I Was Wrong About the Keynote

Turns out there is no iAir in a can. What there is, is the Macbook Air the newest and most portable Apple has ever put out. Sure I want one but it's one of those things that wouldn't change my life all that much. The iPhone changed the way I did things. My present computers did too. The Macbook Air would be nice to own but I wouldn't want to sign the check to pay for it. 

Now the Time Capsule is a different story. I'm getting myself one of those. I'll wait for it though. To tell you the truth I'm thinking more about a new camera with my tax refund. That's been my plan for the last year and I didn't see anything new from Apple to change my mind about that. 

So this is Christmas

I'm up and down today. On the one hand I'm happy to be out of the store for a whole day, on the other I'm feeling that all alone on the holiday thing. I went out to breakfast this morning at the Persimmon Cafe. I have eaten at least one meal every Christmas since I moved to the city there. That was an up. I did my journal on my phone while waiting for the food to arrive. Then I read the Talk of the Town and the beginning of a story in the new New Yorker. The story was called Alma and the first paragraph smacked me so hard I was afraid to read the rest of the story in case it was a let down. 

As usual my end of year processes are including updating how I do things on my computer. This last month I've been working on finding a good GTD solution. I was all but typing in the debit card number for OmniFocus when I realized that it I wasn't going to be able to utilize to the fullest any task list that I couldn't use on my phone. I like not having to take anything but my phone out and about with me most of the time. I need something that will work on both my desktop and my iPhone. I thought that Easy Task was the solution and it might have been if it hadn't turned out to be the single buggiest piece of software I've ever paid for. $20 down the toilet. Even if it didn't freak out all the time the online site won't update if you complete a project on your phone. That isn't a bug, that's a feature. Thanks but no thanks. 

So, against my internal misgivings I turned to Web 2.0. For the most part I like applications to be in my applications folder and data stored exactly where I tell it to be stored, but the more I use some of these services the more I like the way they are always up to date and always available. I checked out a number of programs, most only took a glance to show me that they were not what I wanted to be looking at everyday to tell me what to do. The three contenders ended up being Remember the Milk, Nozbe, and Vitalist. I really have nothing bad to say about any of the three. In fact even though I went with Vitalist I was very impressed with Remember the Milk. And it has a pretty cool cow favicon. (I've got a bit of a thing for good favicons.) The bottom line was that I've decided to go with Vitalist. I haven't given them any money and I'm not all that happy about paying them $5 or $10 a month for as long as they want to only charge me $5 or $10 a month but the solution is elegant and works exactly how I want it to either on my iPhone or in my desktop browser. 

This was an easier decision because for the past two weeks I've been looking at purchasing a personal finance program. Ending up using a website to track my money was the real leap of trust for online applications. Once I uploaded my checking account registers for the last year onto Wesabe there was no looking back. 

The third new service is actually a blogging platform that has been out for a year but is new to me. That is the blogs from tumblr. Not to panic. I'm not ending this site. This is still where I'm going to write my daily takes on life. I have, however started a parallel blog on tumblr. Here is a nice little blurb on Lifehacker about tumblelogs. So make a bookmark for a new site from me. 

lacadaz on tumblr

The tumblr blog will always have a link back to the latest postings here as well as more little bits of the the net that I come across in my surfing. I'm going to try to keep up with the originality of this site, using it only for my own work and not so much for links and net-minutia. As usual we'll see how it goes but I like the idea of having something that I can just dump whatever strikes my fancy. I've got my flickr, digg and this blog feeding into it as well so it should be a pretty good aggregator of my web life. Check it out if you like and Merry Christmas. 

Those Pills Really Work

So I took a couple of nighttime decongestants last night and I did manage to get what passes for a full night's sleep last night. I even got my morning pages out of the way in the morning before work which I hadn't managed to do in the last five days. Still life is pretty boring when you're sick. Sleep and eat whenever possible and try to stay on your feet at work. That sums up my life this week. We're making money at the store so I'm not gonna complain. I've spent worse holiday seasons. I've felt worse, I've worked more and made less money so this isn't even going to make the bottom 10 worst Christmas's. Not a lot to report though. I've switched browsers back to the latest build of OmniWeb. It seems much faster than Safari 3 and this time around I'm actually liking the drawer for tabs. Oh and I gave up on OmniFocus and started using Easy Task for my GTD task lists. It was the only to-do list that did what I wanted with both a web based screen for my iPhone and an actual application for my MacBook.

Getting Excited

I know I'm a geek, but I'm all excited about my trip to the Apple Genius Bar tomorrow. I'm finally getting off my butt and having the top case replaced on my macbook. The hand rests went black pretty much the week I got it and back in October the front edge started peeling off. The warranty is up in February so I decided if I was going to do it I should do it soon. I have a 10:30 appointment at the Burlingame Apple Store. By noon tomorrow I should have a bright and shiny new look to my laptop. I can't wait. 

I Want One of These

Take a look at what this guy did to his monitor. Actually, I have the same monitor. It's too bad that I have no mechanical aptitude whatsoever. The keyboard may even be cooler than the monitor. I'm going to have to check back and see what he does with his mouse.

