• 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.

Popularity: 12% [?]

• April 9th, 2008
• Filed in
  • Blog
  • Shameless Promotion

This blog is powered by WordPress. Wordpress is a solid blogging platform, but it has its flaws. Blogging with Wordpress is a time, consuming, process.

I wish I blogged more often but it’s hard to find the time to do it. The bottleneck for me was creating and editing posts via WordPress’ backend. Loading, refreshing, uploading pictures, and double-checking the blog post to make sure everything was lined up correctly, etc. The time I would spend writing a post was compounded by the back and forth between the front and backend until I found MarsEdit.

MarsEdit to the Rescue

Simply put MarsEdit is an OSX application that interfaces with the Wordpress backend of the blog via XML-RPC. MarsEdit allows me to edit/post/upload images with ease. If I wrote for multiple blogs (I don’t yet), then I could do it all from within MarsEdit and life would be that much easier. Now I can post/edit/upload much faster. The next step to making things REALLY fly is my use of Markdown.

What is Markdown?

Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML). daringfireball

Essentially Markdown is shorthand HTML that makes it faster bang out blog posts.

If you’re blogging or thinking about blogging I highly recommend adding these tools to your repertoire.

You’ll notice since I implemented these tools back in the beginning of March there has been a serious uptick in the frequency of posting here at somedirection. A large part of that is leveraging MarsEdit+Markdown in this blog. There’s also another factor and I’ll be writing about it shortly.

Resources

• MarsEdit
• I use the WordPress Markdown Plugin to format the pseudo markup.
• Markdown CheatSheet PDF

This post was written in Markdown, you can view the syntax here.

Popularity: 7% [?]