Categories
Life

Choosing a Tool

When my brother-in-law helped me build my workbench, I didn’t have a drill. I was faced with the idea of spending $65 on a decent DEWALT corded drill, but balked and decided that a $25 Black & Decker from Target would work just fine. I learned a valuable lesson (again) about not being afraid to pay a little money for decent tools.

We built the workbench, but I quickly returned the Black & Decker drill and just this last week picked up the $65 DEWALT model and used it for a few projects around the house with no problems. I was stalling, hoping that I could find a MEGA DEAL to save myself a little money, but I just needed to get the drill and now I am satisfied (finally).

I should have spent the extra money and purchased the better tool. It would have saved me time and it would have made things easier (the trigger on the cheaper drill was terrible and it had almost no control over speed). Having decent tools is important not just with power tools or hand tools, but with your programming tools and technology as well (since technology is a tool as well).

There really isn’t much to this post, but I finally just bit the bullet and purchased the better tool and got work done. Now I at least don’t have to think about what tools to purchase, I’ll be sticking with DEWALT for the foreseeable future.

WWDC 2011 Keynote: Mac OS X Lion

If you don’t like Apple products, you might as well skip over my next few posts. I’ll get back to more interesting things after a while, but for now I’m going to cover some of my thoughts on the announcements from Apple’s keynote for WWDC 2011.

First on the list is Mac OS X Lion (or 10.7, I’m not sure if they’re going to get away from numbering their OS from this point forward). Where 10.6 (Snow Leopard) was a great upgrade from the standpoint that it didn’t change much in the UI but tightened everything up and cleaned up a lot of legacy code (adios PowerPC), Lion is bringing a lot of new stuff to the table. You can find more information at http://apple.com/macosx. I’m going to cover just a couple of things that stood out to me.

Auto Save and Versions

This is a long time in coming, and it should have been something added a long time ago. Auto Save does what it says it does, it automatically saves your work for you without you having to think about it. I’m hoping that this will just become something that will become normal across all platforms because losing your work sucks, and this should make it suck just a little bit less.

Combined with Versions, it becomes quite cool. You can look back at your changes and bring stuff back if you need it on a per-document basis while working. That’s pretty cool. While there are a lot of specifics that are not known yet (how much disk space will this take up, what amount of work will it take on the part of developers to get this as well, can developers tie into this system), the idea as presented basically fixes many issues that people have about forgetting to save their work.

That’s a huge deal!

The idea that if one of my parents starts a document and it will continuously be saved while they are working so that I don’t have to go through the Microsoft Office recovery file rigamarole is very pleasing to my ears. I’m hoping it is as good as it sounds.

Mail

I currently use the Gmail web interface for my email, but the new Mail app looks pretty good. A better conversation view was definitely needed, and it has been provided. The search feature looks much improved, the interface looks nice and clean and there are probably other things I am missing. Will it be able to topple Gmail’s web interface? I don’t know, but I’ll give it a try.

One person on Twitter was asking for Apple to add in labels (Gmail labels I am expecting), but that seems odd to me. I like labels, but that is most obvious way Google has embraced email and then extended it beyond the standard, and by doing so, has caused people to be locked into Gmail’s interface and their service.

Don’t get me wrong, I am a fan of Gmail, but sometimes I wish that Google would have instead focused on keeping the basics of Gmail more in line with the RFCs, but that is neither here nor there.

I’ll give the new Mail.app a try and see what I think.

UPDATE: So it seems that there are going to be labels in the new Mail app. I’m not sure if it is a 1:1 correlation to Google’s implementation, but it is another thing for me to try out.

Lion Server

$50 from the Mac App Store when it is all said and done. I’m wondering if there is a client limit on that, but I’m excited about the prospects of a $79 server edition of Mac OS X that will allow small businesses you see what can be offered.