What's Going On

Sorry I missed yesterday. Usually I skip because my internal censor takes over and I start second guessing my thoughts and opinions. That wasn't the case yesterday. Yesterday I tried to read 600 rss feeds. (Actually, only about 30) It was tough. But Scoble was right, it's all about the keyboard shortcuts. (I know. I know. This is devolving into another computer process story and I've just lost Paul) The good news is I think I have a work flow for reading and tagging. Now I just need add that final step of taking the best of what I read and getting it on to this page along with my superior commentary. And I should probably work on actually having some superior commentary. The only real news from this is that Google Reader won. Especially after it upgraded to allow me to work offline thanks to Google Gears. That may come in handy especially since I no longer get wireless at work. The more services that Google can give offline functionality to the better for them. Gmail and Blogger would be huge.

This Guy is My Hero

Update: The switch from iWeb also coincided with a switch from Safari to Firefox (for the del.icio.us extensions at first) and I've decided to make flickr my permanent home for photos on the web. This means that the only thing I'm using .mac for is the imap email. Now that I've weened myself off of the service I hear this little tidbit from Reuters: "After a questioner suggested .mac had failed to live up to lofty expectations, Jobs said: 'I couldn't agree with you more. We'll make up for lost time in the near future.'"

Top 10 – Why Blogger Kicks iWeb's Ass

It hasn't yet been a week since I abandoned my previous blog and moved from using iWeb back to blogger. Already though I'm a much happier and productive blogger.

1. Unlike Apple's iWeb, Blogger just works
2. Updating a post on Blogger takes seconds instead of minutes on iWeb.
3. When I forget a period and have to edit a previous post it does not re-create every page I've ever written. (see #2)
4. Moving between my laptop and my mini is effortless because Blogger is accessible from the Internet. Iweb requires the master domain file to be moved between computers in order to use a different computer.
5. If you lose your current domain file you can't recover your site from Apple's servers. Blogger emails me every post including the media automatically which for me means all my posts are saved locally on two machines and remotely on Apple and Google's servers.
   
6. Space is no longer an issue. With .mac I had 1GB to share between my web site, pictures and email. Google is limiting the photos to 1GB and nearly 3GB for email. Of course all of that extra space doesn't come cheap. Apple charges me $100 a year for that 1GB while Google kicks back the 4GB for free.
   
7. I got to use all of the widgets and code I wanted to. I have my flickr badge and my lastFM widget and my del.icio.us tags and feeds on my page and it all took less than a minute to set up. Apple's plug-ins pretty much constitute a counter and a link to Apple.
   
8. Blogger lets me change themes on the fly. If I want to change to way my whole site looks I just change the theme. With iWeb that meant recopying every entry into the new format one by one.
   
9. While five days is not enough time to call Blogger more reliable I do know that every time I do a security update on my computers I'm not going to lose control of my website.
10. Blogger is simply more intuitive to use. Whatever I've wanted to do I've found the tool close by and easy to use. (see #1)
    

The thing is, I didn't want to write this post. I'm a crazy Apple fanboy. I replaced the Brita filter on my kitchen sink with the iWater which only dispenses the Apple cool-aid. I put up with more than a year of frustration with iWeb, wanting it to work, waiting for the cure-all update, waiting for Leopard , waiting for the new iLife. Instead of getting better it got worse. So I got out.

My Movie Collection

I have updated my public list on the imdb to reflect the current state of my movie collection. I'm rather fond of my set up with several external hard drives all plugged into my mac mini and accessible through itunes. I have all the original poster art in itunes too so it is a real pleasure to flip through all the movies. I like sorting by year to watch the history of film go by. Beginning in 1920 I only have five years where I don't have at least one movie to represent. Anyway you can use the link to the imdb in the new "Where I'm scattered on the Web" section on the right side of the page.

Computer Mania Continues

I continued to work on setting up my laptop until after three in the morning. I was so wound up that I couldn't get to sleep for another hour or so. So did I sleep in and wake up balanced and refreshed? Of course not. I woke up at six-thirty and immediately tried to figure out why the settings I made in firefox before I went to sleep were no longer there. Hours go by like this. Once again I forget to eat anything substantial. If only I could keep my diet to tea and sunflower seeds I could keep the pounds off. The problem is that I'll eat nothing but until I get wacky in the head and require cheeseburgers.

Since Blogger doesn't really like Safari and Firefox does get along with del.icio.us very well, I've spent most of my time customizing Firefox and getting it to sync between my two computers. I took the screen shot above to show off my latest piece of computing happiness the all favicon toolbar. I know it looks obnoxious and is probably slowing down my browser but I just love having all my sites right where I can see them. The name of the extension that does this is Smart Bookmarks Bar. You can see that I've got my favorite fifty or so sites bookmarked on it.

The website that is on screen is the is the funniest thing I found all morning. Check it out here. It is included because I just hung up the phone with my ever encouraging friend John whose reaction to me saying that I've started a new blog was to ask if I could not make it so boring this time. Bite me John.

Rebuilding the Lacbook

It's getting late and I haven't eaten anything. I am suffering from that particular kind of mania that strikes me when I'm working on a computer issue. Tonight I am re-formating the hard drive on my laptop. It's my own fault I guess. This morning while messing around in my keychain trying to save my iWeb site I hit the wrong check box and before I knew it my keychains and all forms of using .mac were lost on that computer. Actually I'm not that unhappy with doing the re-format. I had transfered everything over automatically from my mini and had brought all my desktop settings and programs over to my laptop. I had all sorts of bizarre programs and settings especially since the mini had all my settings and programs from my ibook. All of this means is that there was a lot of garbage on it I didn't really use or want.

The problem is of course that I start working on these issues and I can't stop. I don't even take a break to eat. Which is dumb and makes me crazy and I realize that it's five minutes to twelve and I'm starving and batshit insane, listening to Supertramp and thinking hey this sounds pretty good.