The past couple years, I've not had much time to watch movies, due to having a full-time job and being involved in the People of Praise, among other things. Three or four years ago, I was a Blockbuster member and rented a couple movies every week. I spent about the same amount using Netflix the year after, and it was great to not have to stop at the local Blockbuster to pick up movies. Now that I don't watch movies, though, it's painful to rent movies. I can count on my right hand how many times I've rented movies this year, and that's mostly because I don't want to pay $4.50 to rent a movie. It's just not worth it, plus the last time I rented a movie, the DVD was almost broken and only worked in my computer and not a friend's.

Over Thanksgiving break, I was introduced to Redbox. My dad and I walked into McDonald's and requested a copy of Live Free or Die Hard, one of my favorite movies of the year that I definitely don't want to own but liked. To rent it, I just swiped my credit card and gave them my zipcode and e-mail address. The Redbox clearly stated that it was due tomorrow by 9pm. It only charges us $1 per day. And, I could bring it back to any Redbox anywhere if I wanted.

When I got home after renting, I was very glad I gave Redbox my e-mail address. They sent me a nice confirmation e-mail of my purchase and reiterated the information about the rental. The next afternoon, an e-mail reminding me to return it found its way to my inbox as well. And that evening, I asked a friend to return it for me, and later that evening I got a final e-mail saying that it was successfully returned. Oh yeah, and I enjoyed watching Die Hard 4 for the third time as well. (I think my parents enjoyed it too.)

At this point, I was very impressed with the slick service and, of course, the price. But what remained to be seen was their website. If Redbox was going to be cool, it needs a good, functional website. And, yes, the Redbox delivers there too.

Back when I used Blockbuster, you used to be able to look a movie up online and see if it was at your local Blockbuster location. Redbox does one better than this: you pay for the movie online, and it stays reserved in the Redbox. For popular movies, you could get to your local Redbox and find it's all out of Pirates of the Carribean: At World's End. But if you check online, you can find out if it's available and reserve it, so even if those who walk up to the Redbox can't get a copy, there's one hiding inside the machine with your name on it. (If you don't pick it up within a day, it automatically gets "returned".) Now that's the functionality you need on a slick-looking movie rental website. I also love that Rebox's site has attitude, saying "Yes" in about 10 different languages in their FAQ and advising you to "Lean over the keyboard whilst entering your password to foil spies" during login.

There are a few drawbacks, though. Of course, unlike Blockbuster, they only have space for a couple hundred movies in the Redbox, not thousands like at Blockbuster. For this reason, it seems, they limit themselves to fairly new releases. I saw a couple releases from up to a year and a half ago in my local Redbox, but don't expect it to be there if it didn't come out recently. Also, when searching online, it seems that one of the nearby Redboxes is "unavailable" at any given time. I don't know if that means that the local McDonald's don't have a good internet connection or if they bring the online features down when someone is requesting a movie, but it's pretty annoying to not always have it available. (One time last night it went offline while browsing the title selection on their website and the website just stalled for a couple minutes instead of giving me an error.)

My local Redbox is just as close as the local Hollywood Video dive, but for the price and the convenience, I'm going to check Redbox.com first if I want to rent a movie.

Alright, here's the exhaustive list:

• Intelligent Touchpad: Most of the laptops I've used have very annoying pointing devices. This MacBook Pro has a spacious pointing area and, once you get to know it, the easiest-to-use functionality possible. Want to scroll? Anywhere on the touchpad just hold down two fingers and scroll in the direction you want to go. Want to right-click/CTRL-click? After enabling it in mouse preferences, hold down two fingers and click as well.
• Zooming: Anywhere in Mac OS X, I can hold down CTRL and use the scroll wheel/fingers to zoom in and out. That YouTube video just too small? Zoom in at it and it'll fill up as much of the screen as you like. The screen pans around as you move the mouse, and it's great for reading things when you can't get up close (or just don't want to).
• Unix-based: Your file permissions not acting correctly? Open the terminal and look at the permissions via good ol' ls. Install the developer tools off the OS CD and all you Unix hackers can compile your own version of just about anything. Plus, like most distributions of Unix, it comes with all the necessary tools.
• Dictionary: Mac OS X has an address book and calendar built into the OS for plenty of nice integration, but, of course, why not a dictionary central to the OS? Mac includes a full copy of the Dictionary and Thesaurus, which are available with one click.
• Windows-friendly: I still run my old computer and even store most of my files on there, and that causes no problems with the Mac. Connecting to Windows and Linux SMB shares works flawlessly, and with the right passwords and the power of Hamachi, I can get my data from anywhere.

