Carrying Stones

Shame on you if you don’t know about xkcd, the best comic on the Interwebs!

This is the only way anyone should record dates on their computer. I have years of files that I can quickly flip through to find just about anything.

Glenn Reid has the credentials to authoritatively write What it’s Really Like Working with Steve Jobs. Reid wrote he was employee #40 at Adobe Systems in 1985 before moving to work as product manager at NeXT reporting directly to Steve Jobs.
The entire piece should be interesting to those who run in my circles online, but it was this line that captured my attention.

Many years later, when NeXT acquired Apple for negative -$400M, I was recruited by Steve’s right hand man to come in to build iMovie 1.0…
Doesn’t that sum it up? Apple came to court NeXT and boy howdy did they get what they asked for, the foundation of the then-future Mac OS X and the once and future king who returned to restore glory to his Camelot.

If you don’t read xkcd, you should.

It’s really easy for nerds like us to build up a digital hoard of things to do/learn/read later, and each of those (mostly useless) items drops another pebble of guilt on a growing mountain of mental debt.

Tech bankruptcy

My Instapaper queue is a great example of tech debt and it’s easy to fix. Just a few minutes ago, I squished my eyes closed and cleared out a list of articles reaching back in time all the way to March. The list was overwhelming, and everything I saved before Dec. 1 is scrubbed from the list leaving a manageable list of articles I will finish reading by tomorrow. Are all of those deleted reads really lost forever? No. If I happen to remember something that I really wanted to read, it’s saved somewhere on my Pinboard account.
During the past few weeks, I have chucked out most of the mailing lists that suckered me in at some point thought a few good ones remain. My email inbox is, for the moment, is blissfully back to zero.
Reeder and Google Reader used to feed my heroin-level addition to RSS. Fever is my methadone. My move about six months ago to Shaun Inman’s wonderful feed reader has helped me reduce mental debt, relieve my guilt that I haven’t read everything, and keeps me informed about the news and technology that interests me. Later today, I’m going to move some of my kindling to sparks to deglaze my news pan and further concentrate incoming news.
OmniFocus got its first round of annual review earlier this week. I’m going to sift through it again to get a few things done, pull a few more weeds, and begin the new year with a realistic stack of projects, actions, and contexts.

Work smart

A proper workshop isn’t limited to one screwdriver, one hammer, and one wrench. It will have a collection of the best tools for a craftsman to get the job done with efficiency and beauty.
I used some of my Christmas loot to add Sublime Text 2 to my text-wrangling toolbox. My work and play is primarily filled with organizing letters and words on my Macs. This began back in System 7.6 with BBEdit Lite on my first Mac. After its demise, I stuck with the free apps and moved on to Text Wrangler. There was a long dark era of collecting a variety of word processors that ended when I found TextMate.
TextMate was great, and when support began to dwindle I jumped ship back to my freebie roots and purchased BBEdit, the legendary text editor for Mac OS. BBEdit is tough to beat, yet Sublime Text provides better support in some scenarios (it’s cross-platform, and multiple cursors!). Both editors are jockeying for position as my primary editor, and both are great. I would have a hard time recommending one over the other. Lucky for you, both of them have generous trial periods. If you’re interested, check them out:
– BBEdit
– Sublime Text 2
I’ve always been big fan of the keyboard — I added a Matias Tactile Pro and Apple Extended II since Christmas 2011 — and 2012 was the year of keyboard shortcuts, learning a bunch of new ones and getting friendly with Keyboard Maestro. After migrating to Movable Type on this website, I have been learning perl and honing my skills at the command line (focused on vim and zsh). My work has been produced on a series of Macs since 1994, and it has never been easier or more fun.

Christmas break has given me and Julie a chance to tie up a loose end we left frayed a long time ago.
4 8 15 16 23 42
We were enthralled by J.J. Abrams’¹ Lost while it was airing on television, yet for some reason that neither of us can recall (electromagnetic pulse maybe?) we stopped watching before the show’s finale when it wrapped in May 2010. Netflix bingeing through the holidays provided the coordinates to help us return to the island, and the show still fascinates.
Execute
The plot twists, parallel timelines, puzzles, and intricate details hidden throughout the series easily support a second a viewing. If you have nearly 87 hours² to spare, you may agree.
If you find your way back to the island, find your constant at one of the many resources available online such as Lostpedia.

We’re also enjoy other productions Abrams has had a hand in including Fringe, Alias), Person of Interest, and Alcatraz) (before the TV warden threw it in the hole). Oh, and did I mention Fringe? Best show on TV right now. ↩

87 hours?! Sometimes I wish my brain didn’t force me to suss out facts like that. What else could I have accomplished in 87 hours?! At least I began learning perl while we plunked down in front of the TV. ↩

My MacBook Air (11-inch Mid 2011 edition) is the best Mac I have ever owned, and a handful of apps I use every day really help me churn. I write this stuff up occasionally to help me review how I work. Maybe it’s helpful for you.

Always running

These are the apps that power my daily Mac, listed in rough order of usage.

