Smoke free dinning in Marion just got possible. Ice House has moved to a new location. It is at Shady Hills Golf Course. Owners have decided to go smoke free. Kudos to them.

Neither Grant County nor the city of Marion have a pro-business smoke free ordinance. Local restaurants typically do not take the bold step in doing such on their own. As a result, folks like myself, travel to nearby cities which offer such customer friendly environments.

Companies looking locate in an area look at such things and often choose more progressive areas. Lagging persistence on public health issues such as weak or non-existent smoking ordinance hurt a community's competitive edge.

My wife and I will give the new Ice House a go. Hopefully their food and service will match the freshness and decor of their new location.

Okay, so Steve Jobs said the iPad was magical, but when I began a search for a cell phone for my elderly mother I could find no other as easy to use as the iPhone. It took her less than 5 minutes to learn to make a call using the contact tab, the keypad, and favorites. Next came "Messages" and she was texting away - to her grandson, niece, and daughter-in-law.

Our family had an extra iPhone 3G laying about from a recent upgrade our son made to a 4S. So I figured my mother could make good use of it. A swap of the sim card from her old phone to the new and she was in business.

She had never used a computer, never had a "smartphone" in her hands, but quickly figured the iPhone out. She is happy and excited and to me, that is magical.

Just received the new iPad. Upon setup I restored from an iCloud backup of my original iPad. Took about 20 minutes to do this. I synced with an iMac to install all the apps. Painless procedure.

Once again purchased a Dodocase for it. I like the protection and look of this case. Very book-like. Recommended.

A couple of things I noticed right away about the new iPad (3). The Retina display is amazing. We are talking about a screen resolution of 2048 by 1536. That's 264 pixels per inch. My Macbook Air is "only" 1440x900 at  127 ppi and the iPhone 4S is 326 ppi. With text the new iPad is noticeably easier to read.

It is much faster than the original iPad. Apps open quicker and respond faster. That was a bit of an annoyance for me when using the first generation iPad.

This is a great product. Blows the competition out of the water.

Came across this while looking through some documents. It is a poem from a parishioner upon my appointment to another church.

Jenni and I drove up to Wabash, Indiana. We had planned on going to Market Street Grill but it wasn't open until 5:00 so we walked over to Charley Creek Inn. Inside is a restaurant called Twenty. Great place. Good food. Nice atmosphere. Recommended.

Some Russian antivirus company broke news about the flashback trojan which is a malicious program that installs via a vulnerability in Java. It passes itself as an install of Adobe Flash. They claim some 600,000 Macs have been infected. That would be about 1% of Macs.

I checked my Macs. They were not infected. Apple just updated Java to fix the vulnerability. Oracle, who makes Java, has made their update fixing the issue.

Check out the article in Macworld

Differences between a computer virus and trojan - Webopedia

The AA in our office had to call our computer tech service. Her PC, running Windows XP, suddenly slowed way down. The IT guy came out and announced the PC was infected with malware or virus or a trojan. Never mind that our AA has virus program updated and running. He said that we should have multiple malware scanners and virus protection, but even then "things get through."

She thought it was fixed. However, this morning the machine continued to exhibit "issues". The guy was called, once again, and this time came out and took the machine back to his office for "more in-depth repair."  I take this to mean he was planning on wiping the HD and reinstalling everything.

Our office pays $80 an hour for this kind of repair. I suspect the final bill to be well over $200. Given the cost of tech support and loss of productivity can one really say that Windows PCs are less expensive than Macs?

I have never, never, ever had a virus or malware on my Mac. I don't even have a virus program - well, I do and ran it today with updated virus definitions. It didn't detect anything. I closed it. Who knows when I'll run it again.

Bottom line is that for Macs you really don't need to install and use antivirus software because there are no know and active viruses out there nor are there malware or trojan software that would not require - and I emphasis - REQUIRE your input - meaning your password - to install and run.

Check out this from MacMost

Some people will complain that Macs are more expensive than PCs. Here's the deal. If you select a Mac computer and then select a PC with similar hardware (meaning: size HD, memory, processor speed and the like) you'll find that Macs are a couple hundred bucks more.

But factor in the fact you've got to run Virus software and perhaps Malware detection as well as pay the IT guy when they have to fix your infected PC - and lets not forget your down time - that "couple hundred bucks" is overwhelmed pretty easily.

Given that I don't even think about viruses on my Mac, that my Mac just does what it does without fail, and that I can run Windows on my Mac, if I want - why would I buy a PC? Really. Why? Makes no sense.

Background - My first computer was a Tandy 1000 running Dos 3.0. I've had 286 machines, 386 and up. I've used Windows 3.0, Windows NT, Warp OS2, Windows 2000, Windows XP (for many years) and Vista. I knew Microsoft products in and out. I've updated hardware, tinkered with Linux, I even had a water cooling CPU and Video Card just so I could over clock the CPU and GPU.

In 2004 I bought my first Mac. At that point in my career and life I wanted to get work done and not tinker and fix a suddenly broken hardware or software problem. I was immediately rewarded with the Mac experience of "it just works." I would say it is Simple, Straightforward and Intuitive.

Every office I have provided leadership for has, over time, switched to Mac. Every person who has done so has been grateful for the change.

The answer to the title question is a resounding - No.

Wanted to streamline, tighten things up with my online profile so I created a google apps account with my bikepast.com domain name.

Given that I use two of these types of google apps accounts simultaneously I wanted to keep each in their own virtual machine. I tried using Chrome OS download through Parallels (I use Parallels Desktop 7 for Mac) but it was not stable. I have a Windows 7 virtual machine, but it takes up about 20GB of valuable HD space on my 256GB Macbook Air. I settled on Unbuntu and the Chrome browser. Very nice.

So I use one VM for my work and another VM for my personal Google App account.

The Unbuntu VM is less than 5GB.

I'm impressed with Unbuntu Linux. It is free and comes with all the office applications you might need. The office suite is LibreOffice. I've never heard of it before but I suspect it is based upon OpenOffice. Downloading and installing software is dead simple using Unbuntu Software Center. Course I'm only using it to launch an instance of Chrome browser.