I have often wondered why we do not get speeding tickets on toll roads where your entrance and exit is timed, but I guess they just have not gotten around to it yet. I think they make those black box sensors that some insurance companies plug in your car to record your speed. I don't think I'm ready for that. I've often thought the best protection against a speeding ticket is to drive no more than 5 mph over the speed limit and have your own GPS tracking taking place. At least you can have some facts to back up your contention that you weren't speeding. Maybe we need sensors which when fog is detected limit your speed to no more than 50 mph. We have sensors that turn windshield wipers on. How hard could it be? The real problem with Fancy Gap is that it is in far southwest Virginia. Afton Mountain close to Charlottesville has had a better fog system with lights in the lanes for years. Virginia has had such an anti-tax legislature that it is a wonder they even use reflective paint. US 220 south of Roanoke had terrible lane markings that were almost invisible on a rainy night, yet nothing was done for years. It is all a matter of wanting to fix a problem and putting the money into fixing it. We put people on drawbridges, maybe we need a fog monitor on Fancy Gap who shuts down the road when the fog gets so bad you can't see.

So what type of device are you using for your personal NAS? I actually had to turn off Time Machine on my new Mac Mini. It was giving me too many errors so I try to keep all my files in the cloud and on the Windows 8 box which has a good file backup system. I keep my Nexus 7 by my easy chair for quick browsing and mail, but my old Kindle Fire which seems bullet proof often travels with me to meetings for use as an Evernote device. While I also use Gmail, I continue to have some email accounts hosted on my own websites and I was lucky to have one of the grandfathered Gmail accounts with my own domain. Sometimes I still miss my old Newton for note taking. It still works but not sure how I would get the notes moved. I bought Office 365 but I am now using Google Docs for much of my writing. I would like to try a Chromebook. I have been watching with interest discussions from students and educators about how nice Chromebooks are for taking notes. Most of the educators are coming down on the side of Chromebooks working better than tablets or iPads for students. The Pixel would be great note taker but I don't have that kind of money to spend on something I don't really need. I think it looks great and reminds me of my favorite old Titanium Powerbook. I have finally freed my music from iTunes and am now using Spotify and Amazon Cloud player for most of it. Though I do have much of it in iTunes.

There is certainly no shortage of technology on my desk and it does take a fair amount of work to keep it all talking to each other. However, it is a lot easier than it used to be. Products like Dropbox which works on Windows, Linux, and even old flavors of the Mac OS make things much simpler than they used to be.

Actually that is what I did and that is the image of Lion installing the system on the external drive. When it finished, it didn't work. You missed the whole point of the article, the app store might have the version of OS X that I need but it won't let me download a copy of it. However, I did make a copy by cloning what was on the internal drive to a brand new drive.

The ice and snow scenario is not fun. But I have enjoyed more trips with a great view than anything else. Thanks for the comment.

Patrick, Thanks so much for your kind comments and wishes. We still miss a lot about Roanoke & Salem, but I don't miss the freezing rain and sleet. Hope you have a great winter. I'm looking forward to spring. -David

Likely Apple has it patented and would sue the pants off any manufacturer trying to use it.

Unfortunately the statistics that I cited in my article clearly demonstrate Apple is no longer the most reliable computer. http://ctwatchdog.com/finance/2012-computer-reliability-report-lenovo-most-reliable-acer-least-reliable-apple-declined And that is the bigger problem than my one iLemon.

Thanks for the info It would sound like my system would be a perfect fit for that program, but somehow I always miss out on those Apple programs. When I entered my serial number I got the message "The iMac serial number you entered is not eligible for this program. No further action on your part is needed at this time." http://www.crystalcoastlife.com/applestumbles/noteligible.jpg Well "no further action" is required if I want my iMac to stay broken. I had the same problem with Aluminum PowerBook which had a bad lower memory slot. Apple had a program to cover that but my serial number didn't qualify me. All this brings me back to my original point, you pay through the nose for Apple products and chances of getting good service if something breaks is a roll of the dice. I don't even mind buying a drive, but I don't like pulling a LCD. I'll likely take it to a friendly reseller that I know around Winston-Salem, NC. I suspect I will switch the iMac to a SSD. Actually I did qualify for one Apple program, my white MacBook eventually quit working due to overheating and I had to send it back to Apple. That means three of the last four Macs that I have purchased have had serious problems. I think that I see the hand writing on the wall given that my wife and I have also purchased four Windows laptops during the same period and all of them are still running. At least in my case Windows hardware has been more reliable than everything but my Dual G5 system. Certainly the Windows hardware is a lot less expensive. The three disabled Macs cost me close to $5,000. The four Windows laptops totaled around $2,800.

