I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t plan to do it, but boy-oh-boy am I glad i did! I bought an Apple Magic Mouse this weekend.

My Apple Mouse experiences have been hit and miss. I liked some things about the Mighty Mouse. The little scroll nipple on the Mighty Mouse is extremely pleasurable to use until it stops working. In seems to always stop working.

When Apple announced the Magic Mouse, I went to the Apple Store and tried it out. I loved that it’s surface recognizes multitouch gestures, but I was disappointed that it only supports a few. I really wanted pinch and zoom and since it doesn’t do that, I left the Apple Store empty handed.

Last time I was at the Apple Store I decided to get one. The thing I like about it is very basic–it saves time. Multitouch gestures adds a little bit of speed to just about every little thing I do with the mouse. Just the ability to scroll with two fingers left, right, up and down, made my work go faster today. I’m not talking about loads of time…it’s more like microseconds that add up to minutes in a day.

If you’ve been on the fence, jump off and go get you one!

My system disk is almost full according to a warning I received earlier today. It’s a 300GB drive and I don’t store many files on it. It’s primarily applications and system files. iTunes has a handful of songs. iPhoto is empty. All the apps that store files are empty. My Final Cut scratch disk is on a Drobo. There is no reason this drive should be even half full, but if I Get Info on the system disk it says I’m using 297.87GB of 300GB.

I ran OmniDiskSweeper and it only found that I was using 146.71GB of disk space. I ran Filelight and it showed me using 140GBs.

What am I missing? Thanks in advance!

So far it hasn’t been a perfect experience. It’s a little awkward navigating my way into a new church community where I don’t know anyone. Before I left church, I was always a part of the music ministry and experienced church from the platform — rarely from pew. It’s very different to be anonymous in a congregation than being a *star* on the stage, but that’s a good thing.

So far, I’ve tried three churches. The first one is Keystone Church in Keller, Texas. It’s mission statement is “Leading everyone to experience a passionate life in Christ.” Services are contemporary, casual and just cool enough that the effort to be cool isn’t lame.

One of the things I’ve always said about going back to church is that I wish I could find one that just had praise and worship — no preaching. It’s interesting that I don’t care for the music at Keystone at all, but I could listen to the pastor, Brandon Thomas, talk all day long. He’s young, engaging, smart and his teaching has seriousness and depth.

I’ve been twice and watched and listened to Brandon’s talks on the Keystone Web site.

Keystone has a pretty good site. They do a really nice job with media (audio and video). They use Vimeo Plus for video, and it’s very obvious that in addition to loving God, this church loves Apple products. Since I do Internet TV for a living, I give them a strong B+ for what they’re doing with media. I’d like to see them stream services using Ustream.TV and make the podcast subscription option a little more prominent, but mostly, Keystone is getting it right.

During my second visit, people were encouraged to SMS questions. Brandon and his wife answered the questions at the end of Brandon’s talk. They even had the questions formated on a slide that matched the artwork from the teaching. It was effective.

Everyone is encouraged to fill out a card with personal information and prayer requests. I usually hate that, but since I’m longing to connect with a church community, I happily filled it out. No one contacted me and that’s either a good thing or a bad thing depending on what a person wants from a church visit.

Keystone clearly sees the importance of social media. They have a Facebook Fan Page, a Twitter account, a Flickr Photostream and a Blog. They have all the right pieces in place for winning in social media, but it doesn’t seem like they have a great strategy for social media. It’s all very promotional and not very relational. I feel like I can engage with Keystone through their social media efforts, but I don’t get the impression they are trying to engage with me.

I definitely plan to visit Keystone some more, but I’m not sure yet if it is where I should plug-in and get involved.

In Back to Church, Part II, I’ll talk about a church that does a great job engaging through social media, especially Twitter.

For my personal computing and iSocial needs, I use the same powerful Macs I use for work. It is a lot of power coming along for the ride on tasks that don’t require it. The MacBook Air was an ideal solution for accomplishing the more personal stuff, but the price made it seem like more of a luxury that I could live without.

The iPad may disappoint some, but it is exactly the kind of tool I’ve been wanting. I want to accomplish light processing tasks like writing stories for Geek Brief and interacting with friends online on a lighter, less energy consuming machine. The iPad is light, small and portable while still retaining enough functionality for many people to skip laptop ownership altogether.

The only thing missing that gives me pause is iChat. iChat, for me, is the most important tool on my Macs, apart from video and graphics programs. If AIM and Skype can run on an iPhone, why not voice and text chat on an iPad (and an iPhone)? It must be a decision Apple has made based on all the mysterious reasons Apple makes choices that puzzle those of us living outside the Infinite Loop.

The technology community seems to have greeted the iPad’s arrival with disappointment, just like Cali predicted. Other than with the name, I can’t say I’m disappointed. The lower than expected price makes up for everything missing for me except iChat.

As a loyal devotee to the Cult of Mac, I can’t say I embrace open source in reality…only theoretically. Apple is what you get with intense closed control, but I still have a huge place in my idealistic heart for open source so I wrote this song parody called, Imagine, The Open-Source Edition.

Here’s the link to download my silliness in MP3 format.  

And here are the lyrics:

Imagine no rights management
It’s easy if you try
No monopolistic business practices
For what you buy at Fry’s
Imagine all the coders
Coding for common good.

Imagine there’s no Balmer
It isn’t hard to do
No market war with Google 
Or bidding for Yahoo!
Imagine all the users
Searching their own way 

You may say that I’m a dreamer
There are others out here too
If all the code was opened
Not owned by a powerful few 

Imagine no proprietary systems 
I wonder if you can
No need for holographic security stickers
No barcodes in need of scans
Imagine all the coders
Sharing all the code  

You may say that I’m a dreamer
There are others out here too
If all the code was opened
Not owned by a powerful few.

Steve rarely seems to compromise his values. I can only guess at what his exact values, but he’s always consistent. That consistency has probably resulted in slower growth for Apple, but it’s resulted in a company that people love unlike any other. Now Apple is growing like crazy without the need to compromise.

Tonight, Apple releases an update to it’s operating system. It’s going to cost us about $180 for the family pack, and I can hardly wait! Why is that? What does Apple do so well to build anticipation for a new release? I’m not over-the-moon about a single new feature in Leopard, but I can’t wait to be at the release at 6 PM. I’m convinced that Apple’s in the business of selling excitement and anticipation more than hardware and software, and that’s what competitors can’t duplicate.