New Home Office

July 8, 2009
Entrance

Click photo to view gallery of pictures

So I recently decided it was time to build out a home office for myself with how much I work from home.  Previously, I had a desk setup with all of my computer stuff in what is supposed to be the dining room of my town house.  Unfortunately this room is also the only route from the kitchen to the rest of the house.  So I always had to walk by and see all my work stuff crammed onto this single desk.  I didn’t even have room for my printer, so it sat on the floor.  It just sort of made me feel down when I sat down to work.  That’s no way to start out the day.

So I decided to wipe out my (now former) spare bedroom and turn it into a home office.  It was pretty much the perfect size for it.  So I went up to Ikea and bought a large “slab” desk at a great price along with a nice office-rated chair and a small file cabinet / printer stand.  Then I went to BJ’s and was able to locate a good deal on a 32″ LCD TV along with a perfectly sized TV stand for it all at a reasonable price.

It’s worked out awesome.  The desk is large enough to fit my 13.3″ MacBook, 24″ Apple Cinema Display, and a 21(ish)” secondary display that I sometimes use.  I use my old MacBook (a first gen BlackBook) as a media center for the TV.  So I’m able to watch Hulu and things like that, which works out perfect.  No need to pay a monthly fee for a cable box since I can pretty much get anything I might want to watch while in my office from Hulu or I can just plug it directly in the wall to watch the local news channels since you don’t need a box for them.

Now I just need to get some cable management in effect and I’ll be very happy with it all.

Posted in Personal | Comments (0)

New MacBook

October 23, 2008
MacBook 2008

MacBook 2008

So I recently purchased one of the new MacBooks released just last week.  I’ve now had about 5 days to play with it, so thought I’d give my initial thoughts.

First, the hardware.  Here is what I have:

  • 2.0 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo
  • 4 GB 1066 Mhz DDR3 SDRAM
  • 250 GB Serial ATA Drive @ 5400 RPM

It feels a lot beefier then my previous MacBook (first gen, black model upgraded to 2GB RAM).  I’ve been using my previous MacBook for both work and personal usage for the past several months (primarily personal usage before that).  Lately I was feeling it strain at times.  I’m a web developer, so that in general means my normal suite of development tools running (Apache, MySQL, Navicat, TextMate) and also having to run Windows XP in Parallels and, at least at times, Photoshop.  Then of course there’s the other average stuff like IM, Email, etc that the average person runs.  All of that together is a workout for most computers, so I didn’t really fault my MacBook for straining under the load at times.

The new MacBook however, seems to carry the load with ease.  Today for example I had probably about 10-12 app’s running, plus Parallels/XP with 1GB of RAM dedicated to itself, and Photoshop, even with all of that running, it was still extremely responsive.  Definite thumbs up.

Some of the other items I’ll comment on because they seem to be getting coverage:

  • High Gloss Screen: This really doesn’t bother me.  I don’t really understand why some people have such negative reactions to it, but they’re entitled to their opinions.  I will say that I tend to work in low-light environments, and working from home a lot, I have a great deal of control over my work environment (thanks Business Bullpen!).  So I never notice a reflection.
  • Aluminum Body: It does feel sturdy.  I wouldn’t say it feels significanly more sturdy then my old MacBook, but it is very handsome and doesn’t pick up the oil smears like the previous black model can tend to do.
  • No-Button Trackpad: It works.  Nicely.  This was by far the feature I was most apprehensive about when I purchased.  My initial reaction when I read about it was, “Oh man!  They ruined a great laptop.”  I currently use it with the functionality to mimic two buttons.  I notice that I have to be careful to click distinctly to the left or right to make sure it does the correct click.  It seems to have a little bit of gray-area where it decides which to give you on its own, but now that my fingers are getting trained, I’ve noticed it becoming a non-issue.  I’m very happy that they still gave it the feel of a button clicking, which is part of what I initially thought they’d taken away.