Actually you don't need a Kindle to read the book. Amazon provides lots of free apps to help you read it on almost any device. http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000493771 Unfortunately because of the ninety color photographs, publishing a paper copy would be very expensive.

Glad you enjoyed the book, thanks for purchasing it. I received many email comments yesterday from current and ex-Apple employees. One of the emails summarized it well. "I have to say Apple was a great company but you do not realize how weird it was until you are out."

Not sure I understand your question, the post is full of places that I have suggested. I'll even be glad to suggest a fishing guide for the area. I'm quite willing to share my fishing holes also but they are down the coast from Beaufort. http://www.crystalcoastlife.com/blog/2012/09/19/living-by-the-inlet/

For those who are looking for other thoughts on Apple, you might be interested in this NY Times piece published the same day as my article. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/22/opinion/nocera-has-apple-peaked.html

For the last six years we have enjoyed a second home on the North Carolina coast near Emerald Isle. That is the reason we wrote the EI travel guide. North Carolina's Southern Outer Banks will now be our permanent home. I'll continue to write View from the Mountain but the pictures might come from other mountains. I also have a few books other than our travel guide up my sleeve. The one I hope to get out this winter is "From Maybery to Nova Scotia and back." It is about growing up in North Carolina in the fifties and sixties, going off to military school, then to Harvard, moving to Canada to farm, and coming back home as an Apple employee. The book honors my extraordinary mother. A prelude to the book will be published in the September Feathered Flounder issue. http://thefeatheredflounder.com/ Thanks for the note, I still have fond memories of my visit to Australia. You Australians are also world class when it come to being friendly.

Almost seven years later, we have no bamboo. Crossbow did it in, but I did have to apply some to the bamboo shoots that came up the next year, but it was not a long term battle.

I hope to write up Windows 8. I've lived through XP, Vista, and Windows 7 so I am anxious to see what Microsoft has in store for us. The Surface product might me my next computer. I probably will wait until I get something new with Windows 8 on it.

Well getting slow can definitely be a Snow Leopard "feature" as I found. Anyone that says nothing ever happens to a Mac hasn't had very many Macs. Just do a Google search for "slow Snow Leopard" and have a look at the comments.

Well you learn something every day. I guess I had heard about the syncing photos which uses iTunes. http://osxdaily.com/2010/07/10/transfer-photos-from-iphone-to-computer/

I don't run Goobers Restaurant, I just eat there and wrote this review. You might try calling them (336) 786-1845 or visiting their official website http://www.goobers52.com/

The picture was taken at Third Street Beach in the town of Emerald Isle, North Carolina.

Just to prove my point on true Internet services, I just tried something which makes it pretty clear that Apple has become the new Microsoft. I used beat up Microsoft because many of their services were tied to Internet Explorer. Guess what company has seen at least some light. It is Microsoft. Yesterday I uploaded a number of photos from my Windows 7 laptop using a Firefox browser to my Microsoft Skydrive.. Later in the evening I added to one of the folders some photos from my Snow Leopard iMac using Safari as the browser. This afternoon, I logged into my SkyDrive from my Oneiric Ocelot Ubuntu Dell machine with Firefox and uploaded a picture to the same album without any problems. Then I went back to my iMac and uploaded a photo to a MobileMe album using Firefox. Next I moved over to my Linux box and tried doing the same thing. Even though I was running the latest Firefox on Ubuntu, I got this message. http://www.crystalcoastlife.com/notatrueinternetservice/unsupportbrowser.html Now Linux has a very small market share compared to Windows or MacOS, but other manufacturers even Microsoft manage to support it, but Apple won't. There was a time when you could argue they don't have the money, that is not the case today. They just don't want to do it. I suspect Windows 7 will work, but I haven't tried it yet. Apple has always reserved a special spot in its heart for Linux. Real Internet services manage to support most if not all platforms that have wide use. I am sure iCloud will be great for those hooked on the latest and greatest from Apple. The rest of us will get by with those other services that have already been doing a great job for a number of years. Dropbox is a great example of an Internet service that works for almost everything, and it is really free.

