Gizmodo is my new crack. All the gadgets I’ll never own with pretty pictures and enticing descriptions. Excuse my while I go salivate.
I love gadgets. I just can’t afford all the ones I want. So many toys, so little cash. I need to work for a tech magazine or some place that gives them away. I’d write reviews, I promise. Really really I would.
There’s so much I could be doing right now that I’m not going to do. There are things I could do to get ahead for work this week. There are things I could do to improve myself, learn something or be “constructive”. Am I going to do any of them tonight? Nope. I’m going to sit here and watch TV, or maybe go play Civ 3 and forget that I have to work next week, and it’ll be crazy. Avoidance wins tonight. Avoidance wins almost every night. Work will be there tomorrow…
Action Tin Toy has the coolest freebies. The wallpaper and icons are retro-gorgeous. The icons alone are reason enough to switch to a Mac (ok, grasping at straws, but you really should think about it).
I’ve got some new things I want to try here. I want to write longer entries, but still keep the short “Ooh, go check this out” option open. There are lots of ways to do this, and a lot of people do it… It’s my turn. Look for some changes around here in the next few weeks (you know, as I get time).
In other good news, I got a new Powerbook! It’s the same model as I had before (TiBook 550), but it has more RAM! Things run so much better now that I’m not running out of RAM all the time. Good good stuff.
In related news, and another fine reason to use OS X, it is extremely easy to restore all your crap in OS X. First, just backup the Library directory from your home directory. Then, when you get your new Mac, install all your apps, create a user with the same name as the old one, and copy the contents of the old Library folder into the new Library folder. Voila, all your saved passwords in Mozilla, all your old mail, and bookmarks! How cool is that?
If you use one e-mail application to send both Work and Personal e-mail, make sure you choose your work address before sending a big long technical e-mail to the world… Today just gets better and better.
People at work give me a hard time about the number of computers I have under my desk. Honestly, I think they’re just jealous. Here’s the rundown:
That’s not too many, really! I use all of them on a daily basis to get my work done (well, the Quicksilver may be overkill, but it has my 8.7 days worth of music on it – that I own… really, I do. I swear). The XP box may get demoted to 2000, because XP makes my buttcheeks clench. XP is evil.
I have no idea where this is going… only that I need more computers. I want a crash PC that I can reformat whenever I want and install goofy stuff on it. It has nothing to do with my job, so it’ll never happen – but it would be fun. When I was on the phones, I had what we called “The Crash Mac”. It was a beige G3 that I installed every flavor of Linux available for the Mac (all of two, LinuxPPC and YellowDog) on and learned all kinds of wicked things you can’t do to Macs on it. It was fun, and a great learning tool. I think everyone should have at least one crash machine. I may go out to Wal-Mart and buy a \$200 crap PC right now just so I have one. Yeah… just try and stop me.
So, I get Dawson to start a blog and now what’s happened? They’ve gone and started a blog commune. They’ve got nine little baby blogs on their site… I’m so proud.
Miss Mea-Mea won the best Amazon Wishlist category in this year’s Anti-Bloggies! Her prize (from yours truly) was something from her Amazon Wishlist less than \$25. Her choices (since I thought randomly choosing something was kinda mean) were Pulp’s This is Hardcore and Sophie Kinsella’s Shopaholic Ties The Knot. They’ve both been ordered and are now wending their way through the Amazon ordering system on their way to her door. Congratulations to her and tough luck to the losers with crappy wishlists.
After my full-time switch to OS X, I’m finding all kinds of great tools to make blogging easier and happier. This here is my incomplete list of things that make blog writing/reading life easier:
I want to build another CMS. Why? I’ve built two already (for work, a loo-ooong time ago), and there are already so many good ones out there. For blogging alone, there are several that people should look into. I know you know what they are. But, I’ve got some ideas for one that could include not only a web interface, but I think provide some features not available in the other personal publishing tools.
I’m not sure when I’ll have time to start it, but thinking about it kept me up all night. I want to create something easier to use than the ones out there now, and more flexible. It’s a tall order, especially with Movable Type doing it so well already. As good as Movable Type is, it’s a little beyond the typical Blogger user. The features lacking from Blogger are legion, but it is the easiest to get started with (at least that I’ve seen – if someone has one that’s easier to get started with, please let me know). How do you combine Trackback, Comments, flexible templates including the ability to make “other” pages, more flexible archiving formats, a WYSIWYG editor, etc and make it easy? It’s a huge problem, and it’s keeping me up at night.
I’m not even sure why it’s keeping me up, but it is. Maybe I just need to start drinking. Or take TylenolPM. Yeah, that’s the ticket.
The switch to OS X is going well. I finally downloaded and installed OpenOffice. Other than it taking a year to start up, and requiring X, it’s doing fine so far. I just opened up a gigantic Word doc and it handled it fine. It reads the fonts OK (although without anti-aliasing), and only slightly munges tables. I think I can live with it. For someone who uses Word or Excel all the time, it might not be a good solution, but I only open Word when I absolutely have to in order to read product requirement docs, and only open Excel when I get reports – which isn’t very often. I write all my docs in HTML.
The Powerbook is straining under the weight of the dual displays and all these open apps, but it’s not bad enough yet to consider moving to the big machine. I am loving having two monitors hooked up to one machine. It makes things so much nicer. I have an old SGI monitor with a digital input, so I may try hooking my Quiksilver up to that (it’s an 867 with a ton of RAM, so it should handle better than this, but then I’d have to install all the toys I’ve put on the Powerbook which could take days).
My computing environment is completely free of Microsoft’s influence now. I no longer worry about what info my computer is sending back to the “MotherShip”. This may not bother most people, and if it doesn’t bother you, then by all means, use XP. It bugs the living crap out of me. It’s my computer. It’s not Microsoft’s computer. I bought and used Microsoft’s software, but it’s still my machine. Microsoft has no business knowing what I have installed or how often I use those programs. What else does my computer tell Microsoft when I’m not looking? Does it send them the names of the documents on my computer? Does it send them the list of e-mail addresses I have in my address book? With them, there’s no way to know because everything is a black box. In OS X, it’s just BSD with a pretty face. If I wanted to, I could get under the covers and see exactly what’s going on. Not so with Microsoft products.
This is why Open Source will ultimately win. It’s not because it’s inherently better. It’s not because it’s geek friendly. We’re (ok, by we I mean me) tired of being lied to and manipulated. We’re tired of spyware. We’re tired of prohibitive licensing and insane software prices. We’re tired of being told with the products we’ve purchased. We’re tired of being treated like criminals. I don’t steal music or software. But, the software and music I buy, I want to be able to use as I see fit. I want to rip the cd’s so I can listen to them at work without having to bring the CD everywhere.
Whew… Ok, I’m done.