blog.andyhume.net

I wouldn’t normally write about something like this, but my asides don’t work, and this deserves attention.

I read, as do probably a number of you, Tom Coates’ blog. This means I have been following the story of him contacting his father for the first time.

Some weeks ago he received a letter from his father. The first contact between them ever. He wrote about this on his blog in the same honest, natural way he always does.

A few people left comments. One person left this comment:

“Hi Tom, Always remember one thing. Life is very, very short and nothing is worth limiting yourself from seeing the ones you love. I hadn’t seen my father in 15 years until 2 years ago. I was apprehensive but I kept telling myself that no matter how estranged we’d become there was no river to wide to cross. Drop me a line if I can be of any more help. Cheers, Barry”

Barry, thouroughly nice chap that he appears to be, is a marketing vehicle for Cillit Bang. What the buggery fuck is the world coming too.

Why is A List Apartfixed width?

I don’t really follow the mobile phone market. I can’t even tell you the model of my last Nokia, except that it was a long thin grey one, and when I got it I’d never heard of Bluetooth and I still thought WAP was really cool.

Anyway, when it came time to upgrade my phone, instead of looking into all the options properly and really getting a handle on the market, I just popped over to Andy Budd’s site to see what phone he’d most recently bought. If there’s someone I trust when it comes to choosing the latest gagedtry, it is Andy. And he’d made all the tough usablity vs. style vs. functionality decisionssome time ago, so who was I to question it.

It’s a little bit of a departure for me becuase I’ve been using Nokias for about the last 5 years, so it’s going to take me a bit of time to really get used to the software, particularly the predictive text, which is so different it’s driving me crazy.

One of the other reasons the Sony Ericsson models were appealing to me was how well they sync with OS X. As I said earlier I don’t follow mobile phone technology very closely, so here is a list of things I’m genuinely chuffed my phone can do, as I’ve never done anything like it before.

• Connect to any mail server I like (including IMAP I believe).
• Sync my address book without erasing half the contacts on my SIM.
• Sync my freaking iCal with the calendar on my phone, including events, reminders and tasks.
• Auto connect to BluePhoneElite. My Nokia needed approval to connect every time.

That’s the pick of the bunch for me. I quite like the camera too, and it will definitely increase the number of photos I post to Flickrover the next few weeks, which should be fun. The only thing I think it’s missing is an AM band radio. The FM works really well, but when I listen to radio it’s invariably for the sport of BBC Five, or Capital Gold. Still, it’s a small complaint.

One final thing I should mention is this terrific little web site called mobile.feisar.com. It’s dedicated to hints, tips, software, themes & more for Apple Mac, iSync & SonyEricsson users, and it’s been a real lifeline in helping me get everything syncing nicely with OS X.

I even admit to making one myself in Mike’s comments, but now I’m just sick of it.

Having a Mint?Mint-rosoft, Mint-Thousand-And-One: A Stats Oddyssey, The Mint Parade. I wonder how long that little lot, combined, took to think up? And that’s just a few of them!

However, Mintdoes look good. The hype is getting to me, and I kind of want to buy it, despite having Shaun’s ShortStat already installed on a few sites. I don’t really see what it does that ShortStat doesn’t, but I’m almost inclined to feel I should have payed for ShortStat in the first place, so maybe this is a way of giving something back.

One thing’s for sure, however: I won’t be making any pseudo-comedy puns about tangy confectionary, fragrant herbs, or how Shaun’s gonna make a mi… bit of cash. I recently took part in a questionnaire entitled: Which puns convince you that the author is of outstanding intellect? Of the ten puns presented to the participants, no pun in ten did.

I think, over the last few days, I’ve reached a point where there would be a distinct drop in my productivity if I had to return to Windows XP. OS X has sunk in, and I can almost feel it integrating into the very way I approach tasks and visualise workflow. For those who haven’t noticed (or don’t indeed work with me!), I swapped to OS X at the beginning of June. I had used Macs a fair amount before that time, so a lot was familiar, but OS X was 100% new to me.

Of course, due to testing and the enforced use of a few IE-only apps, I do still use Win XP on an almost daily basis. However, whereas once it felt like the return of an old friend, it now feels a little stodgy and unintuitive. The biggest difference for me is the seamlessness of the Apple operating system. It just feels like everything is there, waiting for you to call into action. You don’t open and close applications, you just give a flick of your left hand and bring what you need to the front. You don’t search for stuff, you just pop up Quicksilverand within a few keypresses you’ve opened a file, sent an email, or selected a track in iTunes. Everything is just there!

I’m being careful not to be called out as a so-called, Mac fan-boy, because I’m aware that for some tasks Win XP has distinct advantages over OS X. However, in my usage so far, OS X is winning me over.

Having said that, I’m yet to come across a decent replacement for the Terminal tool in OS X. I use the command line a lot during my working day, and for me, Terminal just does not cut it. I am currently in the process of trying out iTerm, and although I prefer it (how anyone lives without storing server addresses/logins I don’t know) it still doesn’t seem to have the robustness or features of the Puttyclient for Windows. Anyone got any tips?

All in all, I’m pleased to have made the switch, and I even made sure to wait at least a few months before penning this OS X changed my life post: just so everyone knows I’m not a complete head-in-the-sand Mac fan-boy. I just quite like ‘em.