Sure, the term “epic fail” is thrown around the Internet a lot these days, but the following “fail” moment is just too epic to simply make a fake motivational poster style picture out of it. This epic fail appears on a website for a supposedly legitimate business called Orange Label that does web and graphic design. If you take a look at their Icons Development page everything looks straight forward and professional until you look a little bit closer at the top of the page where you see an standard Windows XP-style start bar. If you take a look at what applications the person has open when they decided to take that screen shot you’ll see some standards like Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, and Internet Explorer. Take a closer look at the IE tab and you’ll notice that working on their website wasn’t all they were doing. Apparently, web development and porn go hand in hand. In case the link above isn’t working or the web developer stops jerking it long enough to catch on and fix it, here’s a screen shot of the site in its current state:

If you’re flying in to my former residence of Minneapolis (or, I suppose, St. Paul), you may notice a large billboard off of I-494 when leaving the airport. It is of the larger-than-life John Stewart along with the rest of his Daily Show crew welcoming Republicans to the Republican National Convention. Want to see it? You’ve got two options. Fly in to the Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport, or just look at the picture below.

To be fair to McCain, if I had that many homes worth that much money, I wouldn’t be able to comprehend what is going on in today’s housing market either.

Growing up, I always had macs. From my first MacSE sporting the lightning-fast 8mhz 68000 processor to college when I had a Power Mac running a 200mhz PowerPC 603e processor, I was always a Mac person. Even after that last Power Mac died, when I was exclusively running PCs, I still considered myself a Mac addict while I secretly longed for the day that I would once again have a nice shiny new Mac. Well, several months ago I got a nice new iMac and I love it. Although not new to Mac OS X, I had never owned a computer that ran it, so its taken me a while to feel out what software I like and I have some recommendations. So, without further ado, here’s my top 5 list of freeware applications every Mac user should have:

1. Adium
   This is easily the absolute best chat client for Mac OS X. I’m way more fond of it than I was Trillian on my XP machines and I swore by Trillian. Adium supprts just about every chat platform ever right out of the “box”, with the exception of IRC and video chat (supposedly coming soon). I’m pretty sure some of the platforms it supports went extinct along with the dinosaurs, but it still would work with Adium. The dock notifications are awesome, it integrates extremely well with Growl, and the styling, sounds, icon, and just about anything else are extremely customizable, which is fun. Sure, Mac OS X comes with iChat, but this just embarrasses it.
2. ClamXav
   Sure, there aren’t many viruses out there for the Mac, but you can never be too safe. ClamAV is an open source anti-virus solution for *nix-based operating systems. ClamXav is the Mac OS X front end for it. Its easy to install, easy to configure, works well, and is well supported. What more can you ask for in virus protection?
3. VLC
   I was debating whether or not to list this, because it is available on just about any operating system, but its just too good pass up. It’s a video player that can be both extremely basic to use and extremely advanced to configure, depending on your needs. It plays just about anything and that’s what makes it great.
4. Transmission
   Hands-down the best torrent client for Mac OS X. It’s fast, it’s simple, and it’s easy to configure. If that’s not enough, it also has an extremely small footprint. I’ve tried at least a dozen different torrent clients over multiple platforms over the last few years and this is certainly my favorite thus far, no matter what the operating system.
5. MagiCal
   This innocent little application does two incredible things that should by all means just be built in to the next version of Mac OS X. It displays a small icon with the month and date next to the clock on the menu bar and when clicked, it displays a small calendar that even allows you to flip through the months. Why this is not just a part of the OS is beyond me, but thankfully MagiCal is available to help.

Honorable Mentions: Firefox, Thunderbird, Stuffit Expander, and Fetch.