Wazzapedia.

Apparently, I’ve begun a tradition of updating monthly. Not intentionally; I only realised after I started writing this entry that the previous one was a month ago.

This month I:
- “Discovered” David Allen’s book “Getting Things Done”.
- Switched. Primarily accessing the online world via a 20″ G5 iMac
- “Discovered” Merlin Mann’s 43 Folders, thereby bringing together the first two items in my list.
- Started drinking various Coca-Cola branded products with “Zero” in their name almost exclusively (within the context of carbonated sugar water).

I had a lengthy post to write, except I decided to leave it, and post it “later”.

Now this is a short post, laying the groundwork for future posts, which should happen a little more often.

Something has changed. It’s been in the wind for a while, but it seems to grow stronger each day.

I grew up with a father who was in full-time self-employment in the electronics industry. He also had a keen interest in computers, which meant that I grew up around electronic gadgetry and computers. This resulted in me having an almost-unhealthy obsession with the trivia and minutae of computer systems, and a habit of constantly fiddling with hardware and a constant stream of software. I used to read a wide collection of computer magazines, every month. I was constantly designing new systems (admittedly, for a few years that was part of how I made my living), but mostly because I enjoyed the process. I liked the fiddling, and the fine details.

As I get older it seems that life gets more complicated. That’s the rub. After all these years of collecting utilities and fonts, skinning my apps and modifiying my PC’s user interface, collecting computer hardware and doing my own upgrades, it seems that something within me has snapped. I’m becoming increasingly irritated by the things that used to fascinate me. See, I think it’s all about control.

iTunes is a good example. For several years I’ve had a growing collection of MP3s. I have a considerable collection of CDs (as well as boxes of cassettes, and a box of LPs). As my collection grew, I had an increasing struggle with managing the collection. How do I sort them? How do I track duplicates? What about compilations? What application should I use to rip my CDs? I insisted on sorting them manually, because I wanted to be in control. It was taking an increasing amount of time.

Then came the fateful day that I could purchase an iPod that was larger than my collection of MP3s. Of course, unless I wanted a painful amount of work, this meant using iTunes to manage my iPod. I gave in, and ceded control of my collection to iTunes (however, I kept a backup… just in case…).

After starting to work with iTunes, it was like a great weight had been lifted from my shoulders. iTunes is now doing the heavy lifting in managing my MP3 collection. And it’s simple. I no longer need to concern myself with the minutae of managing my collection – I can just listen to my music. Drop a new CD in, rip the tracks, away I go.

I once had an extensive collection of pirated games. Several years ago, I destroyed the lot and started collecting legitimate games. Recently, I’ve looked at my collection of games, and realised… I don’t actually play any of them. If I play, I mainly play WoW. I don’t use most of the utilities I have installed on my PC, because most of them were for control of some obscure feature.

When it comes down to it, I don’t want to come home from work and fiddle with my PC anymore. If I sit down to use it, I just want to get something done. I have a beefy PC that I built as a machine that could drive my graphics & web design software, but could also play any games I throw at it.

I have to constantly make sure that Windows Update, my anti-spyware & anti-virus software are all running and up to date. I still get faced with the occasional blue-screen because my graphics card throws a wobbly in WoW, or because my PC occasionally decides it doesn’t like one of my USB devices. Normally my iPaq (either that, or it decides it needs to reinstall the drivers so it can talk to the iPaq. Honestly, it’s beginning to drive me crazy.

Perhaps I’m becoming the anti-hacker. I read a friend’s blog today, where he had a lengthy to-do list of things that he had to get done on his Linux box before he could get down to the business of getting some work done. I can’t think of anything more painful than sitting down and trying to configure Linux to get something done. Some people find pleasure in that – I used to be one of them.

Honestly, I don’t want to spend hours and hours fiddling with makefiles and dependencies, just to get an office suite running that will almost open files correctly from Microsoft Office in Linux. I shouldn’t have to download the latest drivers for my graphics card, spend twenty minutes fiddling with settings and sacrifice a chicken to get a game to run in Windows. When I pick up a hammer or screwdriver, I don’t spend half my time trying to configure the tool to get it work with a nail or screw. I want a computer that just works. I want to spend less time configuring, and more time creating.

And honestly, I’m staring at one of the new G5 iMac’s and wondering “Would I be able to get some real work done?”

I blogged last night about the dearth of blogging tools for OSX.

When I first got a LiveJournal (yes, I have one of those too), I cycled through the available offline editors until settling upon SeMagic. When I got Eddie, I stumbled across a LiveJournal widget that did everything I wanted.

While I googled for all the different phrases I could come up with that involved OSX, blog, editor, I couldn’t locate anything that did what I wanted.

This morning, I came across a link to Dashboard Widgets. Lo and behold, under the Post and Upload section there was a widget for WordPress.

Still a little underpowered (no editing, misbehaves after posting, no pinging?) but functional.

Another step towards the dark side.

