I have been studying my Mac OS book today, along with doing some searching online for specifics I needed, and I even got an email from a peer’s son on how to overcome my frustration with the Mac’s lack of a right button.

I was in a generous mood, so I figured I’d share the ones that were cool enough that it made me go ‘ohhhh!’ outloud. Since I don’t notice when I do this, I rely on my daughter who immediately comes in from her desk (using any excuse to escape her math sheet today) to ask me what I’m ‘ohhh-ing’ about.

1. The mouse DOES have a right button! I’m going to copy my email from my friend Bron Robertson’s son here, hopefully it will help others with this frustration. Never occured to me to look in preferences on this, it really didn’t:

Hi Angela,

Basically I read your blog about the iMac and you said how you can’t right-click without using the command key/two hands. This really annoyed me when I first got my iMac about a year ago, but I figured out after about half an hour that it’s really simple to change.

I assume you have the mighty mouse (as you got your Mac recently or at least more recent than me and I have it) as opposed to the old one. With the mighty mouse there are four buttons even though they’re covered so it just looks like 1. There’s a left button, a right button, a middle button under the scroll wheel and the side buttons on either side which you squeeze. As a default factory setting, and I don’t know why this is, Apple assign both the right and left buttons to do the same thing. In order to assign it a new function, you need to go into the setup, go to ‘mouse and keyboard’ I think it’s called (I don’t have my Mac here and can’t remember exactly) and then assign buttons on the mouse.

There’ll be an aerial view of the mighty mouse in the middle with arrows coming off. Just to give you an example, The controls I’ve assigned to my buttons are: ‘click’ for the left button, ‘command click’ for the right button, and ‘show all running apps’ for the side squeezy ones. For a click on the middle button/scroll wheel, I’ve assigned the ‘alt tab’ function you’ll probably be familiar with from Windows, just as a quick way of cycling between programs.

Hope this helps, all the best.

Josh

2. Clicking the title bar on any window twice makes it minimize. This saves me an enormous amount of stress while trying to get used to the controls on the Mac’s windows being on the left, rather than the right. Now, maybe there is some way to set a preference to have the sides swap, I don’t know. But, if I’m going to stay with the Mac I want to just learn the standard layout for this OS. (Also, using the options button and the double click on the title bar will shrink everything down to the dock at the same time. Nice!)

3. Keeping my desktop clear. I was searching for a program to do this last week, before I found out that it’s an easy fix using the preferences in Finder. Just go there and click on the general tab and uncheck the boxes you don’t want to see on your desktop. Keeping Finder in your dock means you can see all the disks hooked up to the Mac with a single click. I also changed the preferences on where my downloads reside. Since there’s already a downloads folder, I created my own “Repository” folder and put a shortcut on the dock. Using these two tricks keeps my information close and my desktop is clutter free!

I have been listening to Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac Podcast for over a year now, but I’ve never shared that information. I find that when I’m looking for some “writerly” inspiration, it’s a perfect springboard.

The podcast is only a few minutes long – I keep about 6 months worth on my iPhone at all times. It’s not a daily offering, but it’s close to daily. It usually gives a couple of fantastic quotes, a biography of a writer and sometimes even a short poem.

If you would like something interesting to listen to on your way to work, or when standing in line waiting, check it out on iTunes. It’s supported through brief advertising statements at the beginning/end and is brought to us by American Public Media. (You can also subscribe to the RSS feed by visiting The Writer’s Almanac Website.)

Worthwhile way to spend a few minutes each day.

Well, after buying a bunch of cool apps night before last, I’ve essentially decommissioned my iPhone. Not only does this “upgrade” make all my applications crash seconds after they attempt to launch…

I no longer have music, videos or audiobooks on my iphone! Yesterday and today (despite an all-night synch attempt) I have been stuck with an iPhone that is JUST a phone. I’m hating this, and according to reports online, it will be sometime in September before this is fixed.

If anyone knows of a place to download iTunes 7.7 for Mac OSX (or if anyone has their old copy of 7.7 still hanging around), please let me know. I’m desperate!