Why I Like Mac OS X Leopard

• Boot Camp: This is the official 1.0 release of Boot Camp, and it was probably the nicest implementation of Windows I've seen on a PC. After setting up your partition and booting into Windows install, just pop in the Mac OS X install disc and install a complete package of Windows drivers. The one Windows install includes an app to switch back to OS X as well as drivers for your monitor, keyboard, and mouse (and it includes all the fun mouse stuff like finger-scrolling). It's like all the nice features of your laptop but still running Windows if you need to.
• Spaces: The only thing better than having a nice monitor is having two monitors to work on. You can't achieve that on the road with a laptop, but with Spaces, it's the next best thing. Spaces gives me 4 separate desktops accessible via simple keystrokes. I have e-mail/chat in one space, web browser in another, iTunes in a third, and a development environment in the fourth (if needed). There's even a keyboard shortcut that will show all the spaces where you can then move windows from one space to another. Programs can be assigned to a space, and if you switch to an app that is only in another space, it'll zoom over to that space automatically.
• iChat: It's the little things in the new iChat that I like. I can share documents even with people running older versions of iChat. If someone has a link in their status, iChat now gives me a button to click on. Most of our paint colors at home are too close to skin color, so the backdrops don't work well, but they're still kinda fun.

After talking to a couple friends, I found that I was assuming my readership knew a bit about Macs and how they work. Some readers thought when I posted .mac: What Is It Good For? that I was saying that I didn't like my new computer. That's certainly far from the truth.

.mac (pronounced "dot mac") is an online service that Apple tries to sell you for $99 per year. They give you a mac.com e-mail address, 10GB of storage, and the ability to synchronize settings across your Mac user accounts. What I was saying was that it seems like it'd be worth it if you have a couple Mac machines, but with only one Mac, it's hardly worth it. Plus, I have my own server on which to store data and run my e-mail.

Sorry if I confused you, but I'm glad I was able to clear that up. Hopefully, sometime soon, I'll give a rundown about what I like about the Mac.

AftThis post is different.  For most posts to this blog, I just login to the WordPress blog administration.  This one I wrote through a free program called Windows Live Writer, which is currently in free beta from Microsoft.  Here's a bit of the experience: After giving my blog URL and login, it did some thinking for a minute and dropped me here: Yes, it looks Vista-rific, but checkout that main pane!  That's exactly how it looks on my blog when it's published!  Windows Live Writer downloads my CSS stylesheet and mimics it to a T so I don't even have to do any imagining or clicking "Preview" to see what the result will be.  Writer is compatible with Blogger, LiveJournal, and just about every major blogging service and software. As far as further features, I just hit ALT+PrintScreen (one of the few functions not built into Mac OS) to get those screenshots and then pasted them into Windows Live Writer and it made them PNGs and added that snazzy drop shadow.  The images were automatically uploaded to my uploads section of my site.  Writer also knew what my categories are so I just selected them from a list at the bottom.  And, as you can see, you can easily insert links, pictures, or even maps and videos without leaving the writer. What's the benefit of having software like Windows Live Writer?  Well, for one, you could write a bunch of blogs and schedule them for publishing while you're on a plane or other place not connected to the Internet.  And, like I said, you have the full "what you see is what you get" interface with your weblog.  Plus, you have a great Windows interface where you can do all the fun stuff like paste into it and it just works.  And it checks your spelling while you do it too. That being said, I probably won't be using this too often.  I rarely write a blog post while not on the web (because I'm often on) and then the draft is only stored on this computer and not on my server where I can access it from any computer.  I don't have this software installed on all my machines, especially my MacBook Pro.  But, it is amazingly nice and well-organized.  Also, I'm a web developer by trade, so looking at HTML code instead of a screen like this isn't annoying at all, and is in some ways soothing because I know what type of HTML code I'll get. There are a number of similar desktop blog editing softwares out there, but this is the first one I've tried and I haven't heard of any this nice and easy-to-use minutes after downloading.