Richard Keith Latman - The Blog

iMagicLab Opens in SecondLife

Guess I don't need to write much because well, it's being written about everywhere.... Here are a link to the offical release and some pics. Enjoy! 

Keith Latman goes Mac *gasp*

I sold and bought my first PC a long, long time ago. Back in the late 80s I owned a Mac, I think it was a Mac2. I honestly thought there would never come a time where I would buy a Mac. Ever.

Then I upgraded my PC to Vista. What a disaster. I had grown accustomed to my PC freezing every now and then. Enter Vista and my PC was frozen more often than it was working. The biggest culprit was Microsoft Outlook.

The application has to have a memory leak. I could follow memory numbers as they grew and grew. Then as my email was downloading, the rules would stop working and everything went straight to my inbox. Spam and all.

When you get as many emails as I do. Thats a problem. When it also causes the system to freeze, its more than just a problem.

My first step was to get a copy of CPU Magazine with Vista tricks. The tricks helped. Everything froze or crashed less often. Significantly less often. But the annoyance factor was beyond belief. I dont run any special applications. I run outlook, Office and firefox. Thats it.

I had gotten to the point where I was embarrassed to be a PC owner. The thought of someone calling me and asking me to go to my computer to find something was paralyzing (ok, not that bad, but it sounded cool writing it).

This wasn't just a problem on my Desktop, it was a problem on my laptop with Vista as well.

So a few weeks ago I made the executive decision to buy a MacBook Air to replace my laptop (and now an iMac to replace my desktop).

I haven't looked back.

Its not that there aren't hassles with the Mac. There are two. One there isn't a version of Outlook for the Mac. As someone who has more than 10 years and gigabytes worth of emails in multiple outlook files, the concept of exporting and importing wont fly. So i am keeping my PC Desktop purely to download my emails into Outlook so I have a master database. But I only do so after deleting unimportant emails from the server using my Macbook.

The 2nd problem is the lack of the right mouse click. I know its a Mac thing to only have one button, but its a hassle. Sure there are work arounds, none of which are quick and easy for a longtime PC user.

Both of these are easily offset by 3 simple Mac elements that make me very happy.

First is that when I close my MacBook Air without turning it off, it doesn't lose power. It can sit there for hours and then work when I open it up.

The 2nd is that it rarely freezes up. Maybe 3 or 4 times in months.

Finally, i LOVE the fact that it boots up in 1/1000000000 of the time it takes my PC. It probably will add years to my life .. (ok an exaggeration).

Im not an Apple fanboy, but I love me some MacBook

Wow.. what a response

Thank you to everyone who has written to me over the past few weeks! As you can imagine we've been very busy growing iMagicLab (www.imagiclab.com) and I have been getting ready for the release of my first novel (shameless plug). I posted a few new pieces today and I answered about 30 of your messages, I will try to answer the rest soon.

Sorry the site was on password protect for a few days, we had to move it to a different subscription because of the huge volume. We are back, and thrilled to be :) Check out www.latman.com for some new pictures and a completely redesigned imagiclab.com is coming soon.

Happy Holidays to all, and to all a good night.

Keith