I just watched a video which covered many of the things I’ve been contemplating lately. I’ve always been an identity protection freak. I have been guilty of making a scene in public when someone tried to demand my social security number (when I knew it wasn’t necessary) before offering me a service or looking up an account.

I’ve been a freak about other things too…

When the education system wasn’t up to snuff, I pulled my kids out and educated them myself. If a store didn’t provide me with the service I needed, I walked out and spent my money (even if it cost more) elsewhere.

All of these things did little to change the system, the situation or the environment.

Mostly they just changed me into a skeptic (usually a pissed-off one) and complicated my life. It seems that nearly everything I did served only to make life harder. Some were worth the added complication (like my children), but most were not worth the price they exacted from my time, my tranquility, and the quality of my life.

I’ve recently decided to quit trying to change the world.

I’ve quit trying to control my environment. Instead, I’ve decided to only avoid being controlled. That may sound like the same thing, but it’s not. Trying to control other individuals and situations is always futile and is usually rude. Refusing to let others control you is difficult but possible and it doesn’t have to be anti-social.

First, I have to determine “what is me?”

Is my personal information “me” or is that only a series of labels people/companies/entities put on me? Are my thoughts “me?” Is my video collection and taste in media an identifying marker of “me?” — and should I remove my information from Pandora? Is how I’m spending my time this second me? Is that information “private” or is it something to be shared on Twitter? Are the people who are my friends private — or do I add them to Facebook? Where I go and what I do… is that something my iPhone should be allowed to track? A couple years ago, I’d say no to all of the above. And, I would have said it loudly.

Is my journal me? Are my musings (like this one) private thoughts, or should I blog them? Am I communicating and being more open (the way I like my software and the way I’d like my government to be) or am I divulging my own personal details to a degree that I’m too visible? Will I regret the new level of transparency I’ve started to adopt?

I’ve spent much of my life jousting windmills in the name of freedom. I’m tired. Even more important, I’m not sure that what I thought I was gaining is achievable or even desirable. And isn’t this how societies change… with broad, sweeping apathy following exhaustion? I think we are there.

Exhausted — politically, philosophically, personally

I’m not interested in being militant for its own sake (that’s the game for a much younger person… been there, done that… and I was in the minority even then. Most of my generation (at least the ones I knew) were sheep in their youth. Quiet sheep. I’ve always been the odd one for fighting the wind, pushing life uphill and raging against the machine.

Balancing my love of autonomy and communication with my passion for technology and “connectedness” has always been a saga of personal oxymorons. Determining how much I do is promoting my own freedom (the freedom to not struggle and fight everything in life) vs. selling my freedom (by accepting things that once let loose into the wild cannot be recaptured) is taking up too much of my mental energy.

View the Video

And, although the video on the Next 5000 days of the Internet is interesting and follows many of the positives of the connected society, it also screams the downfalls (even if the presenter doesn’t seem to notice.) And, Mr. Kelly? The word you are looking for (the replacement for the words “the one”) is “Borg.”

That is all. Rambling rant over… and out.

I’ve been looking for a more attractive, easier-to-navigate layout for my WordPress sites recently, and I found a couple interesting resources to share:

Magazine Theme – a unique layout for a WP site with a cutting edge style and directions for customization by the designer.

SEO Themes – nearly 50 websites that have been SEO’ed by Court of Internet Marketing School. Nice!

This was sent to me by my friend across the pond, Bronwyn Robertson a London-area Virtual Assistant. It was in relation to my new, deeper dedication to niching my business. It couldn’t have been more timely (or more humorous).

Watch a video that offers the "Cure" for Writers

WickedBlog went a little “dark” for a couple weeks while I got my collective *ahem* stuff together and made the transition from the long-held WickedWordCraft.com to my new, more narrowly focused and less “freeflowing” site, WickedWriter.com.

I could no longer juggle all the things I was trying to do with my life — business and personal. So, after a couple months of spending every spare moment (and some that weren’t really spare), I’ve revamped things.

