On holiday in Victoria

Seeing as work was enticing us to be away from the office in January with free days-in-lieu, I thought I'd take the family away from the madness of Sydney in the summer (seriously, 38C the other day, and it was already hot and sticky by 9am), and head for the cooler climes of Victoria. We've only visited Melbourne the once, back in 2000 on our first trip to Australia, which after three years of living here, is bordering on the criminal. So here we are in Melbourne, meeting up with my dad and stepmother, who are on the return leg of their round-Australia-by-caravan trip, for a spot of Chinese dinner and a walk along the riverbank. Tomorrow we head inland for the goldfields. So far, the furthest inland that we've been is Canberra, so we're going to try and get away from the coastal metropolises (metropoli?), and take in some of those big wide vistas that Australia is supposed to be famous for.

Blogging on OS X

Some time back, I blogged about my dismay at finding no equivalent to Windows Live Writer for OS X. Well, since then I've been mainly using Blogger's web client to do my blogging, but the lack of a decent offline client has been a bit of a pain. For some reason, having to run Windows Live Writer from within a VMWare session, just grates a bit too much. So I thought I'd try out some of the Mac equivalents. OS X lacks a clear equivalent to WLW, which is as close to a perfect product as Microsoft is ever likely to release (not inspiring for a platform some 20 years old), and free as well. From what I garnered from the web, the best commercial products for OS X are ecto and MarsEdit. I downloaded both clients this evening, and ran through the setup routines. Ecto was a bit less friendly than MarsEdit, so I'm going to give MarsEdit a go first. This post is being written with MarsEdit, if you couldn't guess.