My original switch was the result of my laptop, then a VIAO, getting sick one too many times. My beloved VIAO with its x-windows emulator allowed me to login to a Solaris server somewhere else and do my astronomy work. I had virus protection and always surfed safe. Then I discovered there are viruses that will swim up closed ports. I got series of viruses that wiped my hard drive while at work at Harvard, and was twice one of the first 100 sufferers. It sucked. I live by software. I am more of a digital person than a real person in a lot of ways – taking all notes on computer/phone and talking more through IM and email than in person. I also have dyslexia, and computers allow me to mostly hide my problems behind spell checks and auto correcting tools. I love my laptops – they are a third arm and a second brain. And after two cases of digital amputation in short order, I switched to Mac. Back in 2004 I bought my first MacBook and I haven’t looked back.

But now I’m working with my students to develop software that integrate with Microsoft Research software. I’m typing this message on my ASUS EeePC 1000HE in Windows XP. In this tiny environment, I can hold the universe in my hands using MS World Wide Telescope. This many layered software package is being designed to facilitate not just looking at the sky, but for searching databases of images and information, allowing users to side by side explore the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and the Hubble image archive.

While I will leap frog Vista, staring suspiciously at it while I pass to Windows 7 someday in the future, XP is an old friend, and I feel like I’m falling back into the multi-platform days of graduate school. I have found a cool toy that I can only code if I’m using Windows, so I’m going to use Windows to play along with my software developing students.

MS Research has a bunch of cool toys. They are building George Jetson‘s tomorrow with a Star Trek aesthetic. From Surface, to the virtual receptionist, to, well, World Wide Telescope, they have my attention again.

Now, if only Apple and Mac would just use the same keyboard layout…

There is a certain intimacy to writing my blog. It’s me and the words in my head spilling out across the screen. I work in silence, no one knowing what I’m saying, until I hit the publish button. And then it all goes live at once. As I sit here talking to my computer, talking to Firefox, I feel this terrible urge to pace and rant and use my arms to talk. I’m not giving in to my desires, I’m sitting quite still at the kitchen table, speaking softly to my computer while my husband plays Wii in the living room. I’m not sure what will happen to my writing style – I’m not sure how my language will change as I speak to you rather than letting the words spill across my fingertips. I’m going to take a risk, I’m going to try and figure it out.

I’m not sure how I feel about the software, but after using computers almost every day since I was in the fifth grade, I a realized who is running up against maximum number of uses numbers. My joints only had so many tries left in them. I needed to find a new way to communicate to my software before my parts demanded replacement. This is a compromise. There are some things I can’t speak to my computer, at least not easily, like when I’m coding, when I’m drawing, when I’m creating things for the Web. But at least this is a partial solution. I want to keep working online for another 40 years. It’s a good fantasy at least.

I have to admit, mostly I like the software. Nevertheless, I have to reprogram my brain. I can think, I can speak, I can do many things faster than I can type. This software spells better than I do – I don’t have to keep going back to figure out what I’ve done that has caused little red lines under my every fifth word! It’s odd though, my internal wetware is struggling with this new device more then the software is struggling with my voice. As I speak I feel my brain pausing in ways it doesn’t do when I’m speaking in front of an audience. It’s an interesting challenge, changing how I do this thing have been doing so naturally for so many years.

I am really impressed with MacSpeech. While there are certain things I just can’t get it to do consistently, it’s not too bad except when I’m using Mail. For instance, deleting an e-mail message just doesn’t seem to work. There is something about how I say deleting, that causes it to hear “leading” most of the time. I think I’ve crashed mail 20 times today. There are other interesting errors it makes occasionally. But than there are no more errors than I make myself. I’m guessing most of you have read my posts that weren’t correctly proofread. This seems to be doing a better job than I do when I try and type. I’m going to try and work through this, and see if I can adapt. So far so good.

Tomorrow morning I’m going to try and see what its astronomy vocabulary looks like. Tomorrow I need to think, and write about something that challenges my brain. Write about something that challenges your brain, maybe? And that will definitely challenge the software.

Preface – My laptop is at the Apple Store being repaired. This means my computer with all my best toys is not available for use.

For those who have been following my twitter whining, here is the full story.
1) Yesterday I noticed starstryder was no longer googlable (is that a word), and asked for ideas
2) The wonderful Stuart Lowe noted that if I did a view source, many naughty and pharmaceutically related words appeared.
3) I realized I’d been hacked. As had my university computer (growl). Astronomy Cast was safe.
4) I restored my theme, removing all google ads and stuff, on this site and upgraded wordpress (this site is privately hosted.
5) I upgraded Astronomy Cast for good measure. This totally broke the site. Dead Dead Dead. I can’t repair it and cried via email to Fraser. I tried every trick I know – and I know many. Ugh.
6) I went into campus (where I have now been for 8 hours on a Sunday) and upgraded my work server to 10.5. This broke *everything.* Blue screen of pointer only. I reduced myself to the command line and fixed it. I then updated everything, fixed permissions, and reconfigured the server.
7) Part way though this I began to understand why Wil Wheaton’s original blog is still toast.
8 ) After getting my office and starstryder.com servers fixed, I looked into why I wasn’t in google search and learned I’d been officially banned from their index (joy). According to Google “We’ll review the site. If we find that it’s no longer in violation of our Webmaster Guidelines, we’ll reconsider our indexing of the site. Please allow several weeks for the reconsideration request.”

