Brent Kearney

It was a fantastic morning at Sunshine Village, with boot-high pockets of powder to be found hiding in the glades and between mogules on Goat’s Eye Mountain. The official snow report says 5cm of fresh, but its been snowing since Tuesday afternoon, and it was still coming down at a decent rate all morning, so each run was better than the last. If it keeps dumping like this, Friday will be great too.

Today is a powder day at Sunshine Villiage! Yesterday it began to snow in the morning, and by the late afternoon it was approaching white-out conditions in the alpine. There was a dump alert this morning, as Sunshine reported 17cm of fresh pow. Although I have way too much work to do today to ski, I can see from their live webcams that its still coming down up there, despite the warm weather in Banff today. There is more snow in the forecast, and I bet that tomorrow will be another epic powder day at The ‘Shine!

The sweet new machines from Apple, the Intel “Core-Duo” iMacs, are more than just blazing fast. They are also the easiest to use, best designed personal computers on the market.

That statement sounds like its coming from a raging Mac zealot, but its not. Having made a career in information technology, I have installed and configured thousands of computers of all types over the last 10 years. None have compared to the iMac in terms of ease of use, functionality and well thought-out design. I have so far seen 3 complete novices who were able to take them out of the box, and get online within a few minutes. For people who have little or no computing experience, I couldn’t recommend anything else.

The first thing that people ask when they look at the iMac is, “where is the computer”? The Intel iMac has a profile of only about 5cm wide, making it the thinnest “fat client” I’ve seen. Here is a profile shot comparing the new iMac with a Sun thin-client terminal:

The thin client has no CPU or hard drive in it, but the iMac is a full featured PC packed into a similarly sized casing. Sort of like a laptop, but the iMac offers desktop performance with an SATA hard drive and a ATI Radeon X1600 graphics card with 128MB of fast video memory.

The iMac has sufficient ports for most users to attach pretty much any kind of device. On the back you’ll find 3 USB 2.0 ports, (there are 2 USB 1.1 ports on the keyboard), 2 Firewire 400 ports, a gigabit network port, digital audio out and in, and Apple’s freaky video-out port. You can use an adaptor for the video-out port to connect to pretty much any kind of video device: SGVA, RCA, S-Video, DVI, etc..

Other notable features of the hardware include the built-in iSight camera, the new Apple Mighty Mouse, and a tiny remote control for Front Row.

The real treat with these machines though, is the software that they run. I will post a subsequent article on Mac OSX and the little surprises that came with the new Intel Core-Duo iMacs.

Or, how high, is perhaps the better question to ask. A woman from Oshawa, Ontario was shot in the chest while dancing at a nightclub on Friday night. Apparently, she didn’t notice. She claims that later that night she was having troubles sleeping, and noticed that she was bleeding from the chest, then checked herself in to the hospital to have the bullet removed.