It’s been a bit of a marathon couple of weeks and I am just getting caught up. I wanted to post some updates while on the MVT Road Show but it turned out to be some very long days usually ending with getting into the hotel late and crashing.

The MVT Road Show was well worth it in the end, we met with around 20 Mac Dealers, most of them where very interested in our Quick Start Your Mac Training Video. Paul and I even managed to sell a bunch of our courses and offset most our trip costs. It’s was really great going and seeing all of these amazing people and their Mac based businesses.

Now for some of the highlights…

Day 2 we went made our way to Cupertino and of course we had to stop in at  the Apple Mothership.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Mac Video Training Website went live today! Still some minor changed to make but for the most part it’s a go.

I am about to embark on a 4 day roadshow tour with my business partner Paul. We are starting with San Francisco, traveling to Los Angeles and ending with San Diego. The purpose for this trip is to promote our new Quick Start Your Mac video training course to the people of America (If you come - they will buy it - or something like that??) We have a very busy four days ahead of us with plans to visit some 20+ retail Apple locations.

Time permitting we will try to post an update with some photos of our journeys…

Well my MacBook Pro reached the 2-year-old mark and it was starting to show its age a bit, I use it near 24 hours a day, it’s always doing something… downloading, ripping, encoding, you name it! I have it set to never go to sleep.

In all that time it has never had a hiccup. The battery is in need of a replacement, it’s at about half of it’s original capacity which is not bad for a machine that has seen as much run-time as this one has.

I would actually still be using it but lately my trusty MacBook Pro has been letting me know to ease up a bit, I have been experiencing some annoying video card artifacts when I push it to the limit graphically speaking that is. This seems to only happen when I do my Screen Cast recording or other heavy duty video related work. I get these periodic and random horizontal lines in the video and as you can imagine this is not good when I am trying to record to print for my new Mac Video Training videos. It only happens when things heat up, if I start on a fairly cold Mac I can work for a while with no problems but as I said my MacBook Pro is usually working away so it stays pretty warm most of the time… Worst of all I didn’t get Apple Care which would have covered the battery and screen issue so for now resolving this issue would not be economically viable.

My previous MacBook Pro was the last generation Intel Core Duo (Not the Core 2 Duo) running at 2GHz. I had maxed it out to the 2GB of RAM limit and also upgraded the internal 80GB hard drive to a 160GB drive. The video card was an ATI Radeon with 128MB  of VRAM. My older MacBook Pro did not have a FireWire 800 port, the Dual Layer DVD burner or the 802.11n capabilities. (but rather a 1 FireWire 400, Single Layer Super Drive and 802.11b,g) Read the rest of this entry »

We are very excited about the new Mac Video Training direction we have taken and so to further our focus in this area we recently purchased www.MacVideoTraining.com. Right now MacVideoTraining.com forwards to our first of many Mac Video Training courses - (Quick Start Your Mac), in the future we plan to setup a sister site specifically for the Mac Video Training portion of Switching To Mac.

We thougth since we do Mac Video Training, why not go with www.MacVideoTraining.com! What do you think? Does it work?

 (UPDATE -  they’re done and they are live, you can get them here)

I wanted to give you a bit of a teaser preview of some Video Tutorials I’m working on, they’re part of a series I’m calling “Quick Start Your Mac”. There will be a total of approximately 40 or so short and informative videos shot using screen capture at a very crisp 1024 x 768 resolution so they look like I am sitting right there in person demoing them on “your” Mac.

Here is a preliminary list of what the end content should look like:

Navigation

• Finder Views
• Cover Flow & Quick Look
• Apple Menu
• Menu Bar
• Dock
• Red-Yellow-Green
• Opening Files or Applications
• Expose
• Stacks
• Spotlight
• The Trash
• Inserting & Ejecting Media
• Key Commands
• Quitting Applications
• Managing Open Applications

System & Settings

• System Preferences
• Power Management
• System Info
• Installing Applications
• Deleting Applications
• Setting up a Printer
• Change Desktop Images
• Sharing your Mac
• Right Mouse Click
• Changing File Names
• Time Machine

Extras

• File Management
• Contextual Menus & Items
• Force Quiting
• Save as PDF
• Zoom
• Target Disk Mode
• Recent Items
• Word Processing Options
• Web Browser Options
• Media Player Options
• Widgets
• Help menu
• Software Updates
• Windows on a Mac

I have not worked out the cost as of yet for the series but I do plan on making them available as an affordable download.

So take a look at a few samples and let me know what you think…

(Depending on your Internet connection the movies may take several minutes to load and play)

I don’t usually use this area of the site to flog off anything I have for sale but this is a bit different.

A month or so ago I received my OLPC Give1-Get1 XO Laptop and I really enjoyed playing around with it but the reality is it’s just not a Mac. I wasn’t expecting it to be Mac so I’m not disappointed but I was thinking I would use it for occasional Internet connectivity and then I got my iPhone and we all know how well the iPhone does Internet! One other reason for the XO Laptop purchase was for my daughter but she is just a bit too young right now for it, maybe in a few years… But why keep a good thing like the XO Laptop sitting around not being used? So I sold it to a very nice family with 3 kids, one is 5 and one is 7, perfect ages for experimenting with an XO Laptop. I was truly sad to see it go!

Ironically I just got my complimentary Give1Get1 T-Mobile 1 Year Hotspot information and so what I want to do is auction it off to the highest bidder. The value for 1 year of unlimited T-Mobile Hotspot service is around $350!

I will be donating 50% of the proceeds of this auction to Children’s Charities, my usual charity proceeds from the revenue of Switching to Mac and S2M Computer Consulting is 10%.

So let the bidding begin and remember much of it goes to a good cause and the rest will be put to good use, believe me!

So email me your best offer here, the winner gets it!

I have noticed a an increase in web-traffic on the main site and S2M Forum do to getting StumbledUpon a few times lately, the two key pages receiving StumbleUpon traffic are:

• Tiny Guides - OS X Shortcuts & My Mac Won’t Start
• The Mac-way! What every Switcher needs to know…

Anyways, welcome to all you “Stumblers” and I hope you enjoy the site and stick around for a while.  Make sure to checkout the S2M Forum while you’re here…

Happy New Year 2008

Starting December 1st 2007  and moving forward, Switching to Mac and S2M Computer Consulting will be donating 10% of all revenue sources back to Children’s Charities.The children’s organizations may change from time to time, this information will be updated when it happens. The first donation was to the “One Laptop Per Child” cause, future donation will now go to the “Village of Hope in Zimbabwe“.

If you would also like to help out you can go directly to the Village of Hope website and show your support.