I’m no longer offering marketing services or tech support or the dozens of other things I offered incoming clients. I have a few (literally a handful) of long-term clients for whom I will continue to offer the services they have come to expect, but any new clients I accept will be those seeking writing services.

I have a great network of RemoteProfessionals that I can call on to provide the other types of services any client may need. It’s an enviable network to have and I’m going to use it more thoroughly.

I’m a writer. It’s what I do and what I enjoy most. It’s where I shine and where I find my bliss.

After all these years of advising clients, I’m finally following my own advice. I’m trimming down, niching hard and doing only what I really enjoy. I’m no longer building my business… it’s built. I’m no longer interested in making more and more money — that is no longer my definition of success. I just want to make “enough.”

What pleases me most now is the concept of having more time, not more money. They say you can either have time or money, but you can’t have both. I disagree. I think you CAN have both — as long as you are balanced and reasonable in how you define wealth, how many “toys” you need to be happy, and how well you spend the time you have.

So, welcome to my new philosophy!

I’m keeping WickedBlog to do what I’ve always done — write about everything under the sun that intrigues me. My business site is ALL business and is all about the business of writing. If I’m not working for clients, posting to my blog or networking online, I’ll be spending my time enjoying my life, watching my youngest become a young lady, sleeping more than four or five hours a night and maybe even getting some much-needed exercise. (Hey, it could happen!)

I’ll be posting regularly here on WB now that the new site is finished. My old site will be taken down September 1, just shy of the six year mark of doing business under that name. And next year will mark the TENTH year since I started offering services online. TEN YEARS! That amazes me.

I’ll still be practicing “Wicked WordCraft”… I’ll just be a WickedWriter while doing it.

I’m hard on computers. I’m always pushing the limits. I replace my hardware every 12-18 months. I have to. Heck, I wear off the letters on my keyboards every 6 months. My family laughs about it and no one ever wants my “used” keyboards.

I was sick and tired of rebuilding my system. I went to Linux to avoid the rebuild of XP that happened every 6-12 months, when the OS went from “speedy” to “getting slower” to “crawling.”

The only cure was to wipe the hard drive and reinstall the OS. This process rendered me unable to earn a living (or sleep) for 2-3 days while I tried to pull everything back. It’s not like I wanted to rebuild my machine so often. I didn’t. It made me crazy.

The Move to Linux

With Linux, it was easier. Once you got it working, it usually stayed that way. And, if there was a problem, you could reload the OS and pull your data back in pretty easily. The only problem was when I started poking around in Terminal, sometimes a “tiny” change would hose my whole system.

After spending weeks “tricking out” my Linux box and making it function flawlessly to do what I needed, I took extra time to make it pretty. I like pretty.

Form IS Function!

My father fusses that I spend too much time customizing. We share technology “finds” and argue about computers/software/hardware a lot. It’s our “thing.” For him, computers are a hobby. For me, they are also a tool to get my work done. Sometimes I confuse the “hobby” portion of my work with the “income producing” portion and this causes me headaches.

My Dad swore I’d like Linux better if I’d go with the standard look and feel – and just regen in minutes (unlike Windows) if it started acting flaky.

That would certainly take less time for a new set-up, but I liked having a witch hat for my personal files, a hard drive with a lock icon for my data backups, a globe for my Internet, etc.

I like pretty — but I also like efficient. It takes me less time to glance for a visual clue and click than to read through a list of generic folders with the contents listed in text on at the bottom. As many times a day as I clicked each one, this is a substantial time savings.

Two monitors are better than one

I always worked better with two monitors in Windows, but I had real problems getting two monitors to work with Linux. I decided to fix it by going and buying two identical monitors – so there were no conflicting driver issues.  I didn’t care how much it cost anymore, I was tired of poking at my machine. I wanted it to work.

I was lured over to the Apple display at my local Best Buy by the huge monitor on the back wall. It just happened. Honest! The monitors were so pretty and BIG. I wiggled the mouse on one machine and what popped up made my eyes go wide!

Then I got angry.

The layout on the iMac was amazingly close to what I’d spent days building on my Linux box. And, I’d never touched a Mac. Not EVER.  I left in a huff, without my two new monitors.

