This evening I arrived back home and noticed the power had been out in my absence. I know this, because my Mac mini reports this to me. It being my ‘home server’, I spent a weekend writing scripts that fill the screen with useless information and other statistics. You know, the sort of thing only a nerd would really do. One of the scripts searches the system log for notifications of improper shutdown and assumes this was due to a power outage. A message gets displayed on the screen accordingly.
It’s one of the things that is part of life when living in Bangkok, the power goes out sometimes. It can’t be good for the devices, harddisks, etc. to just have their power source yanked away like that. So I was thinking perhaps I should get a new UPS.
I used to have one, but it was dropped during a move and stopped working. So I think we have a new project!
When the 11″ MacBook Air was first introduced, I thought it was the most gorgeous thing I had ever seen since I retired my 12″ PowerBook years before. I never did get one though, as the machine quite simply did not pack enough umpf to make it usable for me. Instead, I bought a 15″ MacBook Pro. Less than a year old, I now find myself considering selling it with the new MacBook Air rumored to arrive soon.
The decision I’m facing, revolves around briefcase I take to work every day.
If I get the rumored new 11″ MacBook Air upon release, I would continue to have to carry a notebook between home and the office every day. It would dramatically lighten the weight I carry with me every day, but I would continue to carry a briefcase to work. I would most likely get a second Cinema Display set up in the office, and connect the MacBook Air to a screen whenever at one of my two desks. It is a tiny little machine, which provides me with enough power to do what as a manager I need to.
If a combination of iCloud, better license terms in the Mac App Store and Dropbox allows me to have the same work environment at home as in the office, then I could get rid of my briefcase and be free. I would probably keep my MacBook Pro at home and buy an iMac for the office. Applications, documents and settings would have to somehow be exchanged between the two machines. For ultra-mobile use, I would have my iPad with a wireless keyboard that carries me over for a few days.
Something that would significantly impact this decision of course, is a consideration of what else gets carried in the briefcase now that would no longer be carried across. I do have a set of folders in my briefcase which I use to carry documents between my office and home. It does make a great place to carry my mobile phone, iPad, wallet, bits of paper and more of the sort. I guess a simpler briefcase would be possible.
Decisions, decisions.
This site will probably have periods of high activity and periods where for weeks there will be nothing new. Today was a day where I wrote a lot of posts. And I think I’ve now introduced all the players in my technology life to you on this site. So I thought it fitting to open up with a review of the state of my network.
The following devices are in active duty, being used by me, on an almost daily basis …
- Airport Extreme as a wi-fi base station
- Mac mini as a personal server
- Apple TV, one in the living room and one dorment in the bedroom
- Blackberry Bold 9700 mobile phone
- MacBook Pro as my main machine, with 27-inch Cinema Display
- iPad 2, brand spanking new and measuring in at 64GB
The state of the network is strong. The state of this website is quite poor, but that will improve over time as I get more content up and work on refining the design and structure and even purpose of the site.
I got the first iPad as soon as I could after it had been released. In fact, it was the first Apple product I ordered sight unseen. When Steve Jobs presented the iPad 2 in March, the device itself was not really all that interesting to me. What absolutely blew me away were the smart covers. And I knew that for this reason, I’d eventually end up buying one.
With my first iPad, I never bought a cover. Such a streamlined and elegant device did not deserve to be covered up. Even the Apple cover felt bulky to me, despite it’s extremely smart design. No, the iPad was to be used pure and naked. The smart cover changed all that, the combination of the ingenious design with the incredibly simple method of removing it, was exactly what I wanted.
Ok, I’ll admit that part of the reason I ended up buying one was the fact that the first iPad was spending a significant chunk of it’s time in my girlfriends handbag, rather than mine. My hands, not my handbag. I don’t have a handbag.
Last Friday I was at the iStudio in Seacon Square, a massive mall on the outskirts of Bangkok. My friend was buying a 17-inch MacBook Pro there and I had gone with him. While I was there, I kept looking at the new iPad. My friend, who had gotten one from his wife for their anniversary (are you reading this, sweetie?), was urging me to get one too. And I caved. I was not planning on it. But financially, something had come my way so I could really just go ahead and buy it. And so I did. I also got the cover for the iPad 1 that I knew my girlfriend had wanted on there all along. And I of course got myself a smart cover to go with my brand spanking new iPad 2.
On the iPad 1 I never stored much data. So I decided that if I ever were to buy an iPad 2, I was going to get the 16GB version. Yes, it would still have 3G in there because that was very useful! Aforementioned iStudio didn’t have the 16GB model in stock (or so they said) …. “ah whatever, let’s get the 64GB version then!”.
And then there were two.
I don’t own an iPhone.
I remember the days of wonder when oddities like WML made it’s way into phones like the Nokia 7110, which of course I owned and for which I even developed little micro sites. My first smartphone was a Sony Ericsson P800. It was extremely advanced (and stupidly expensive) for it’s day and I loved it. It broke down one day and I started buying cheaper handsets for a number of years. Funnily enough, I found it when I was moving to Asia and was able to sell it for a pretty penny. It had magically repaired itself.