Now, let’s cover some of the software I first installed, just for the geeks of you that might be interested, in absolutely no particular order:

  • MAMP – Great “get up and running fast” dev environment.  I highly recommend it unless you have a real need for a pretty strong custom configuration in your dev environment.  If you’re building things that will end up in shared hosting environments though, MAMP likely has you covered.
  • Navicat – My GUI of choice for interfacing with a MySQL server.  I’ve tried CocoaMySQL, and I know it’s free (Navicat is not), but Navicat just gets it done better for me.
  • TextMate – This is definitely my editor of choice for web development now.  In previous positions I’ve used BBEdit, and even DreamWeaver, but TextMate seems like the right balance between features, speed, and ease of use.
  • NeoOffice – Google Docs doesn’t quite take care of all my office needs, at least not well enough.  NeoOffice is an off-shoot of OpenOffice, but made specifically for the Mac.
  • iTerm – Improved and tabbed Terminal, ’nuff said.
  • Transmit – Great FTP client for the Mac.
  • Parallels – Sadly I can’t give up on Windows all together, I still need to test my code in IE 6/7.
  • FireFox – Duh …
  • Fluid – Easily create app’s out of your web-apps (single-site browser).  Whenever I tell people about this app, they almost always get envious when I start mentioning the websites we all use that I’ve virtually made into desktop app’s.
  • Adium – Best multi-service chat application there is.
  • Dropbox – 2GB for free?  How can you pass it up.  It’s installed on all my computers.
  • JungleDisk – Mount a Amazon S3 bucket as a drive on your computer.  This is another one installed on all of my machines.  I use it for both off-site personal storage as well as off-site backups.

I would say that covers most of the essentials.  I’m sure there are other applications that I’m using, but the list is probably already stretching to the realm of non-noteworthy.

One other thing I will mention is that this is the first time I’ve started messing with Time Machine.  It really is quite nice.  I use an external USB hard drive to let it keep my backups.  Basically it keeps hourly backups of my files for 24 hours, daily backups for a month, and weekly backups until it runs out of space on your backup drive.  That’s pretty good peace of mind, and nice if you happened to delete a file and realize tomorrow that you want it back or need to roll back some changes.  As I mentioned, I’m pursuing other backup means as well (such as S3), so I don’t feel it’s the only answer, but it is a good answer.

Posted in Technology | Comments (0)

All I want is …

July 21, 2008

… to find a company that believes in offering good customer service.  I’m growing so tired of the lackluster customer service.  I am a user of many services, and it’s getting to the point where I think it’s time to cut all or most of them off.  It’s become absurd.  I don’t expect them to be perfect, but when they make a mistake, I want to see them actively working to correct the problem, not relying on me to follow behind them with a whip to get it done.

Comcast — My issues with Comcast are well documented.  I finally got to the point where I cut two thirds of my service with them off completely.  If I could I would have cancelled it all totally, but I’m not quite willing to go without TV all together, and unfortunately, they have a monopoly on my address.  It took basically throwing a temper tantrum here on my blog to get anything at all done with them.

Apple & AT&T — Apple should be very, very ashamed to be listed side by side with AT&T.  However they’re the ones that went into an agreement with them for providing the iPhone, so they’re equally accountable.  Every one of us where I work has an iPhone.  All of us have service issues.  At home (a rather well-populated area of a large city) it’s easy for me to slip into no service, unless I properly stand on my head, pat my stomache and juggle, it’s difficult for me to get a signal.  I commonly have lesser signal if one at all then my friends do from other providers.  “More bars in more places” ?  There’s a lie if I’ve ever heard one.

Apple — Yep, once again, it’s time to list them.  MobileMe … what a crock.  It’s been nothing but trouble since they launched it.  I signed up for a trial account and was never able to login to the web interface for it.  It kept telling me invalid username or password … despite the fact that I could connect to my iDisk and IMAP into my email account (meaning I had the correct username and password).  Their email support has yet to respond to my 3 emails, and I’ve only been able to catch them on chat once.  They’ve now billed my credit card for roughly $115 … for those of you unaware, that’s not even the correct price for the MobileMe service.  They no longer have the email form up on their support website.  There’s only a link for Chat support, and it’s only available during certain hours.  Apple is supposed to be better then this.  They’re supposed to be one of those companies that represents “all I want.”