While I’m cleaning out my closet, might as well come clean with this little factoid. I’m a small-S switcher.

I couldn’t bring myself to throw away thousands of dollars worth of investment in my PC platform to become a Switcher. I guess that makes me a switcher.

My inability to commit to the House of Jobs stems from several issues.

Firstly, there was the fear of the unknown. I’d played with a friend’s Macs (yes, plural) a few times, but what if I didn’t like it? What if I couldn’t cope? What about gaming? What if I couldn’t get all the tools I needed? (In order… I do, I can, OSX is not really a gaming environment, and I’ll get to that a bit later).

Secondly, as mentioned, there was my existing investment in my PC platform. I think I must be one of the few people in the world who actually owns all the software on his PC. That includes over 60 games and the Adobe, Macromedia and Microsoft Office suites. Not pointing the finger, just that in my past self-employed life I didn’t want to run the risk of losing everything over a dodgy copy of Office (of course, there’s a whole school of thought that even a legitimate copy of Office is “dodgy”, but I digress).

So I took the easy way out. I bought a Mac mini. Quite honestly, I wanted one from the moment I saw them. I couldn’t justify the cost (even that small cost), particularly configured with the options I wanted (more RAM, Wi-Fi, larger hard drive, maybe Bluetooth), well, that kicked the pricetag into iMac territory.

Then the HOJ released the 2005 series of the Mac mini. Suddenly the price was much closer to “reasonable” for a machine that was specced almost exactly as I wanted. And I had money in the bank. AND I was being handed the OSX support jobs at work by a couple of the other tech support staffers, by virtue of the fact that I’d uncovered a curious Mac-only bug, and thus was handling most of our Macolyte userbase. That pretty much sealed my doom, and gave me the intellectual justification to spend nearly $1000 of our investment account on a computer that I really, really… wanted.

So it was, that one fateful night I bundled the family into the Rocket and traversed the city to Chadstone to purchase the Apple Store’s lone 1.42GHz, 512Mb, wireless, 60Gb, combo-drive equipped Mac mini. Unpacking it was a joyous affair, in that sad geeky kind of way (is it sad because non-geeks don’t “get” it, or because we geeks find such joy in unpacking new toys? Once again, I digress).

The Mac mini is often referred to by the acronym BYODKM (Bring Your Own Display, Keyboard, Mouse). There are a couple of issues with this, particularly if you’re not a switcher, but trying to play both sides at the same time.

No, that was not a double entendre.

The immediate solution was a relatively complex one. Fortunately, my LCD has both digital and analogue inputs. By connecting one input to each computer and using a convoluted set of button clicks, I could switch between inputs. The input solution was worse. I knocked off the USB keyboard and mouse from one of the other PCs in the house, and juggled them with my existing keyboard and mouse. This, at least, enabled me to actually use the Mac.

I then proceeded to start installing software. Setting up Eddie (as opposed to Zaphod, my PC) to check my personal email was pretty easy. Getting my head around files that mount themselves as disks was interesting. Moving my iPod to the Mac was disasterous (that deserves it’s own post). Physically switching back and forth between systems was painful.

I needed a KVM. Reviews of various KVMs really didn’t help that much. In the end, I bought a boxed one from a Dick Smith in frustration. Dick Smith Superstores have a fourteen day, no questions asked return policy. Exactly fourteen days later I returned the KVM. It was either that or repeatedly apply a large heavy object to the KVM. It was awful. At first, I thought I could live with it’s little ideosyncracies. Like switching back to the PC and refusing to switch back if the Mac turned the screen saver on. Then it started timing out the mouse and keyboard on the PC. I’d switch between PCs and the mouse and keyboard would cease to work. Sometimes they would start to work a few minutes later, sometimes it required unplugging all the USB cables from the back of the KVM (being USB powered) to reset it.

The next-to-final straw was provided when my previously anti-Apple father arrived to take the family out to dinner for my son’s birthday. He was hoping to have a look, and play, with this little Mac that was actually a BSD-Unix box, but found me in the study with my hands buried deeply inside the guts of my computer desk trying vainly to reconfigure some out-of-sight USB cables to try and reset the KVM, and muttering death threats because it appeared that both the Mac and the PC had locked up, with unsaved work on both, due to the KVM’s recalcitrance. The final straw was the fact that none of the “extra” keys on my “multimedia” keyboard were being recognised by either computer when connected via the KVM.

A week after switching back to multiple keyboards and monitor fiddling, I walked into OfficeWorks and walked out with their only KVM, and a half price Microsoft Elite Keyboard and Mouse set.

The KVM works perfectly. There’s something deliciously wrong about plugging a Microsoft wireless keyboard and mouse into a Mac.

Really, that only leaves the lack of tools for the Mac. I posted this from w.bloggar on Zaphod. In spite of the fact that I prefer using Eddie for most day-to-day tasks, and having lots of cool little widgets at my fingertips, do you think I can find a good blogging tool for OSX?

Ah well. We switchers can’t be choosers.