This evening I bit the bullet and fired up GarageBand. DJ Steve Boyett makes great workout mixes, but I needed something more personal. With a 28:00 time, I’m on a 5:36/km pace. I wanted music tailored for that pace, increasing tempo from 160bpm to 180+bpm, and I wanted audio effects to let me know when I crossed each half-km point.

(I’d love for the Nike+ to allow me to set alarms based on my distance, but it still doesn’t do that. Hence why my birthday list includes a Garmin ForeRunner.)

It turns out that mixing your own music isn’t rocket science. I mean, I’d barely call what I was doing mixing—fading out one track while fading in another. I did spend a bit of time trying to match up the beats, but I didn’t do any of the real work that the pro DJs do. I have to give credit where it’s due: GarageBand makes it disturbingly simple to do. It’s not a Swiss Army Knife of tools and effects like Audacity, but it’s good enough and doesn’t crash every 5 minutes.

I ended up with two mixes: the one for my 5K tomorrow, and a second 30-minute intervals mix with cute little racecar sounds telling me to book it and dinosaur growls to telling me to chill out. And … they don’t suck. In total, I probably spent 4 hours on the first one, then 2 on the second. I don’t know that I could get it down to any less than that, but 2 hours before a race isn’t a bad investment. For the Gate River Run in March I’ll probably need 4-5 hours to get the 110 minutes of music that I’ll need … but that’s something I can work on in tiny pieces from now until then.

Anyone who knows me well won’t be surprised to find that my version of a “Precious” isn’t an iPhone but rather an eReader.

Silly husband didn’t ask me to restrain myself at B&N when we were Christmas shopping, so I have three purchased books (100 Heartbeats: The Race to Save Earth’s Most Endangered Species, Dawn Light: Dancing with Cranes and Other Ways To Greet the Day, and The Botany of Desire) waiting for me, competing with the stack of library books about gardening that I’d checked out the week before. The library finally corrected my address so all the books I had on hold were ferried to my doorstep a few at a time in shiny blue packages in the days leading up to Christmas.

My book ennui was just lifting and I was plowing through my book pile, several at a time, when I got my Christmas gift.

I got my Precious on Christmas eve, pre-loaded with too many books for one human to possibly read in one sitting (more than a dozen from the hubby) and got comfy on the couch. Eventually, hubby convinced me to dock the thing and actually check the Sony store, Google Books, and the library websites.

Yikes. 46 books loaded. A dozen started almost immediately.

This is book gluttony.

So, yeah. The Reader, much like a newborn, has barely been set down.

It gives me the same trouble in dim lighting that my own eyes do, but other than that, the functionality on this baby is awesome. We had played with the Reader and the Nook prior to purchase, and this is just … the best.

You can highlight, bookmark, search, circle, annotate, define words and otherwise mark up your ebooks. You can create PDF documents of, say, a map to your relatives, and save for review when driving on the highway down to Rockledge. You can add music, you can use the stylus to draw pictures, you can type little memos to yourself reminding you of all the other books you want to look for. Best of all, you’ve got the ability to add external memory (SD card or something else; two options) so you can swap out libraries… and it all fits in my (very normal-sized) purse!!!

Hubby threatens metrics generation to see just how many books I am in the middle of… I think the Kindle actually offers those onscreen on the device. I’ve already finished a couple of books, and other than exceptionally badly formatted PDFs, they’re awesome… I just zoom in and out for ease of reading in different lighting.

Yeah, I heart my Precious. Like, whoa.

• The screen on the MacBook Pro is bright and the dot pitch is low enough that it doesn’t bother me at all.

• Text is very, very pretty.

• Most of the software I’m used to on my Ubuntu machine works on the Mac, too.

• The whole Disk Image (.dmg file) concept is brilliant. Dragging apps into the Applications folder to install them is truly awesome. I miss Synaptic for app discovery, but you can’t beat the Mac install process.

• iTunes on Mac is wicked faster than iTunes on Windows.

• Once you get used to the multi-touch and gesture support on the touchpad, it’s not half bad. By default the touchpad is set to be braindead, but once you turn on the right-click functionality and some of the gestures, it’s just as fast. (I do miss the nipple mouse from PC laptops, though.)

• Battery life on the MacBook Pro is decent, and certainly better than an equivalent PC laptop. It’s maybe a little better than my Ubuntu laptop, but not by much.

• Inter-app communication seems to be much more advanced than on Windows or Linux. You did something in Rick’s Music App that iTunes should probably know about—I’ll just let iTunes know for you. (Quicksilver, of course, being the ultimate example of this.)

The Bad:

• Busted keymaps: Home and End don’t go to the start and end of a line. (They want to go to the start and end of a document.) This makes them useless for single-line text fields, where they do exactly nothing. You can remap them with customized keybindings, but applications have to be coded to specifically pay attention to that, so support is spotty. There’s a Command-Arrow combination for each, but that’s still slow.

• Busted keymaps, part 2: There doesn’t seem to be any logical distinction between Control, Option, and Command. In Windows, Alt is shorthand for start this task while Ctrl is shorthand for apply this setting. Mac accelerators seem to be willy-nilly chaos.

• Busted keymaps, part 3: Delete and Backspace are not reliable. Like maybe some applications are overriding them? I need to do more research here to figure out what the deal is.

• Mac, Vista, and XP all follow the same set the default options for the idiot user and let the gurus dig to find a way to change it mentality. (Reference above: you have to dig to find the setting to turn checkboxes into tab stops.) Linux apps these days seem to get this, offering a single simple/advanced mode toggle that unhides all the interesting stuff.

• Command-Tab is somewhat broken: it seems that I can’t use it to switch between windows, just between applications? I’m sure there must be a setting somewhere for this, right? (Update: Command-~ cycles between widows with an app. I’m not sure if I love it, but it’s better than nothing.)

The Ugly:

• Far too many applications, I’d say almost all of them, are coded to assume that you want to use the mouse to get around. Many are downright unusable from the keyboard alone. I get that Macs are mouse-centric, but it’s still annoying. I never realized how much I should appreciate that nearly everything on Windows is a tab stop, because almost nothing on a Mac is.

• There seems to be a dearth of utility software. If an official Apple product performs a function, no matter how bad it does it the consensus seems to be just use iTunes/Pages/Time Machine/this AppleScript. (Linux also suffers from the here’s a shell script dysfunction, but in its defense that’s part of its underlying philosophy.)

I’m still not completely sold on the whole Mac suite, and some of it makes me want to throw the laptop across he room, but I have to admit that it does a whole lot of things right.