• April 19th, 2008
• Filed in
  • Life Hacks
  • Premonitions
  • Shameless Promotion

I love my MacBook, but it’s the only Mac I own and it could go at any time.
knock on wood
I’m not worried about it because my data is everywhere. It’s located at server centers, hosted websites, remote versioned repositories, on multiple hard drives and media.

In reality I don’t have a single point of failure at all because I’m leveraging web services by not putting all of my eggs in one basket. However, if my laptop did have a serious problem I’d have to deal with an annoying situation. If for instance my cat spilt a glass of water on the computer (happened to my sister just last week), I’d be out of commission for a few days, but I would still be able to get back on my feet relatively easily. For these reasons I do have a single point of failure, but one I’m comfortable with.

Since June of 2006 I’ve used my MacBook Pro at all of my recent 9-5’s as well as personal use and I have yet to have a hardware failure. In fact truth be told I rarely even turn it off.
knock on wood again

I’d say most savvy netizens have similar setups. Although it can’t hurt to share mine.

Online Applications I Use

• Gmail in favor of Mail
• Google Calendar in favor of iCal
• Google Docs in addition to Numbers and Pages
• Subversion Repositories for Code Projects
• Serial #’s Labeled:Serial in Gmail (or any other important info worth labeling)
• Del.ici.ous for Bookmarks
• Flickr for Pictures

and many more

• MP3 Library on a LaCie external drive + DVD Backups
• iPhoto Library on external drive + DVD Backups

I also use SuperDuper! for nightly bootable backups. Time Machine was putting a strain on my system and if it ain’t broke - don’t fix it.
One thing I would like to move completely online are my finances. I do the usual online banking, but I use Quicken on my Mac for personal finances. Quicken sucks, especially on the mac. Hopefully one of these days there will be a decent web app to replace it. I’ve played around with Mint and Wesabe but they’re just not there and I don’t feel entirely safe with that type of personal information in-the-cloud yet.

Right now we’re at a half-way point between pre-internet-personal-hardware-entrapment and post-personal-hardware-cloud-processing-greatness. How long do you think it will be? I say 10 years before I’m on an Apple Thin client as a primary computer. That will be sweet.

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• March 10th, 2008
• Filed in
  • Apple
  • Google
  • Premonitions

ReadWriteWeb has an excellent article on why Apple is posed to dominate the next generation of computing. It’s a very good article and I recommend reading it. It talks about why Apple’s software is rock solid and how the very basis of all of their software is light years ahead of everyone.

It’s funny because as much as I love Apple software, at the end of the day I know the future of software in the broadest sense belongs to Google. The computer of the future will be the network and cloud computing. I honestly think when we’re wired enough and fiber optics (or something better) is woven into our very being, we’ll be utilizing thin clients - probably 10th generation iPhones. Down the line (ridiculously far down the line) their lead in hardware is what really sets them apart. Even Google can’t catch up, it’s just not in their DNA. Both of these tech companies are already poised to transform our relationship with “computers”. Google on the OS, Apple on the hardware. You can take that to the bank. Hell I’m already most of the way there. I’m a Google Apps junkie who lives on his MacBook and wants a 3G iPhone like you read about.

What do you think the future holds for computing?

ReadWriteWeb Why Apple Will Dominate Next Gen Computing

Popularity: 11% [?]