You ARE a Mac.

exciting!

hmmm. my mac is getting a little old, but i'm surprised you're not using garageband.

i also really like aurora, a shareware program that's an alarm clock tied to iTunes.

Thanks! Aurora looks pretty nifty.

I haven't install itunes cause my PC and ipod already meet my every need.

And I'm not sure how I would use garageband. Some of my favorite people in the world use garageband with the built-in mic, but I'm pretty married to studio equipment from the 80s and cassette tapes at this point.

oh, hey, that's cool. i know very little about garageband, except that thomashartnett loves it.

i'm actually on my PC right now, which makes me a hyprocrite, haha, but i'll look later and see if there's anything i forgot.

the nice thing about garage band is you can use it as a multi track recorder, or as a loops/samples program. it nicely supports multi track input from a few cheap devices, so that's kinda nice also.
Plus, the new version that just came out has some really good "virtual lessons" (yeah, I know that sounds like every other terrible/unusable virutal lesson software in the past, but this is like "wow, they took all the dispeate good elements of existing software and combined it in an intellegenet very well produced way.)

also... I'm surprised you like stacks. You seem like the demographic to complain about it. I personally have not found it a value add, but maybe I'm just used to the previous workflow.

Also, I know of sub $100 USB => DVI devices that let you hook up 4-6 additional displays so you can have a giant extended desktop running off anything from a mac mini to a mac pro without messing with video cards. Let me know if you want to hear more.
Also, I am following you on twitter.

let me know if you have garage band questions. Bobby and I got pretty pro with it, using basically the same setup you seem to have right now, where all your effects are processed external to the computer.
Did i mention we have a new album on iTunes??? http://itunes.com/chojimoji/dontfeedthedinosaursjesus

Huzzah!

Good to know about garageband. I'm kinda too into with recording to cassette, bouncing that down to digital fourtrack, then mastering that on the PC with fancy mastering software to start playing around with the computer I got to finish my thesis. (yay run-on!)

Kinda weird to me that you'd think I wouldn't like stacks. They really are the best, in my opinion.

Maybe it's important to know that my last mac (PB G3 Wall Street) came out with the very first imac, so I'm currently catching up with all the awesomeness of the last ten years.

For example, I just did a big old, screen filling text time delayed reminder in quicksilver. It was all too beautiful for my brain to handle. I'm terribly grateful to have such a graceful and lovely machine with software that's not all kinds of fucked up.

I have to switch computers too much to get used to quicksilver. I can barely even handle customizing the spotlight keyboard short cut.

Here's something you might not know (seeing as it's basically undocumented) Hover over a word and press command+control+d.
Let me know if it works.

Ah, works great.

I noticed it in the keyboard prefs, but didn't know how to use it yet.

PORN!

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8493378861634507068

This is by far the best thing I've seen on quicksilver.

2nd Aurora alarmclockage.

My favourite underdog must-have is Nocturne
(http://docs.blacktree.com/nocturne/nocturne),
usually for dark dark nights because my screen doesn't dim enough.

Pages is the most impressive paid software I have.

World of Goo is my favourite recent fancy game, except that you can't control sound volumes. All of the sound effects are mouth-noises, so at least check out the demo.

Zoom is an excellent text adventure zmachine/tads/whatever interpreter.

Thanks! I use Nocturne everyday now. Often, in ways I know it was intended.

And I am actually doing my thesis in Pages after one hour of trying to do it in Word.