I’ve been writing a series of articles for Philweavers.net, a local web-designer community, that focuses on the various lessons I’ve learned over the past month with my new Macbook Pro. Due to the nature of the venue, the essays are written from a web-designer’s perspective, but I touch on several foundational concepts as well. Check them out here:

The Big Switch: Introduction. Mac from a Windows user’s perspective. Talks about basic concepts like the file-system, installing/uninstalling applications, organizing your desktop, etc.
The Big Switch: Designer Tips and Tricks. Discusses various shortcuts and utilities available in the standard MacOS that go a long way towards making a web-designer’s life a little less stressful. Touches very briefly on the concept of PDF-based desktop rendering (via Quartz).
The Big Switch: A Touch of Windows. Compares the three major options for getting Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 (and other Windows apps as well) working on your Mac. This article has yet to be published on Philweavers, but you can check it out already on my personal blog.

Its good to see web2.0 starting to become popular here in Australia. Last night I headed out to the emerging technology/networking event – STIRR put on by the guys at Tangler.

It offered a few things over the usual business card swap and was definitely a fun night. First off was a little game called half-baked, that broke the attendees into groups and got them to come up with an idea for startup. Each group had to pick two words from a list of random and often strange words that everyone had contributed. Those chosen two words became the name for the company and from that a logo, elevator pitch, marketing plan and revenue model all that to be created in 10 minutes. Once the time was up, each group had to present to the rest. Our offering “ShoeWave” with the tagline “The Sock Market” managed to win the vote with an ingenious social network for odd sock trading. If anyone is in need of such an offering we have a solid albeit light on detail business model

A congrats should go out to the guys from Remember the Milk who came away with the most amount of virtual VC money from their pitch. There was some strong competition from BluePulse and Quotify. Having used Remember the Milk myself, it is a great site and certainly got my vote.

So, topping it off with some meet and greet, it was a good night. I’m looking forward to the next one, whoever puts it on.