Category: Life

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Life

What is a computer?

Here is a quote from Matt Gemmell in an article called Low Expectations about the PC industry:

The keyboard, touchpad and screen are the computer …

Really he is harping on a review of one of the new laptops coming out from Samsung. In it, he hits on something that is often overlooked when reviewing a computer: how you interact with the thing.

Actually, it is probably something we overlook in many aspects of our lives. We are constantly interacting with objects, but is the interaction designed for humans or is it designed for other goals: profitability (poor quality, cheap materials, etc.) or machines (overly complicated) for example?

Bringing it back around, when you are looking at purchasing a computer, are we finally at a point where we can make our decision on what to buy on how the computer looks and feels? How it is designed and how well it is built instead of how much horsepower they were able to sneak into a 2 inch case?

I hope so.

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Life Technology

My Backpack

Michael Lopp, writing at Rands in Repose, wrote about his bag he currently uses.

Well, it’s a backpack. That got me thinking about my own bag, which is also (now) a backpack. So, I’m writing about it here.

I’ve used a number of bags with the many different portable computers that I have owned or used. I started with a Brenthaven messenger bag with my 2005 Apple PowerBook G4 and have probably had maybe a dozen other bags since then along with six other portable computers. I’ve never really been happy with any bag I’ve owned because they always involve tradeoffs. However, that is just the way it is.

I’ve owned generic-looking bags from Targus and two bags from STM Bags. While the STM Bags were very good, and my wife still uses one for her MacBook, they were both too small for me to use as my every-situation-I-can-think-of bag, but were great for just going to work and back home again.

The other issue I came upon was that they are all shoulder bags of some sort. While nothing I carry is terribly heavy, walking to work was becoming an issue because I tended to put the bag on the same shoulder every time. While not causing any pain yet, I could definitely see it happening in the future.

Too small, single-shoulder-only … definitely needed to find something else.

I hadn’t looked at backpacks ever because I was thinking that I had graduated from high school/college and was done with that sort of thing! Wow, what an infantile position to take. I should have done this a long time ago.

So this is the bag I ended up settling on.

My backpackThat is it’s default look when on the floor of our office at Martin Luther College. It is just a SwissGear (Wenger) backpack from Target. It was the cheapest one I could find that offered any type of padding between the backpack and my back.

The main reasons for getting a backpack are these:

  1. Can hold a lot
  2. Spreads weight across both shoulders
  3. Zips up nice and tight

The last one doesn’t really matter because other bags do as well, but the top two were the important ones.

The three compartments (not counting that little zipper one on the front where I keep the stray set of keys or USB drives) allow me to carry the following in it every day:

  • 13″ MacBook Pro
  • InCase neoprene sleeve
  • iPad w/Apple cover
  • A book (usually a large book with a programming language somewhere on the cover)
  • MacBook Pro power adapter
  • Apple headphones
  • iPhone/iPad cable
  • iPhone charger
  • 7′ ethernet cable
  • Medium sketchbook
  • 4 pens
  • Field Notes notebook

There is also a ton of space left. On my list of things to get are a small surge suppressor (if you can find out that outputs 10 watts for an iPad, let me know), a tiny USB hub, and maybe an extra iPad adapter to replace the iPhone one. Right now I’m stuck charging the iPad at home since I have only one adapter.

It is just about the perfect bag. It’s not pretty, but it gets the job done. I need to spend a few minutes and search out my winter hat before I can start walking in the cold.

On an unrelated note: my coworker is not crazy. Lined pants are a great investment, and one I might have to make for the future.

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Life

Getting a start on New Years

Yeah, it’s December, but I was waxing nostalgic this morning as I rocked my 4 month-old son at 5:15 in the morning. I thought back to what I was hoping to accomplish this year and taking stock in whether I had achieved any of those goals or, more likely, did they change.

From there, I really just stopped thinking for a moment, tried to doze off for a little bit, and then woke up again to a different thought. This time, what do I want to accomplish in the next 90 days, which happens to contain the New Year?

Mainly, it is a similar goal to most years for me: learn how to program. I still haven’t achieved this goal, so I refined it down a little bit more for myself. What do I, SPECIFICALLY, want to accomplish in the next 90 days. After playing around with some lofty goals, I decided to force myself into a reality check … let’s set a really small goal and accomplish that first before we get ahead of ourselves (that was myself talking to … myself).

“Alright, self,” my self said, “so where do we want to go from here?”

That’s when it hit me: I had a goal sitting right there, started but never finished, which would work very nicely to get the ball rolling.

Enter Learn Ruby The Hard Way.

I am a few exercises in, started and then aborted maybe a month back, and the kind of goal I need to achieve to get some momentum going for myself. It is very simple (in concept) and something that I can achieve if I just put myself to it.

So there you have it: in the next 90 days I aim to finish Learn Ruby the Hard Way. After that, my selves shall reconvene to figure out what is next.

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Life

A Local Wiki for a Town Near You

I stumbled upon LocalWiki today and then took a look at their sample site, Denton Wiki, serving Denton, Texas.

Basically, it is a wiki dedicated to a community where community members (read: anyone) can edit the pages about the community. It is meant to be a collective gathering of information about the said community, much like Wikipedia is the gathering of “all human knowledge” (or something grandiose like that).

The idea really hits me in a soft spot. I’m thinking that maybe such a wiki setup for small communities might help to foster a collective knowledge in the area along with giving some visibility to the many places, people, activities, and just ideas that are sometimes hidden in smaller communities.

I’m contemplating maybe trying to get something for New Ulm off the ground. If anything, it would be fun to take a look at the platform itself.

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Life Technology

Whatever works …

Marco Arment has written a blog post entitled Whatever works for you and I recommend that you read it. This blog post really piggybacks on a lot of overall ideas he posted about there.

I’ll admit that I’m still a raging Apple fanboy, and I primarily use the stuff coming out of Cupertino, but my approach to what others use for technology is increasingly coming around to what Marco is talking about. I just don’t have the time nor the energy to argue about technology choices anymore. I have a family to occupy my energy and much better things to focus on.

The other aspect of things is that there is just a ton of “good enough” technology out there to get work done with. If you buy almost any Windows PC available today with the intent of looking at stuff on the web, you are going to be fine. Yes, there are things I would do to just clean things up and make it a better experience, but they are minor. Heck, even the newest Celeron chips are not as terrible as they used to be.

I choose to pay more for what I consider to be a superior computing experience which Apple provides for me. I have a MacBook Pro, iPhone, iPad, and Airport Extreme … and they all work together flawlessly. My wife has a MacBook, iPhone, and uses the same Airport Extreme while at home. For us, it “just works”, but if you don’t want to go that route then more power to you.

However, I also take it a step further and still support people using whatever technology they decide to use. Sometimes this means taking a crash course in a new technology I’m not familiar with, but that can be part of the fun. I’ll try and make almost anything work as best I can, but when the chips come down, I will let them know my opinion if they ask for it.

In closing, I agree with pretty much everything Marco says. Honestly, use what you want and enjoy it. It is pretty amazing what we can do with even the cheapest of smartphones today, or the least expensive laptop available, so DO something with it.