JDBaluch.com

Shark Diving

Yesterday morning Jesse, his sister, father, and I headed to the North Shore at 6am to swim with the sharks. We tied off to a buoy 3 miles from shore and chummed the water with fish and blood, waiting for the sharks to arrive. The water was crystal clear and after only a few minutes, shadowy figures seemed to make their way up from the depths of the ocean.

We were very fortunate, as we saw five sandbar sharks, a manta ray, and two pilot whales. It was a great time and wasn’t nearly as scary as I thought it might be. Jesse’s dad had an underwater camera so hopefully I’ll post a video soon!

Text Expander 2

If you find yourself constantly typing the same segments of code or snippets of text on a daily basis, Text Expander 2 by SmileOnMyMac.com is an excellent productivity tool that can shave time off your busy day. Recently upgraded and released, Text Expander 2 has been featured on 43Folders (Merlin Mann) and MacBreak.com.

To get started, simply create triggers inside the administrative preference pane, and then whenever the system recognizes that a trigger has been typed, it is immediately replaced by the content in the trigger. Formatted text and even images can be inserted in this way.

One of the really nice features is the ability to alter the placement of the cursor inside the replaced text. For instance, if I type:

a trigger is activated for the following snippet of code:

and the cursor is placed where the underscore “_” is located in the example above, ready for me to type in a URL. What a timesaver!

Text Expander is a great piece of shareware and I highly recommend it to increase your productivity on the mac!

Mac OS X v10.5 “Leopard”

On October 26th at 6pm local time, Apple will be releasing their 6th installment of Mac OS X, named Leopard, into the wild. Most of you know me as an Apple Fanboy, but truth be told in the not so distant past I really hated Apple and their products.

It wasn’t until around 3 years ago that Apple started laying the groundwork for what has become one of the biggest come-from-behind success stories of our generation. If you were to invest 50k in 2003 with Apple Computer Corp (APPL), you would be a multi-millionaire today! Their stock has soared in recent months, with much help from the most anticipated product of the decade, the Apple iPhone. Their full line of intel-equipped notebooks, workstations, and servers, have also really set a new standard.

People always like to point fingers at the “cultest” nature of Apple users but can you really blame me for liking their products? After only a few minutes playing on my Apple MacBook or Apple iPhone, my friends and acquaintances are left in astonishment at how elegant and user-friendly Apple products are. They pay attention to the details. Excellent engineering, beautifully crafted devices, a solid unix-based architecture, and a development community that shares the passion in developing quality apps for the Apple hardware. I have worked as a Microsoft Windows security engineer for nearly 6 years now and I’m not terribly opposed to using Windows, but I really don’t enjoy it nearly as much as sitting at home on the Mac. Vista was a total flop in my eyes and until Microsoft makes some drastic changes, they won’t be receiving any more of my money.

7 days and counting…go to Apple.com and check out the new features coming soon!!!

I’ve been playing with the new Google Maps custom profiles for the last day or so and I really enjoy using their very user-friendly custom map generation page. It makes it easy for anyone to drag-n-drop waypoints and pushpins on a canvas to share with others.

Take a look at my work in progress, my map of the Red River Gorge.

Plotr

I’ve been looking for a lightweight javascript charting mechanism for some time now, and have recently come across Plotr. It is built for the Prototype Framework, loads fast, and looks great. The only down side is that it does not yet support interactive objects. I’m loving the fact that it doesn’t use Flash either! It looks super-spiffy on an iPhone!