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I used to be an Apple evangelist. I still like Apple and some of their products, but we’re not friends like we used to be. Earlier in December, wrestling with a technical issue on my computer got me thinking about life and all sorts of stupid stuff (6 hours doing the same thing over and over to fix a stupid computer problem on your day off so you can work the next day will do that), including wondering why I was working on fixing the problem and not actually leapfrogging the issue and actually improving things. Continue reading

One of my wife’s friends sent us a Christmas card that said something like “May the coming year bring lots of changes.” It sounded disturbingly close to a Chinese curse that goes something like, “May your future be filled with change.” (I’ve read that this is actually a mistranslation or interpretation of another subtle Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times.” Ouch. Too late.) Continue reading

It’s been a year with a lot of small but important changes. Sometimes the most impressive changes are the ones that are easiest to see – new house, loss of job, new pet, kid – but those sort of take care of themselves. They don’t happen all the time. For me, I find that I sort of coast through the big changes and it’s the apparent doldrums in between that get a little tricky. I could ramble about how my kid’s in preschool or recap the car accident I had in the summer, but my kid was in daycare before, and I didn’t get hurt in the accident and ended up with a very similar car afterwards. They make up events on the timeline of the linear version of my life, but they don’t make up real change. Continue reading

I’m excited to be applying for a little writing job at a major content website, it’s the kind of change I’ve been looking for. I’ve got almost no chance of landing the gig, a monthly retainer project reviewing and writing about digital photography, but just taking the leap of faith to apply feels good.

It’s got me started thinking about other stuff, and I’m working on some skeletal ideas for other blogs. As much fun as it is to ramble about broken toes and quitting music and how much I love the little birdies where I live, I’ve got tons of interests, and I’m interested in forging the discipline of writing regularly about some of them. Continue reading

Since I work at home, I wouldn’t easily get snow days anyway, but I feel cheated sometimes when people around me are off and I’m in my lair hunched over a keyboard and pushing pixels around. My clients are still in New York City, and it’s 60 degrees there right now. Me, I have half a foot of snow on the ground and it’s under 30 degrees, so I feel like I ought to get snow day. Locally schools are closed and people are staying home in some cases; 6 inches of snow is not exactly like armageddon, but it’s a nice excuse to take it easy when that’s what’s going on anyway. I’m not actually having any trouble working (remember being in school and trying to focus when it was snowing outside?), but it would definitely be fun to sneak out and play with my daughter for a couple of hours. Continue reading

To paraphrase George Carlin, it’s pretty easy to consider anyone who’d driving much faster than you as crazy, and anyone who’s driving slower than you to be a jackass. I’ve noticed some more granular versions of the rules here in Eldorado, and it’s deepend the awareness I already have that I’m a hypocrite. (Yay!) Continue reading

I offer now my own Dave Barry style contribution to Murphy’s Law; nothing scatological need be implied by the title.

I don’t know what cosmic law of attraction is involved, but as a mostly private person, I’ve found that the best way to abort a lonely fugue right at the onset is a quick trip to a bathroom, wherever I live, whoever I live with, and whatever I’m doing. Continue reading

This isn’t about computers, but a computer issue I had today got me thinking. I spent about 6 hours working on a dumb but crippling computer problem; seemed like it should have been minor, but minor or not, it would have stopped me from working come Monday so I needed to fix it. I have a Mac, but I run Windows XP on it, too, using a program called Parallels. It’s pretty cool when it works, and it usually does. But it introduces some new wrinkles, and occasionally I have to work for 6 hours to get things running again. (All things given equal, it’s been easier for me to coax a fussy program like Parallels back to working every once in a while than getting a Windows machine back up once things have gone awry. Virtualization is mostly cool most of the time. Your mileage may vary.) It’s a little sad to spend a Sunday doing stuff like this, but a) I’m kind of sick today, so I was sitting around anyway, b) some of the time I spent was just waiting for the computer, so I played PS2 while I waited, and c) better Sunday than during the week when I have real deadlines.

Anyway, after a bunch of trial and error – mostly error – I found a magic combination of stuff to fix it, and now I’m more or less in the same position I was in at the end of last week. Half of the last day of my tearfully short weekend spent just getting where I used to be. Continue reading

I’m halfway through quitting music, or playing music live to be more precise. Phase one is saying no to anything new; my current relationship with music – not good – is largely a byproduct of taking chances with strangers that haven’t worked out, so I’m taking a step back from that. I know I’m on the right track because on one hand, I dread every single music commitment I get entangled with these days, even good ones with people I love and music I ought to enjoy, but especially when I’ve committed to something I know from the beginning is a poor match for my interests and love. And on the other hand I glow with pride whenever I successfully avoid something music-related, it feels righter than almost anything else I’ve ever done, at least in recent memory. Continue reading

A friend pointed out a recent article in our local paper on a really interesting new alternative energy for homes and small offices. It’s a sculpural-looking turbine covered with solar material – if it’s windy, it spins, if it’s sunny, it sols. Or whatever Solar things do. If we’ve got anything out here, it’s wind and sun. They’re not like the big Danish windmills you see proposed every time there’s an article on a “wind park,” they’re just a couple yards tall. I didn’t dig up the exact height, but they’d appear to be between 2-3 yards or meters high, so you could probably install them on your property in a wide variety of places without violating any zoning or covenants. Don’t take my word for it, though.

Since the solar materials rotate, you eliminate many of the placement issues that come up with a solar array, and unlike bigger windmills, it doesn’t have to be shut down in heavy winds or rotated to take advantage of the wind direction. Unless it screeches like a howler monkey, the cost may be the biggest downside.

The company is called Bluenergy, it’s worth a look. The costs appear to be competitive with other small-scale “get off the grid” kinds of setups, but their cost estimates seem a bit high. Whatever.