Verizon — /sigh.  They provide my DSL service.  No HUGE complaints here, although I am rather upset with the fact they’ve lied to me.  Upon the time of my first bill, I received an email saying they’d tried to charge my credit card on file and were unable to and they wanted me to login to make a payment.  The credit card is a debit card to one of my checking accounts.  It had plenty of money.  I figured maybe they had messed up when recording my credit card information during sign up, so I logged into my account and made a one time payment.  The next morning I received an email from my bank saying they had charged my card (the original one) for the exact same amount.  They double-billed me.  I called in … and of course I got India.  They asked me to fax in proof of payment for the one time payment, which I did immediately.  They told me I would receive a refund to my credit card.  I’ve never received the credit they promised.  I also confirmed with them that I wanted a refund to my credit card, not a credit to my account.  They confirmed this for me.  Guess what’s happened?  They put a credit on my account.  So instead of me getting to earn interest on the money, they’re getting to.  I can’t seem to convince anyone in India why I find this to be a problem.  My bank won’t do anything for me because they said technically I gave them permission to charge my account.  There’s a Verizon office down the street from me, but at this exact moment, I don’t have it in me to walk in and have a come-to-<insert deity here> talk with them in person.

I just don’t understand why companies have such a hard time with customer service.  They’re constantly getting away with things that if I did at my job, would result in immediate termination.

How did we get here?

Corporations are acting like they can just steamroll their bread-and-butter, the consumers.

They want access to do EFT’s directly from our bank accounts.  Ok, if they let me EFT their account, I’ll consider allowing them to do it to my account.

They are able to threaten our “permanent record” (AKA credit report) for not paying them … even if they aren’t providing their service as promised.  Tell you what, I’ll consider that fair if I can report them for not providing services as promised and have it make a financial impact on their business for up to 7 years.

If there’s a problem with our account, they can and will call us at all hours of the day or night.  Yet if we need something from them we need to call Mon-Fri between 9a-5p, or talk to someone who’s English is barely a second language.

Why are they supposed to be trustworthy with our financial information, but the idea of a consumer having their service providers financial information would be considered crazy-talk in our current paradigm.  In my opinion, it is obvious we need a paradigm shift.  The corporations have proven, crystal clear, that they cannot be trusted.

Again, how did we get here?  It’s absurd what we’re putting up with.

Posted in Personal | Comments (0)

Development Environment up

April 29, 2008

Well, I decided to install Leopard not too long ago. When I did it, I decided to go with a clean install, which meant basically destroying my development environment. So I finally went through and got everything setup so I can have local URL’s for sites I’m working on, MySQL, Apache/PHP, etc. I have to admit, I am pretty impressed with how it’s all come together. I feel like I could really get some things done with this setup.

I’ve also improved with my SVN knowledge recently, and have even been investigating git, which I must say, has some neat features.  I’m just not sure that it’s the route I want to go at the moment. Actually, a repository of some sort is the only thing I’m really lacking at the moment. Where I’m hosting my website runs a SVN server, so I can setup repositories there. But, I’ve sort of become a trac junkie, and they don’t have that installed and hooked up to SVN. I know of a decently priced service that makes the whole SVN/Trac thing so easy, but I don’t really have enough going on at the moment to make it worth spending money on for personal stuff.

I could always go for github, which is an option, but I really enjoy having trac.

Anyhow, sadly I have pretty much zero freelance work at the moment (I’ve been turning it down for the most part, except for some really small projects), and I don’t have any ideas for things I’d like to make. So I suppose now that I have this all setup and figured out … all I really need is an idea. /sigh

I’ve been considering trying to get into the WP community, but I guess I’m somewhat nervous about the idea to be honest. I’ve never really contributed to an open source project, certainly not one as massive as WP has become. I’m not even sure where I’d begin, heh. It would be cool to solve a bug or something and have it committed. There’d be a feeling of accomplishment there.

