I recently decided that I needed a change with respect to my desktop setup. Out went the old Microsoft Wave keyboard that had served me so faithfully. I replaced the keyboard with apple aluminum keyboard. I thought I would have a tough time with the apple keyboard given that it is incredibly small. As it turns out, that has not caused any problems for me, whereas the tactile response from the keyboard is phenomenal! I now use an apple keyboard for both home and work. At work I also got rid of my trackball and replaced it with the Apple Magic Mouse. That also surprised me. I had no intention of getting the magic mouse, as I felt that I wouldn’t be happy without a trackball. I happened to be in an Apple Store in Reston and decided to give it a whirl. I was very impressed, and I haven’t thought twice about the purchase. As an added bonus, the combination looks fantastic on the desk. Now I’m only missing an Apple Cinema Display, but I somehow don’t think that one is in the cards for me.
Scrivener cork board in action
I have to write a number of proposals this week. My work on these proposals is mainly about technical implementation and feature benefits. I am an outliner. I make lists, I love white-boards. I also find that I tend to write from inside-to-out. I start writing specific pieces of information, expand that into an outline, provide more details, and then write introduction and conclusion text. Up to this point I have done this in Wiki and/or Textmate. Recently, however, I had stumbled upon Scrivener and decided to give it a chance. Scrivener is a tool for writing; whether a screenplay or a research paper, Scrivener wants to help you. I’ve only used it for three days so far, but the cork-board feature has fit nicely into my workflow. So far I like it, although I do feel like I’m either not using it to it’s potential.
Very recently, I found myself in new surroundings. For the past thirteen years, I have received a steady paycheck from the good people at AOL (more specifically, the awesome team working on AIM Express. Deciding it was time for greener pastures, I left and started managing the technology for a very exciting consulting firm in Lansdowne, Virginia. While this change is incredibly exciting, it certainly adds a lot more to think about. My days prior to this were focused, almost exclusively, on implementing a flash-based AIM client. My days now involve everything from portal vendor selection, to setting up SVN repositories, to helping co-workers configure their mail clients. With this newfound increase in scope of my duties, it dawned on me that it was time to go re-re-re-watch Merlin Mann’s google tech talk on Inbox Zero. If you haven’t seen it, I can’t recommend it enough. I spent a few days implementing some of Merlin’s suggestions, and I now have complete inner peace (alright, I don’t have inner peace, but at least now I don’t feel like I need to re-scan my email for things I might have missed.)