At this point, I probably need to crawl under the bed and cry, however, instead I’m going to work on a programming project that I should have completed hours ago.

Worst. Tech. Week. Ever.

The first thing I learned is Google actually has folks assigned to nurture non-profits to help them plug in. http://www.google.com/educators/geo . They have help, tutorials, ideas and more pre-prepared to help us build our content into virtual worlds. Their latest and greatet includes: weather, sunlight skins, 3D Buildinsg/SketchUp, a Swoop feature that lets you fly and zoom, and a “My Maps” feature to share content among friends.

Part of what this makes powerful is it allows people to explore independently and it has almost limitless applications and places to explore. Educational research (out of my head not out of the talk) shows that if you sit with a kid and work through every possible way of triggering a jack-in-the-box, the child when handed the toy will pretty much set it down and wander off. Show them only a couple of many ways, and they will sit down and try all the unseen permutations they can figure out. This means that you can hand a person the tools to access the “oh wow” factors of Google Earth and Google Sky, and students will continue to play and explore and learn to find all the ways the “oh wow” Jack jumps out of the Google box.

Google wants to be a part of IYA. (And I’ll be hunting them down later.) They encourage all of us to go to the Geo Education online community and participate. I’m ready, I’m primed, and I want to learn.

After a brief talk, our presenter showed a series of examples (.kml files), including animations, content from missions, and other “Google Skins” created in the kml markup language for people to explore. These can be found in the Google Earth “Gallery” window.

I have come to realize that I desperately need to find a Google Sky and Google Earth expert for the IYA New Media Task Group.

(Side note: There is a Johannes Kepler actor here who has a southern bit of twang! I find this very amusing.)

So, there was the hate that came from having to solve too many problems that really shouldn’t have ever happened. There is also the hate of the price. As a grad student at the University of Texas we could get MS products for $5 a disk, but once I entered the real world I was forced to fork over (if I wanted to be legal) $400+ hard earned dollars. Luckily I didn’t stay in the real world very long, and as an academic I only have to pay $180 for my professional Office pal. It’s not like I can avoid word processing; MS Office is a product that has become ubiquitous and many places require its use (for instance, some journals require .doc instead of .tex files, and UT required my dissertation to be done in Word). Its exorbitant price really is a tax that only serves to increase the digital divide.

Admittedly, there are alternatives, especially for Mac and Linux users. For a while, I tried switching to Open Office / Star Office / NeoOffice, but while this was philosophically satisfying, these packages didn’t offer me the power of MS Office, so… Back I went, offering up my hard won earnings to The Man in exchange for the ability to make documents that I could make do anything. Then, in a moment of artistic misdirection, I tried Quark and InDesign, but the editing tools (spelling, grammar, tables), and equation tools just weren’t there. So again, back I went, letting Mr Gate’s icons take up space in my dock, where they taunted me with their failure to be truly friendly and mocked me with their potential to crash my normally imperturbable Mac.

But, watching Steve Jobs recent MacWorld Keynote reminded me of the little guy on the office software block. iWork has the theoretical ability to almost everything I want (although getting equations into documents may challenge me a bit at first). So, I’m going to make the leap. My New Year’s resolution is to be 100% iWork / iLife by years end. It won’t be easy, but I’m going to try.

But… but… It’s really not going to be easy. Already, seconds into my resolution, I feel like a drug addict trying to justify why I can’t afford to go through the symptoms of withdrawal at this particular moment in life. I have about 100 PowerPoint presentations that I regularly reuse in teaching and presenting. Making this switch isn’t going to be easy. Translating between software packages is an inexact science and I know that importing my beloved old presentations will not go smoothly.

And there are habits to break. I write these blog entries in a word processing program with a spell checker so I can avoid having too many egregious spelling errors. When I had the “Hey… iWorks!” realization and went to start this blog entry my mouse went on autopilot to the mutant Microsoft W in my dock and only two paragraphs in did I realize the irony of what I had done. (I then copied my content into a Pages page, and I am now working in an iFriendly window.)

I don’t know if Apple and Steve Jobs are going to simply become the next “The Man,” but here’s to hoping that I have finally found a powerful, non-crashing, alternative under $100. The only thing it really seems to lack is a spreadsheet, but Think Secret and MacRumors have both reported that iWork 07 may fill that gap. For now, maybe I’ll just more consistently use KaleidaGraph.

Here’s to iWork in 07.