Posted in Personal | Comments (3)

More on Apple & the iPhone

July 7, 2007

Just wanted to comment on two blog posts/articles I just read. The first is from All Things Digital and can be found here. Basically the article is a somewhat condemning look at the iPhone. He comments a lot about traveling with the iPhone internationally and also about the keyboard, etc. Some of the stuff he talks about I don’t really know enough about to attempt a rebuttal, but a fair amount of it is either inaccurate or lacking information to the point that it makes me wonder if I can trust what he says on the things I don’t know much about. Two quick examples are him giving the keyboard a hard time in portrait mode. This is pretty subjective, so I’d urge anyone to try it for themselves. I also have found that mine is truly getting better as time goes on, so I wonder how much time he really spent with the phone and how actively he used it. Another part is he leads the reader to believe that when you need the battery replaced, you will have to go without a phone for a few days while Apple replaces it, however, they already have a policy in place that says they will supply you with a loaner iPhone while your battery gets replaced (the loaner will take your SIM card and will sync up all your information as soon as you sync with iTunes).

Now, if you want to give them a hard time about something, I would jump over to this post from Robert Scoble about Apple’s lack of presence at the iPhone developers conference. I think that Scoble is right on in his assessment. It’s amazing that the developers voluntarily organized and are participating in this conference, with no support or even presence from Apple. Apple is losing in two very big ways on this one. The first of which, as Scoble mentions, is that the developers are having to do all of the leg work. They obviously want to build for the platform and help it succeed, but as in 1989, Apple is doing nothing to assist them. The second part they’re missing out on, which Scoble doesn’t touch on, is that by them not participating the developers are going to do whatever they please, and Apple has no opportunity to help guide them in a consistent and unified direction.

The developers are going to find a way to do whatever they want. Apple is missing out. By making it this hard, there is going to be growing resentment in the developer community towards Apple, so as I see it one of two things will happen. Either the developers will strong-arm their way through and make the iPhone do what they want it to, completely bypassing Apple’s desires/wishes/vision for the product (thus destroying a lot of what people like about Apple), or a competitor will rise which makes development easy, and the developers will stop focusing on the iPhone and instead move to the product that doesn’t require them to fight in order to develop for it. Admittedly, it will be hard, and most likely take awhile for a competitor to hope to replace the iPhone, but if Apple thinks it’s not possible, they just need to look back at 1989.

I guess there is a third option, which is Apple deciding to release development tools for the iPhone and releasing a method to develop for it in other ways then just web and Ajax. I hope this happens, but as of right now, I see no signs of it going this route. For the record in case you don’t know me, I am a web developer that is familiar and comfortable with Ajax. To me, a web developer saying they need to do more, is a statement that shouldn’t be taken lightly.

Posted in Technology | Comments (0)

Universal Music & iTunes

July 6, 2007

Stories like this are really starting to get on my nerves.  All Things Digital brings us a story about Universal Music deciding to not renew its contract with iTunes, and instead continuing with an at-will style of selling.  From the sounds of it, they want to see things like variable pricing of music put in place, etc.

It doesn’t annoy me that the story is being told, it annoys me that the story is there to be told.  Music companies in particular, and companies across all industries need to learn not to bite the hand that feeds them. It’s not the artists that feed them, it’s not iTunes that feed them, it is the consumers buying the music.  Stop pissing on us or sooner or later, we’re going to take away that multi-million dollar roof sheltering you from the outdoors and the fine foods that you eat (yeah, I’m being dramatic, I know).

Posted in Technology | Comments (0)

iPhone keyboard

July 5, 2007

The iPhone keyboard is growing on me slowly. I’m able to type with two thumbs in landscape mode and I’m pretty close to it in portrait mode as well. In fact, I’m typing this entry on my iPhone and its not that painful really. I certainly wouldn’t want to write a long entry on it but I can’t think of many mobile devices that I would want to do that on.

Earlier I commented on hoping that blogs and websites don’t start releasing special themes especially for the iPhone. I still agree with that for the most part, but I would like to add a little to the thought — web applications do need to try to offer special interfaces, at least for core functions. Like a good interface for adding a post to WordPress would be nice, and applications like meebo are definitely going to need to tweak their interface if they want to service iPhone users. The key problem in both of those examples is that the input fields are almost impossible to see when the keyboard comes up. Having to close the keyboard and re-center the screen just isn’t going to cut it. I don’t mean to single out these apps though, all web apps are going to have this issue for the most part, and it’s quite possible they and other apps will decide its not worth it to refactor their interface for the iPhone and other small mobile devices (although I imagine some  won’t be able to ignore it).