Granted, you need to have a Mac to take advantage of a lot of this stuff, but I am now going to be actively looking for a Mac Mini to put this on in the near future so that I can play around with the idea of hosting some of my own stuff on Mac OS X.

I do wish that they would bring back some rackmount hardware.

Overall Impressions

Lion looks like another huge leap for OS X, which is always exciting. Any inkling that the Mac is dead can be quickly tossed aside when you look at the amount of effort that has gone into Lion. It is refreshing to see so much focus on fixing problems that have been plaguing people on computers for a long time.

There are a ton of other changes, but I will leave you to look at them.

Lion, at $29, is proof that Apple is a hardware company, and that their software strategy is to help them sell more hardware to people by making their products that more compelling. Will it work for everyone? No, of course not. However, Lion is shaping up to be another great release of the OS.

The main question I have is how we are going to be able to recover from complete hard drive failures in the future. As Lion is being distributed through the Mac App Store (I guess exclusively), will we be able to burn recovery media? How will I be able to wipe my drive clean and get Lion onto it? That’s the most important worry I have at the moment.

Next up will be iOS 5.

Categories
Life

Missing “It”

I had an article at MinnPost.com this past week title ‘Too many people flee’: A dispatch from New Ulm. It was unexpected to get asked to have my response posted, but I was more than happy to have my experience and thoughts shared with more people. That is what the internet is all about, and it is also why I post here as well.

I want to first thank everyone for their kind words and comments since it was posted. I like knowing that people have read what I’ve written, whether they agree or not.

One thing that did come up in the comments is the same old tired arguments as to why people move away from rural communities. The sad part is that I know why it is done, I just think that people give up way to quickly and are worse for it. The article wasn’t about that at all. It was about my experience and why I am staying and that I feel that too many people “flee” the area (rural communities, New Ulm specifically). They missed it.

So, thanks again to everyone for reading and their comments. It happens to be a subject very near and dear to my heart and something I will be writing about more in the future.

Categories
Life Technology

Standing Desk – A Little Later

Well, the good news it that I still have my desk on top of banana boxes at the moment and I have not gone back to simply sitting.

The bad news is that I haven’t found anything better than the banana boxes to prop my desk up on. Add to that the fact that I haven’t been able to spend much time at my desk recently and I don’t have a definitive conclusion as to whether I like this better or not.

Next on my list is to find a way to make this a little more permanent, or at least sturdy. I have some stringers in my garage that I might hack up into stilts for the desk and then try and rig together a stand for the monitor so that I don’t have to look down at it.

I’ve also started just closing the MacBook and running with a single monitor so that I eliminate some of my head movement back-and-forth. A minor thing, but I like having just a single focus. Wish it was a 27″ Cinema Display … but what are you going to do.

There have been time when I wished I could have sat down, but the desk isn’t set up for that so I’ve stuck it out. Maybe that is the point of having it be stationary at the moment so that I don’t have an easy way out. I’m still thinking that a GeekDesk Max might be in my future, but I would need to greatly expand Deck78 and pay down some debt before that would happen.

While it has been inconclusive so far, I have enjoyed the standing more than I thought I would. Part of that might be that I sit at work all day, so the standing is a good change of pace.

Categories
Life

The Power of Bach

Nothing like some good Bach chorales to get your out of a funk.

I’ve had music as a major part of my life for a long time, but recently I have been putting it a little farther behind me in some ways. I’ve tried to pick up music that other people are listening to, thinking that maybe I’ve been missing something all of these years (and maybe I have). However, denying myself in the process hasn’t exactly been good for me.

As I’ve added other genres to my listening, I’ve tossed much of my classical listening aside because the three minute drive up to work (thank you MPR). I’m not saying that is what has been missing recently, but having “found” my Bach again, I can’t help but think that maybe I’ve been denying myself in the thoughts that the person of the past is not who I am anymore.

However, healthy that is not. I am still that same person, just with more experience and having made more decisions.

Time to bring back the power of Bach.