Anyway, I picked up my next smartphone in 2008. Yes, I realize it is a bit strange for somebody who is as big an Apple fan as I am to not own an iPhone. But the main reason for me to buy a smartphone was to write emails. And well, yeah, the iPhone could do that but it cost 3x as much as the Dopod I picked up. It ran Windows, and it sucked.
Rather than switch to an iPhone later, I switched to Blackberry. And to this day, I carry a Blackberry with me everywhere I go. It runs a stable operating system, unlike Windows Mobile. But the main reason is the keyboard. I can write emails on it with the speed of light. And I’ve tried the iPhone, I just couldn’t get up to speed on that virtual keyboard.
I love my Blackberry, I love how fast I can write stuff on it. And that is the only reason I still do not have an iPhone, 4 generations in.
None.
When I got my first smartphone in 2002, it already allowed for music to be stored on the device and listened to on the headset. The capacity was small, 128MB if I recall correctly. But that was sufficient for me at the time, it seems. The iPod was already released, but Apple was not really on my radar at the time and quite frankly I did not think it made a whole lot of sense to carry around such a massive portable music player.
The idea that music was not on the phone never made sense to me. For a while I thought Bluetooth headsets would perhaps allow an iPod to stream music, and a phone to interrupt this music and stream to the same headset. But that kind of thing never really materialized. If you’re carrying mobile music, it should be on your mobile phone.
I did once buy a 4th generation iPod nano for my girlfriend once. But that was hers. I never really used it. If I’m going to be carrying mobile music, it will be on my mobile phone.
Spend enough time on this site or with me in person, and you’ll realize that I am a big Apple fan. I’m what they call a fanboi, and proud of it too. However, I do like to consider myself an evangelist rather than a zealot.
Now, reading a post like A passion for perfection would perhaps make you think otherwise, but I do consider myself fairly level headed in my view of the world and my view of all things Apple.
I don’t adore everything Apple does. I do absolutely love a lot of their products. There is a massive difference between the two.
I like it when people pay attention to detail.
I appreciate the efforts of a chef in creating an exquisite dining experience. I love the five-star client service experience that a good hotel provides. I’m the kind of person who can get excited at the choice of paper when reading a magazine, or how changing a few pixels in a design can make all the difference, and think that it is important that everybody in a company needs to understand the client they are working for. Even if they never even see this client.
Apple crafts gorgeous hardware and beautiful software to run on it. Apple fits in my world. Their hardware and the software built by a passionate developer community, they please my eyes, my mind and my soul. This is why I love using Apple products.
As a child I was spoon-fed technology. My father has worked for Philips Electronics his entire life, and I like to brag about how his earlier work was at the cradle of the computer gaming industry and the compact disc and how his later work is in almost every mobile phone and other stuff like digital video processing. He has always consciously taken a route to stick with technology, rather than going the management route.
Some of my childhood memories include sneaking downstairs on Sunday morning to play submarine on my fathers portable computer and later on writing my first programs on a P2000/T with 16 kilobytes of memory. In the attic were giant closets full of electronics, including a soldering iron and rows and rows of little boxes with transistors, capacitors and resistors. Technology appealed to me, and it still does.
From 16 kilobytes to my current 4 gigabytes of memory. Over time my life moved away from electronics and became more about information technology. I was on the internet long before the world wide web even existed, but when it did get traction I jumped on it and it has formed my life ever since. I stayed in technology for a long time, but eventually was offered a chance to try my hand at management. I didn’t want to, I wanted to be like my father and stay close to the technology. Necessity forced me to manage a team, and it was a bumpy start. After a while, my then boss and mentor started supporting me and I’ve never looked back.
These days, I’m your typical user. I’m in a management position and spend most of my day in meetings, on the phone or writing emails. And I love what I do. But it does mean that my computer needs have changed from being the nerd who built his own computer, and was not afraid to take a soldering iron to the circuit board – to where I am today, where I want stuff to just work. Technology is no longer the goal for me, it is the means.
Having said that, I still love tinkering with stuff. I still love figuring out how to connect, configure and control things in such a way that they do what I want them to do.
When Apple introduced the first iPad, I immediately knew I was going to buy myself one. I had to wait a few months, but a friend returning from New York brought me one. I unpacked it and I immediately knew there would be more. I have a naming convention based on numbers, as you may well have noticed. But here I was just going to start counting again. I dubbed my first iPad as ‘iPad 1′ because I knew more would follow. This was not a hard conclusion to draw, as my girlfriend used the iPad more than I did in the first few weeks.
It was my first iOS device and so the whole concept of buying applications and having a device I could just grab and would be on instantly, was new and exciting to me. The iPad has never been far away from me, it traveled with me to the office and into the bedroom (and yes, also into the bathroom) and I started reading my books on there. As my girlfriend also started using it for client presentations, I had to let go a bit and the passion died a bit with it. I also started to get a little more critical of it, seeing beyond the initial sheen of iOS apps and not really being able to find what I was looking for.
My first iPad has just a few days ago been handed down to my girlfriend permanently. I never wanted a case around my iPad, but she had tried to convince me to get one for a while. So I bought her a nice case for it, the one I knew she liked, and she will soon be wiping it clean and starting from scratch configuring it to do what she wants with it.