Sacrifice or simplification?

In recent months, I’ve tried lots of paths to simplify my life, many of which only complicated things. I didn’t need a new computer, but I did need to get a better display. I did need something that would work for all the windows I keep open. I liked the multiple desktops of Linux, but I needed more real estate on my monitor.

My father suggested that I ditch the idea of two monitors and buy a single large widescreen. He spouted off the math on how I would gain by having a 24″ widescreen instead of two of the 19” square variety. He won. I decided to buy a single large monitor.

I went back to Best Buy. I saw the iMac again. It had a 24” widescreen monitor, and the iMac had the rest of the computer built into the back of this flat screen. It was fascinating. It also had one cord. ONE. “No more rat nests of cords trailing down the back of my desk,” I thought. It had pretty lines, it was sleek. And, if it was as enchanting on my desk as the iPhone had been in my pocket… I’d be in heaven.

I looked at the Mac Pro Box. It had more cords, I could get into that box and change things… then I realized that was not a good thing.

I returned my gaze to the iMac. I wouldn’t take it apart, because there was no upgrade – other than maybe a little RAM in the future.

I was tired of having my weekends sucked away by a computer hardware or software upgrade/crash issue. If I were really planning to focus on writing and online work, a Mac would serve as well as Linux or Windows, right? Maybe better, since it wouldn’t derail me from from my main focus to go on some hardware/software tangent.

Learning about the Mac

I had done a bit of research on the OS after my first encounter. (Late at night, so no one would catch me at it. I even cruised the computer section of the Apple site. Shhhh!)

OS X is Unix based, like Linux, only with a slicker interface and it comes “ready to plug and play.” This was becoming more appealing to me by the second.

I talked to some folks that had Macs. I ignored those who had never used a PC – those who spouted the same hatred about PCs I’d blindly spouted about Macs. I did pay particular attention to those who knew a little about Linux and who had been PC aficionados before going to the Mac. I kept hearing, “It’s bulletproof.” I kept hearing, “There’s no maintenance.”

I started to want one.

I finally decided that if I was going to buy a new monitor, I’d have to rebuild my Linux box. It’s one of those things about Linux, video stuff is tricky. And, if I had to spend the time to rebuild a Linux box, I could probably use that same amount of time to learn a new OS. A Mac OS. I justified my desires.

And that’s how I ended up buying a new iMac.

Travels with Mia

I’ve always named my computers (and my cars). They have usually been male gendered. My iMac, Mia, is a little different. Still just as strong under the hood, she’s a bit more concerned about her appearance. (She likes being pretty.) There’s room on my simple desk for more than just a computer… and there’s room under my desk for my feet! I don’t get tangled up in cords every time I try to plug or unplug something.

I’ve had her almost a month now and I’ve never regretted it. Not once. My father quit speaking to me for awhile and threatened, “Don’t say ‘Mac’ at me anymore!” But, aside from that, there have been no issues.

Having a Linux box made high-end tweaks in Mia’s Terminal much easier than they would have been if I’d only had PC experience — but most users would never even need (or want) that. I find that the tech community online for the Mac OS is strong and helpful like the Linux community. There’s even some crossover.

The time machine function does automatic backups – I really like that. Mia works beautifully with my iPhone and external drives (although I did have to reformat them initially). And the biggest payoff? I’ve had more time to handle the other areas of my business and my life that needed an overhaul.

These days, it’s more about the big picture and less about spending countless hours with the gritty little details in my life. The more “grit” I eliminate, the more clearly I can see my life and my business.

Of course, Mia’s nice big screen only improves the view.

Watched this amazing talk this morning, then tweeted it and sent it to a few people on my list. Great stuff. Worth the 19 minutes of your life required to watch it. Take the time.

Go here to watch it on TED.com.

While putting the polishing touches on my brand new website, I played with the cool wordcloud tool over at Wordle.net. If you want a “search engine” view of your website, with a little more organization and a lot more visual appeal, go make a wordle of your own.

Wordle's Word Cloud for WickedWriter.com

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