Unrelated to the keyboard, another item i just realized while writing this entry is also the inability to scroll within an element of a page (like the input area for writing a post in WP or the inability to scroll up into chat history on meebo but some of that is a shortcoming on the part of Safari on the iPhone).

Posted in Technology | Comments (3)

Some further thoughts on the iPhone

July 1, 2007

This is a continuation of my review of the iPhone from earlier.

  • I was able to get an adapter to let my iPhone work with my current FM Transmitter setup in my car. It cost me $10. On the way home from the store I plugged it in and started playing music and it’s just as nice as using my real iPod to listen to music in my car. Then I navigated to the phone and made a phone call. This is very cool, and something I’ve wanted for awhile. Throughout the navigation to making the call, my music kept playing, then when I initiated the call, the music paused and I heard ringing through my car speakers. It basically turned my cars sound system into a speakerphone. So basically, the iPhone replaces those expensive bluetooth car phone kits that you can get which tie into your cars sound system (at least somewhat).
  • On a similar note as the above comment, the integration with the phone and the iPod continues when listening over the headphones. If a call comes in, the music pauses and there’s a microphone on the headphone wire, so you can start talking. You just give the microphone a little squeeze to answer the call, and another squeeze to end. If you’re just listening to music you also squeeze the mic to pause and restart the music. So simple, yet so smart.
  • It desperately needs iChat or some sort of AIM/GTalk/Etc. chat client. I know some folks that are complaining about the keyboard might find this idea horrible, but I wouldn’t be wanting to use it for long conversations, just enough to let me pop online and have a quick IM conversation with someone. You might be wondering why I can’t just do this with SMS, but believe it or not, I am sometimes in places that have WiFi but no cell signal (with how my apartment is situated in the building, my bedroom is one of these places).
  • It would be nice if there was at least some game on the device to kill time with. I liked BrickBreaker on my BlackBerry for this, and I usually put Tetris or something on most other phones I’ve owned. I think something like BrickBreaker would work on the iPhone too, you could just drag your finger back and forth to bounce the ball. The interface is already there for it.
  • The keyboard is nice, but I’m sticking behind what I said in my earlier post. If you’re proficient on a thumb-style keyboard, you’re going to be slower on the iPhone keyboard. I’ve become pretty fast with it, but in an Apple keyboard demo video, they show a guy do it with two thumbs and he flies through writing an email. So I opened notepad and for quite awhile just rambled on, typing out my thoughts, using two thumbs. It was dropping keypresses like crazy. It wasn’t an issue of it being innaccurate or me fat-fingering words, it just wouldn’t register some of my keypresses. So the software never even got the opportunity to try to correct my spelling (which it is actually VERY good at when I just type with my index finger). When using just my one finger, I’ve already gotten to where I rarely have to correct it, and I actually have faith in it correcting me. I might see a type-o I’ve made, but I’ll continue on spelling the word because 99% of the time, it’s going to realize what I meant to type and fix it for me.
Posted in Technology | Comments (0)

iPhone

June 30, 2007

iPhoneSo I purchased an iPhone yesterday. All things considered, I ended up pretty lucky in getting it. I was going by the AT&T store anyhow to meet someone that wanted to buy my Blackjack (which I decomissioned a little over a month ago). Anyhow, the line had started forming, and the store was closed until 6pm when the iPhone’s went on sale. I got there around 5:45 or so. So I decided to go ahead and wait in line since I needed to get in the store to get to the guy wanting to buy my Blackjack. I only had to wait in line for about 30 minutes total. When I got in, I took a quick look and decided to go ahead and purchase the 8GB model.

I’ve been playing with it ever since and for the most part, I am very pleased with it. I don’t quite buy into the whole “this is going to change the way everyone thinks about mobile phones.” Sorry, but it’s a VERY nice phone/ipod/browser in my opinion. I don’t think that we’re going to suddenly see a flurry of providers sending people home to activate their phones or anything like that. I was lucky in that my phone activated instantly, unlike some other reports I’ve read of people waiting for a few hours for activation (my guess is AT&T/Apple got swamped with activation requests).

