection of gifts suitable for the child’s age.

I met Wicked Uncle’s owner, Mike O’Shea after a mutual friend put us together. We thought it would be nice to do something together and so I wrote a story about a Wicked Uncle which you can listen to here.

The uncle in question is more irresponsible than wicked, but all the same, you probably wouldn’t want him to look after your kids for the weekend. Mike’s previous business, Splendour.com, which sells lingerie, was probably just a touch more wicked.

My first impressions of WP-Super-Cache are that it’s really worth taking the time to install if you are using WordPress. I’ve got it going on Storynory.com and the pages are loading like lightening. Apparently the excellent WP Cache was still using PHP resources, where the suped-up version is creating HTML pages which load fast and are lighter on the server.

I should install it here too….  I know that I neglect Blog Relations, but it’s benefiting indirectly as it’s on a shared server with Storynory. One day soon I’m going to start devoting time to BR here, but at the moment running Storynory and keeping up with my nanny duties for our small son is all that I can manage.

I’ve mentioned my search for a good sound editor on the Mac. Well I’ve found one. It’s Sony Sound Forge. Ah, but that’s Windows only, I hear you say. Ah yes, but with Parallels, you can run Windows on your Mac, so long as it’s one of the new ones with Intel inside.

Parallels opens up a virtual terminal within your Mac desktop. If you have an XP disc and license, you can install Windows inside the terminal. It’s not hard to do. Well, if I can do it, then it’s not difficult at all.

Sound Forge runs smoothly inside Parallels, but it was hard dealing with a large sound file until I noticed that you can distribute the computer’s ram between the Mac OS and Windows as you wish. You can save files inside folders than can be accessed by either system. If you press fn alt return, the Windows screen revolves round in impressive 3D and becomes a full screen.

It’s a little odd running Windows on the Mac, especially as I don’t have a right mouse button to click. I get confused between using the ctrl button and the Apple button. Otherwise Parallels makes it a lot easier to ween yourself off Windows because you know that you can have the best of both worlds. iMovie on the Mac – a really simple and great video editor – and Sound Forge on the Windows terminal – the best sound editor.

So is Mac really better than Windows? It certainly looks nicer, and it’s easier to find your favourite applications in the bar along the bottom. I also think it’s easier to have several applications open at once, and to switch between them, partly because they tend to open at different sizes so you can see one behind the other. It’s nice the way you can dock applications at the bottom where you can easily find them again. All in all, these little advantages do add up. But it really is useful to have the option to run Windows in tandem for those hard-to-find applications.

Switching has been made even easier by the fact that these days, most of what I do isn’t on either the Mac or Windows. Many of my applications are online – Google Documents, Bloglines, GMail, WordPress, – even a quick-fix picture editor. I keep media files on a big external hard drive, which is just as well, as I will have to give this Mac back to Exbiblio one day. It’s convenient to work like this in the day of the disposable computer that lasts a couple of years at max – and besides, I like to drop down to the Internet cafe to get away from wife and baby sometimes.

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