Know the way Broadly

"Once You know the way broadly, you can see it in all things." - Miyamoto Musashi, famous Japanese swordsman

As I get older, I know what I love to do and I spend more time doing it. I discover things that I am good at and I love trying to be great at them. Sometimes though, I get excited about a few too many things and I have to pare down my focus so I don't end up being mediocre at everything and excellent at nothing. That kind of self control is still new to me but and it's still hard to do. So, the quote means that once you become excellentat one thing you know how to apply the discipline that it takes to excel to all kinds of other things. There is no substitute for hard work and talent is never enough.

Duke

Barf

Ideas that spread, win.

difficulty

We shouldn't forget how hard it is to be a pastor and make hard decisions while maintain the Vision.

Mark Beeson: The Economic Downturn and Granger Community Church from Granger Community on Vimeo.

Whip that Mac into shape! (part 1)

So it's no secret that lots of people are making the switch to The world's most advanced OS on the world's coolest hardware. Several of my friends have made the switch so this series of posts is for you guys. I am going to tell you some things that will make the transition easier and make you more productive. So here goes.

Tip #1

If you have a mobile Mac (macbook, or Macbook Pro) order a mighty mouse. The touchpad is a great for mobile situations but Apple built in bluetooth for a reason. A real mouse is easier, faster and more ergonomically sound. If $50 for a mighty mouse makes you cringe, go to walmart and get one of these. The Logitech V220 is controlled by a little usb stick but you can remove it and leave it sitting on your desk at work. Best of all, it's $19.99. That's what I do and I don't really use the touchpad at all anymore unless I am on the move. If you take this tip, be sure to go into the mouse control panel in system prefs and enable the secondary button. Everybody needs a right click. 

.Tip #2

Use Spaces. It's built in to OS X. Spaces Allows you to have multiple workspaces to keep things separated. Apple describes Spaces here. Imagine in your office you have 4 seperate desks. On one you keep all communications organized like mail, your calendar, to do list, etc.. On another you have all of your graphic design programs and tools. Another has all of your writing tools and and authoring programs. On the fourth you keep your web browser and that game of spider solitaire. I use my fourth space to contain all the programs that could potentially distract me during the day. If I go there I have to make a conscious decision to be distracted.

Tip #3

Use Expose to control spaces and more. Expose and Spaces share a control panel. You use expose to set the actions that control the features of spaces and more. You can set key combos to trigger spaces and to thumbnail all of your open windows for quickly finding an open program. In addition to key triggers, you can set expose to activate features when you move the mouse to any of the four corners of your screen, known as hot corners. It's worth taking the time to explore.

Tip #4

Use Spotlight. It constantly maintains an index of everything on your Mac. You type in the first few letters of a file, contact or any other object and spotlight finds it for you with it's lightning fast indexing mechanism. Spotlight is the little magnifying glass in the upper right corner of your screen.

Tip #5 (advanced)

Download and use Quicksilver. It is a launcher/indexing mechanism for your mac. Where Spotlight stops, Quicksilver picks it back up and runs with it. Whenever you launch it builds and updates an index of everything on your mac. This includes programs, files, folders, contacts, emails and everything else. This function basically does what Spotlight does except that you can build custom key triggers to basically perform any function. It's very difficult to describe what it really does as it's functionality is so vast. Quicksilver definitely requires a learning curve and requires some initial setup time. It's totally worth it though. It will make you faster and more productive. Learn more here.

Tip #6

Ditch Safari. Get Firefox 3. IMHO Apple has severely dropped the ball when it comes to Safari on the mac. For regular tabbed browsing with extensible functionality through FF extensions (these add additional functionality to FF's base code) Firefox is clearly superior. Look at it like this, Mozilla's main product is Firefox. To Apple, Safari is an afterthought. Trust me here. I've tried and tried to like Safari in order to appease the fanboy inside of me. No dice. It's awful. 

So I will post more tips on Monday. I may just keep posting them until I run out. If you like these or use them leave comments. Any questions? I will try to answer them.

Duke

Mr. A-Z

Simplicity.