You would think Santa had just brought the household a new puppy on Christmas morning. My family is enamored with Facebook. One good thing about this love affair is I don’t have to clean up doggie “accidents” or deal with chewed up furniture. It’s also highly likely Facebook isn’t going to get hit by a car or develop bad hips.

Needless to say, I’ve been dabbling a bit with the site in an effort to remain the king of my house when it comes to the number of friends each of us has. To help me, I downloaded the Facebook Application onto my iPhone and I’m pretty impressed. It has the most used base communication features of the web version. I’ve found that adding new friends is actually faster than it is with the web version.

If you’re into Facebook and have an iPhone, give the Facebook Application a try.

I read this morning that Apple is now the No. 3 PC maker in the U.S. with it’s sites set on Dell and HP.  This seems pretty impressive to me given how huge Dell has been historically.  Reminds me of the days when Apple had only a fraction of 1% of the market in terms of users as well as PC sales.

It’s been a long time coming…and I know this isn’t exactly breaking news for anyone following Mac/Apple related news topics, but I had to comment.  I can’t believe how long it’s taken for Psystar to get slapped by Apple for stepping on Apple’s hardware toes.  The interesting thing is, based on what I’m reading, this doesn’t appear to be as much about the EULA (End User Licensing Agreement) breach, as about trademark and copyright infringement.  Here’s a link to the initial source we found the news at:

The Gray Blog – “Apple Goes After Clone Maker Psystar”

Personally, I like the idea of Mac clones.  Although I wasn’t a big fan of the clones in the late 80′s, now that we’re on Intel processors, the hardware options become a lot more interesting.  This could end up being a huge boost for the Apple OS and it’s market penetration if they open up licensing at some point.  I’m certainly not saying I don’t like Apple hardware, it rocks.  But I always cringe a bit at the cost of their more robust systems.  Course “cringe a bit” doesn’t prevent me from actually ponying up the bucks to buy a high end system.

Microsoft Office for the Mac is a necessary evil for a lot users.  The AutoUpdate feature Microsoft built into Office works pretty well, but if things don’t go as planned with the download and/or install of an update, it can be a little frustrating.  Here are a couple of handy tips in case you need to find the update on your local machine or want to download it manually from Microsoft’s site:

• The AutoUpdate application is stored in the following folder:  Yourstartupdrive/Library/Application Support/Microsoft/MAU2.0.  The easiest way to launch it is from Help-Check for Updates in any of the Microsoft Office applications.
• Downloaded updates are stored in the following folder: Youruserfolder/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems/16807Office 2008 12.1.1 Update.  Updates are temporary though and are cleaned out along with other temporary items regularly.
• By default, a log of Microsoft AutoUpdate’s activities is kept in the following location: Yourstartupdrive/.  This can come in handy when troubleshooting.

A buddy of mine asked me recently if I was going to stand in line for the new iPhone v2 on the day they came out. I hadn’t really thought much about it. The release of the first iPhone last year was an all day event for myself, my family and several friends, but I’m not so sure about this time around.

I thought I’d ask…Anyone planning on standing in line for the latest version of the iPhone next week?

I turned on my system a couple of days ago, launched Adium and noticed that my ICQ account wouldn’t connect. ICQ has periodic problems, so I thought the service was just down. Turns out a new version of Adium was required to get ICQ working properly. The strange thing was in Adium, when I clicked Check for Updates, Adium reported back that I was already using the latest version. A manual update to version 1.2.6 was required.

Tip: Don’t trust the automatic program updates. Sometimes there’s no substitute for a manual update.