Hello and welcome to Mac's Picks of the Week. If you are interested in why this site exists, how it operates, and a little about Mac, then click on the Why and How Info link and see what is there. When you have finished please return to this Home page and see what sites I have chosen this week to receive a Mac's Picks of the Week award. Thank you for visiting and please share this site with friends, family, and colleagues who you feel will enjoy it.

This page is updated on a weekly basis, each Monday Australian (Queensland) time (GMT + 10 hours according to the world clock). Please come back and visit often.

When you flip through car magazines one could be forgiven for thinking "This is a man's domain". However though that may have been essentially true in past generations, the Welcome to AutoChic - AutoChic site, run by a woman, is changing that perspective. The purpose of the site? Simply put it's "helping women take control of their car purchases", and why not? Women drive as many vehicles as men, they purchase as many as men, and they should use intelligence in making their decisions on those purchases. Thus, this well done site is worth a bookmark for the next time you're going to purchase a new vehicle and for keeping up with what's happening in the motoring world.

Have you ever faced the prospect of having an mp3 file you want to convert to the wav format so you can burn it onto a music CD? Or maybe you need something else converted, like a bmp file to the jpg format. If you have You convert it bookmarked in your bookmarks, and go there, you can literally upload and convert almost anything to anything, and it's free. No software to download, no hassles, no chare - just upload a file, tell it what you want to convert it to, and there it is, converted for you. Great bookmark. Use it.

Fancy yourself as a writer? Possibly as the next great novelist or seeing your name in lights because your most recent book is listed on the NY Times Best Seller list? If that's a serious dream of yours, hop over to the Welcome to the Purdue University Online Writing Lab (OWL) and get help with your latest edition of work. This truly is a great site for budding novelists. Have a look.

This week I suggest that your food take on a French flavour. I know that the recipes at the French Recipes sound delicious and I recommend that you have a look. Personally I'm going to try the Pan Bagnat. It sure sounds like my kind of sandwich. the only change I will make will be to cut back on some of the oil involved. That amount of fat I don't need. Outside of that (and a personal dislike of basil) I think this sounds like a pretty cool sandwich. Dig in.

As you know Google is growing by leaps and bounds. And, it also has its own blog that is updated by its engineers to keep you up to date on what they have found recently. Have a look at the Official Google Video Blog and see what you think. I think I personally will view it on a weekly basis.

One of the more difficult things to teach the young folk must be math. Therefore when I find a site like the Mathwire.com Resources for Math Teachers site, I simply must pass it on in the hopes that you will pass it on to anyone you know who has this task given to them. Hopefully this will help others help those educators do their job in an easier way. Pass it on.

And in the same vein I would suggest that science teachers will find the Science News - New York Times site of use too. Mind you, simply browsing this site does show some interesting news stories for all of us. Have a look and keep up with what will be happening in the near future in science.

When looking for sites I find some interesting ones. Also, some are sent to me by folk such as yourself, who simply wish to pass a site on so that others might have access to it. Some sites seem obscure in some ways, yet the amount of people it may help can be quite astounding. For instance, the ASA Digital Library site which is the library of the Acoustical Society of America. As their site says, this site "draws the attention of life scientists, psychologists, physiologists, architects, neuroscientists, oceanographers, and speech communication specialists, as well as engineers and physicists.". That's a pretty impressive list. So have a look. You might be surprised at the amount of information contained here of use in your own field of work.

You may well be impressed with some of the images on Flickr, or even on Utube for that matter, but you have to go a long way to get better than those found in the collection called 11 phenomenal images of earth - deputydog which are published online by a fan known as deputydog. These images are not only beautiful in their own right, but do point out what is happening with global warming which, as can be seen from these photographs, can really only be appreciated from orbit. Have a look.

Speaking of global warming you might want to have a look at the homepage Nature Reports Climate Change site as well. Indeed this could make for interesting classroom time too. I wonder when Australia and the USA are going to pull their collective heads out of the sand and actually do something about reducing their own greenhouse gas emissions instead of simply pointing the finger at everyone else. It didn't take a day to get this polluted and it won't be easy changing it, but it does have to start somewhere, and the pockets of big business is not the place to start it. Get with the program folks. My grandsons would like to be able to breathe and not be burned to a crisp when they walk outside. Wouldn't yours?

We tend to all, at some point, make jokes about Microsoft and what it does (or doesn't do) and it's refreshing to find a site that shows you 10 Free Microsoft Apps That Don't Suck MakeUseOf.com put up by the MakeUseOf.com site. Indeed, the list is a good one and not only shows the applications but also where to download them from. And yes, they are free.

I'm one of those who is all for support groups. And finding and highlighting some of them is a good thing. But when I came across the Lip Balm Anonymous Home Page even I had to stop and wonder. Maybe it's true. Maybe it isn't. You be the judge.

Rebecca Game of "Digital Women - Women with their modems running...", is my web designer and a graphic designer who is superb to say the least. Her site, dedicated to women on the net, is worth seeing and bookmarking for future reference. If you are looking for links of interest to women, please visit her site. And if you need the best graphic designer on the planet, I seriously can't recommend her more highly. Oh yes, and when you visit her site, tell her Mac sent you. Thank you Rebecca. I am eternally grateful for your assistance and expertise. ;-)