Some of the features I’ll comment on:

  • Keyboard: It’s definitely nice, and a LOT better then I expected. I am able to comfortably use it for typing URL’s, SMS, and brief emails. So I am impressed … but … it is not going to replace physical “thumb” QWERTY keyboards. If you are proficient (and by proficient I mean you type with both thumbs and can look away from the keyboard without making massive mistakes) with a thumb keyboard, you will be slower at data entry on this. What they say about “trusting” it is true. You need to just type away and let it figure it out, it is extremely smart. But typing with one finger is just slower then going with both thumbs, no doubt about it.
  • Browser: This is definitely something that sets it aside from any other mobile device. Having a real browser on the phone is so nice. You can comfortably read websites like CNN, blogs, etc. I actually hope that bloggers/sites do NOT try to release special iPhone themes for their sites. It would be an injustice to the browser on the iPhone. I was out with friends last night and folks started having various side conversations and I started playing around with it and before I knew it, I had cleared out my unread items in Google Reader. It was completely comfortable to do. My eyes didn’t feel strained and navigation was nearly flawless.
  • Phone: It’s a pretty good phone. The sound quality is decent, getting the keypad up and working with it is easy enough. iTunes sync’s all of your contacts over from your Address Book on your Mac, so I was able to easily have all of my contacts available.
  • SMS: It uses the “conversation” style txt messaging, sort of like BlackBerry’s. So you can easily carry on txt conversations with multiple people and not get totally lost in the conversations (I txt a lot, so this is great to find out).
  • Google Maps: As many people have already said, this is quite possibly better then Google Maps itself. It is actually one of the applications I’ve been using to show off the iPhone to friends and none of them have not said “Wow” and left their jaw open after seeing it.
  • WiFi: It reliably picks up my secured home network, so in the apartment I can easily browse, taking advantage of my broadband speeds. If I’m out and it senses a network, it asks me if I’d like to join it instead of using EDGE.
  • EDGE: I really haven’t had problems with the speed. It’s not as fast as browsing at home on my computer over broadband, but I would not call it painful by any means. I wouldn’t have expected it to be as fast as my home computer browsing either.
  • Voicemail: This is really nice. When a voicemail is left for you, it evidently gets downloaded to your phone or something along those lines. You can just click listen and the voicemail instantly starts playing. There’s no need to dial in to voicemail.

Anyhow, I’ll try to do a follow up post after I’ve had some more time to play with it some more as I did with the Blackjack. I will mention a nitpick I just found out this morning however …

I went to get in my car, where I have a setup for an FM transmitter that I use with my regular iPod. It’s not one of the iTrip things that relies on sitting flush against the top of the iPod. My transmitter basically plugs in like a set of headphones would. I’m not sure if part of the plug is too fat to let the pin go far enough in or what, but regardless, I couldn’t get it to play music with my FM transmitter, instead it defaulted to playing with the iPhone’s built-in speaker, which is obviously unacceptable for listening to music in your car. So it looks like I will be looking for some other means of playing music in my car if I don’t want to carry my regular iPod.

Anyhow, that’s all for now. And yes, Pat, I know I’m a lamer.

Posted in Technology | Comments (3)

Steve Jobs and Bill Gates Together

May 31, 2007

All Things Digital has a video of the interview from D5 with Bill Gates and Steve Jobs on stage together. I had a link for it in my link blog, but I just finished up watching the full version of it and thought it was worth mentioning here. Both of these guys completely fascinate me whenever I hear them speak (especially Bill Gates for weird reasons). I don’t always agree with everything they say, and I think both can be a little “silly” (in the bad way) at times, but you can’t disregard the fact that they’ve both largely shaped the technology world (if not the world) and will most likely continue to do so for awhile still. It’s worthwhile hearing what they have to say.

Here is the Highlight Reel, check the links below the video if you’re interested in watching the full interview (which you’ll need to do if you want to hear more then just the funny bits).

Posted in Technology | Comments (0)