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Killing half an hour, life update
Jul. 29th, 2008 05:22 pmI am going over to my mother's house in half an hour to hopefully re-acquire my SNES, as well as sort through some junk to help clear her house of it. I plan to spend a few minutes at least making this post first, since, you know, it's been a while...
Biggest thing, obviously, is the boxes. Current count is 55, but I'm not finished, so I'm estimating 60. I'm fairly pleased with the box to garbage bag ratio though, since I'm at like 12 bags at this point. I tossed most of the back closet, and gave away a bunch of electronic stuff I was holding on to for reasons unexplainable. The HP printer is Aaron's, the LCD monitor with the dodgy backlight and the ancient woofer are JD's. I am not giving away any computers, simply because I don't want to lose any data and I didn't have time to break them down and salvage the drives and whatnot.
Most of my boxes are fluid possessions, things that are part of collections. 20 of books, and 15 or so of board games. Loose clutter is what I am trying to reduce.
Work has been, well, good and bad. A very bad thing happened last week, and I was worried a bit, but it's all right, I didn't get blamed. If you don't know more detail than that, you're in good company, I've only talked about it with a couple people.
But the good stuff is shiny new toys. They gave me a laptop, which has quickly become my primary machine (after I packed up the Mac Pro). I have been slowly migrating all my personal data to the cloud (as the Web 2.0 flakes dub it), through Yellownote, as well as Pandora (and Amie Street and Airtunes), and Google Docs, Basecamp and Campfire for work, Meebo for IM, etc. It hit me on Sunday that the last thing I would miss from the Mac Pro was my giant bookmark collection, so I wrote a quick del.icio.us importer in Ruby and threw them all up there, and packed the Mac.
I've decided that the Mac Pro will be my last desktop. Laptops, like LCD monitors a few years ago, have reached the point where they're as good as what I was using before. I don't care about expandability at all, what I cared about was dual-headedness and the hassle of moving stuff I want between multiple machines. With everything in websites, that hassle is zero, and frankly, now that I'm not sitting in my apartment all alone, I like the idea of closing the lid and making the computer go away. Not to mention, sitting on the couch or in the kitchen, instead of whatever room I've designated as the office.
Other development is that this morning, Seth, our IT lord and master, came by and said, "on our corporate phone plan, we're paying for a Blackberry we're not even using. I need a manager to request it, but if you get Mike to do so, you can have a Blackberry." A little pestering later and I have a shiny new Blackberry World Edition, hooked to our Exchange mail (for some reason, Seth is slow in hooking Exchange to our iPhones, even though he has one. I am confused, but happy). This little widget has a lot to recommend it, and I'd definitely want one if the iPhone had never been invented, but as it stands, comparison really shows you how much interface matters. Every little feature is like "why on earth would they design it that way?". With the iPhone, I basically never even notice that it has an interface. It's just my phone, it just works. The Blackberry makes me appreciate it more.
Not that I'm complaining. It's a sweet little device, even if the interface is clunky. They did one thing that as a developer I appreciate: most of the interface is text forms. Obviously this helps them develop it, and I bet these forms are being served from somewhere non-local too.
Hmm, not much else going on in my life. I bought Civilization Revolution for the DS, and it is absolutely incredible. Graphics are the same as the first Civ game, and the whole game system is streamlined so that one game lasts maybe four hours at most. It's (barely) possible to play a full game of Civ, multiplayer, in one sitting. And it even feels like you're playing Civ, which is very hard to do when you go to cut a game down like that. Everyone loves Strange Adventures in Infinite Space, but does it really still feel like Star Control II? I never thought it did.
Anyway, I should probably go clean my car out and then go to dinner. I'll try to post more often once I'm not driving four hundred miles every weekend, or putting my life into Bankers boxes.
Biggest thing, obviously, is the boxes. Current count is 55, but I'm not finished, so I'm estimating 60. I'm fairly pleased with the box to garbage bag ratio though, since I'm at like 12 bags at this point. I tossed most of the back closet, and gave away a bunch of electronic stuff I was holding on to for reasons unexplainable. The HP printer is Aaron's, the LCD monitor with the dodgy backlight and the ancient woofer are JD's. I am not giving away any computers, simply because I don't want to lose any data and I didn't have time to break them down and salvage the drives and whatnot.
Most of my boxes are fluid possessions, things that are part of collections. 20 of books, and 15 or so of board games. Loose clutter is what I am trying to reduce.
Work has been, well, good and bad. A very bad thing happened last week, and I was worried a bit, but it's all right, I didn't get blamed. If you don't know more detail than that, you're in good company, I've only talked about it with a couple people.
But the good stuff is shiny new toys. They gave me a laptop, which has quickly become my primary machine (after I packed up the Mac Pro). I have been slowly migrating all my personal data to the cloud (as the Web 2.0 flakes dub it), through Yellownote, as well as Pandora (and Amie Street and Airtunes), and Google Docs, Basecamp and Campfire for work, Meebo for IM, etc. It hit me on Sunday that the last thing I would miss from the Mac Pro was my giant bookmark collection, so I wrote a quick del.icio.us importer in Ruby and threw them all up there, and packed the Mac.
I've decided that the Mac Pro will be my last desktop. Laptops, like LCD monitors a few years ago, have reached the point where they're as good as what I was using before. I don't care about expandability at all, what I cared about was dual-headedness and the hassle of moving stuff I want between multiple machines. With everything in websites, that hassle is zero, and frankly, now that I'm not sitting in my apartment all alone, I like the idea of closing the lid and making the computer go away. Not to mention, sitting on the couch or in the kitchen, instead of whatever room I've designated as the office.
Other development is that this morning, Seth, our IT lord and master, came by and said, "on our corporate phone plan, we're paying for a Blackberry we're not even using. I need a manager to request it, but if you get Mike to do so, you can have a Blackberry." A little pestering later and I have a shiny new Blackberry World Edition, hooked to our Exchange mail (for some reason, Seth is slow in hooking Exchange to our iPhones, even though he has one. I am confused, but happy). This little widget has a lot to recommend it, and I'd definitely want one if the iPhone had never been invented, but as it stands, comparison really shows you how much interface matters. Every little feature is like "why on earth would they design it that way?". With the iPhone, I basically never even notice that it has an interface. It's just my phone, it just works. The Blackberry makes me appreciate it more.
Not that I'm complaining. It's a sweet little device, even if the interface is clunky. They did one thing that as a developer I appreciate: most of the interface is text forms. Obviously this helps them develop it, and I bet these forms are being served from somewhere non-local too.
Hmm, not much else going on in my life. I bought Civilization Revolution for the DS, and it is absolutely incredible. Graphics are the same as the first Civ game, and the whole game system is streamlined so that one game lasts maybe four hours at most. It's (barely) possible to play a full game of Civ, multiplayer, in one sitting. And it even feels like you're playing Civ, which is very hard to do when you go to cut a game down like that. Everyone loves Strange Adventures in Infinite Space, but does it really still feel like Star Control II? I never thought it did.
Anyway, I should probably go clean my car out and then go to dinner. I'll try to post more often once I'm not driving four hundred miles every weekend, or putting my life into Bankers boxes.