Obviously you missed the whole point of the article. Your comments ignore what I said in the article. I specifically said Apple didn't hide the fact that it wasn't free to anyone but Lion owners. However, there are lots of free services out there like Google's and Microsoft's that don't require me to use a particular operating system or have the latest and greatest hardware to administer it. Ubuntu's default way of getting an install is to make a CD. They tell you out to do it on their website. I'm not interested in finding third party instructions on how to do my Apple OS installs. Also as I detailed in the article, I have a very specific reason why I don't want to use Lion. You would have seen that if you had paid attention to the article instead of worrying so much about Android. You seem to think it is a bad thing to support older hardware on the Mac. I'm glad you have the budget to buy the latest and greatest stuff, but not everyone does. I am not sure what capabilities I might get with Lion, but I am sure my life is immeasurably poorer because I haven't upgraded. One of Apple's favorite things is tell you that you will have these amazing capabilities if you upgrade to the latest OS. Every time Apple rolls out a new operating system promising some of these wonderful capabilities, I go to some Apple system engineers and ask them which applications that they see on the horizon which are impossible in the current OS. I have never gotten a good answer. In fact I am still waiting for some killer apps available only in Snow Leopard. Perhaps iCloud itself is the one app that Lion will enable, but I can get it's features in other places without new hardware. As to Android, which you obviously don't like, I have enjoyed all the fancy syncing ability that is promised in iCloud since I bought my Android phone almost two years ago. I am not even sure which version of Android my phone is running but I get my photos on Picasa web albums synced with my phone. It has always been that way. My contacts are synced with multiple Gmail accounts. My contacts were in sync less than two minutes after buying my ancient Android phone which you apparently believe is unusable because it doesn't have Android's ice cream sandwich. The maps that my Android phone creates from tracking me get seamlessly uploaded to My Maps on Google maps and I can edit them and attach photos from any platform, not just the latest and greatest Mac hardware and software. Amazon's cloud services seem to work well for music and don't need the latest and greatest hardware or software for it either. By the way if you had taken the time to pay attention to the article, my i5 iMac was purchased in October 2010. It is way out of date at 14 months old. The truth is something that I have said about Apple for many years, they don't really understand the Internet. They have always made their Internet services more difficult by trying to tie them to specific hardware and/or software combinations. Updating a specific photo album on .Mac was not an easy proposition if you ever tried it from more than one Mac. I can't remember what it is like on MobileMe because I quit using it due to how slow it was. You should give Microsoft's free SkyDrive a whirl if you want to see speed. If you have ever tried to publish a blog using iWeb from more than one machine compared to using Typepad, Wordpress, Blogger, or Squarespace, you would understand what I am saying. The data needs to be hardware agnostic for something to truly be an Internet service that is worthy of the name. With real Internet service platforms, I can start writing a post on a Windows 7 box using Opera, move to my i5 Mac using Safari, and finish on my Dell Linux box with Firefox without doing anything but logging into the service. I could even do editing on that ancient and obviously unusable Android phone. You cannot do that with iWeb. However Apple wants to tie iCloud to Lion (or a new iOS device) and wants to shut out hardware and an operating system that is only 14 months old. That doesn't make a lot of sense to me as someone who just spent a lot of money on Apple hardware a little over a year ago. I don't expect them to support my seven year dual G5. It would be nice, but I know Apple better than that. Apple's iCloud doesn't free you from specific hardware dependence, and even if you are like me and recently spent money on Apple gear, you will have to spend more money to use Apple's free services. Actually I don't trust Apple with my photos. There is proof over the years that my lack of trust for their handling of photos and web pages has been a wise sentiment.

Well it depends on what I want to do, and what system I happen to be using. If I am using Windows, I am pretty happy with Picasa but it does miss a few things, so I subscribe to the premium version of Piknik http://www.picnik.com/app#/home/welcome which lets me do a few more things than Picasa. It's $29.95 per year. If I am on my Macintosh I use iPhoto (not the abominable most recent version) and Pixelmator http://www.pixelmator.com/ . Once in a blue moon, I might fire up Photoshop for something special but I am using it less and less. I try not to only correct the pictures to reflect what I saw with my eyes. My cameras have been updated, and most of my pictures come from my Nikon D3100 and my Sony DSC-HX7V. The Sony has the advantage of built-in GPS which works great with Picasa Web Albums and Panoramio. I do a lot of my GPS now with MyTracks which is an Android app that I use on my Droid.

As note to the fellow who left a rude comment- I was right, you left a fake email address because my response to you bounced. It is typical of people who take affront at the truth about the internal workings of Apple that they hide behind anonymous names. I received this in a note from a former Apple employee. "...I completely agree. My experience from (Apple) was the same although not as deep as yours with Steve and management." I am always happy to hear from Apple employees or ex-employees and as many know, their responses always stay private unless they wish otherwise.

Still working on the details, but you will find out first here on Applepeels.