• Path Finder 6 is my Finder
• Safari for web browsing, Google Chrome when Flash is required
• Tweetbot, for sure
• BBEdit or Sublime Text for editing text, often complemented by Brett Terpstra’s Marked.app
• OmniFocus fuels my Quixotic quest for focus
• Rdio provides ambient entertainment at my home office, though iTunes is still hanging around for obligatory syncing le sigh
• DEVONthink Pro Office is my bit bucket
• Apple Mail for email augmented by Mail Act-On and MailTags
• SpamSieve scrubs out junk mail
• Apple Messages so I don’t always need to pick up my iPhone to text (when it works), with Adium waiting as understudy when Messages loses her voice

Background apps

I almost forgot several other apps that mostly hang out in the background or from the menubar, which stays uncluttered thanks to Bartender.

• Dropbox¹ is the glue that holds so many things together; easy to forget about this linchpin application
• TextExpander does what it says, shaving minutes off my work time and pushing RSI further down the line
• Keyboard Maestro can automate just about anything on a Mac
• Fantastical replaced BusyCal, which pushed iCal off a bridge years ago
• Spirited Away is an oldie but a goodie that automatically cleans up my desktop, hiding apps that haven’t been used recently
• Default Folder X provides more RSI relief, helping me leave the mouse alone and navigate folders to save (or find) documents
• Delibar is my Pinboard portal
• Hazel is my assistant organizing files in the background
• Flux adjusts screen gamma at night to ease eye strain
• FastScripts introduced me to Mac automation with keyboard shortcuts
• Moom shoves windows where I want them using keyboard shortcuts (though this will be replaced with Keyboard Maestro when I make time to set it up)

Occasional apps

Another smattering of apps get launched as needed, either for a quick task or long stretches of focused work.

• Fever is my newsreader, powered by Fluid.app and hosted at A2 Hosting²
• MarsEdit for publishing articles here at Carrying Stones
• Coda 2 wraps web development into a tidy package
• Day One is a beautiful journaling app that should be running all the time but I’m a slacker (Brett Terpstra earns another gold star for giving us Slogger(, which should you go check out right now)
• nvALT by Elastic Threads and (you guessed it) Mr. Terpstra for quick synced note-taking
• iTerm is my console window for local command line work in zsh (also souped up by oh-my-zsh)
• 1Password manages all my website logins, credit cards, software licenses, and other items I need to secure while having ready access at any time

Wow! Sorry to puke all of that out at once. What started as a quick list of favorites turned into that pot of stew; add a little of this, a touch of that… Boom! 18 gallons of stew. Have a seat and try some. Here, let me get you a bowl. Where are you going? Come back!

Affiliate link like this one help me earn a little cha-ching. ↩

This one too. ↩

As I have tinkered with this website, my attention has been focused on learning the ins and outs of Movable Type. The result? A string of posts written in geek speak–probably incomprehensible to many of you–as I work through my questions about the content management system. It’s a great CMS that can be challenging to learn about because much of the documentation is either out-of-date, too sparse to understand, or simply not available. My hope is that publishing my solutions here can help someone else who finds themselves in the same boat sail can row away from the rocks.
I haven’t written much about it, but adopting a new CMS has also pushed me to learn more about CSS (so you’ve probably got that to look forward to), but my brain isn’t completely filled with visions of website frameworks and style sheets. I really do think about other things too.

Stress

Stress has been winning the battle lately. With a household of five people, my income and insurance plan is more important than ever. Meanwhile, expectations at the office about what I must deliver have soared to new heights as monstrous budget challenges cast a frightening shadow on my future there.
Beginning with Thanksgiving on through Christmas and New Year’s Day, the holidays crank up my stress levels (the numbers go to 11, right across the board). The windpipe-crushing squeeze on our household budget juxtaposed against the need to find extra money for Christmas makes this year is no different.
I have a great vacation plan though the holidays often seem reserved as a time for me to be violently ill, a tradition that goes way back to my early childhood; chicken pox on my birthday, puking on Christmas. I haven’t been sick since the weather turned cold this season, and fear the flu or some other malady will come around to collect on that debt.
Besides the holidays, my tires are bald and my passenger-side headlight is blown. I’ve already been pulled over with a warning about that one. Two big problems¹ that cost money I don’t have, and on top of that the rear door on the driver’s side won’t open.

Kids

We have three kids living at the house and a fourth, the oldest who cut me off years ago, somewhere out in the world. I think about him daily and hope he is doing well, regardless of what he thinks about me and my life.
Our youngest is going through all of the joys of adolescence as he begins to wrap up middle school in the rush to high school. Next up is our freshman daughter who has had her own ups and downs (and you will have to trust me on that one, because I’m not getting into it here). Finally, our senior is getting ready to graduate high school.
All three are in band with extra practices all the time, some before school and some after, and my fellow band parents out there know band isn’t cheap.

Hope

Sometimes it’s not easy, yet with all of the challenges we’re facing lately I know we’re going to be OK.
When I was a child and things weren’t going our way, my mom would say, “Oh well. Everything will work out in the end.” She wasn’t dismissing or making light of the challenges facing our family. She had an unshakeable faith that God would take care of us, and every time it turned out she was right.
Even when the stress bubbles over in our house and we start blowing up at each other like bombs. At the end of the day, we take care of one another. We know that we love and take care of each other. We wash each other’s clothes, we cook each other dinner, and watch over one another. I am lucky to have such great people in my life–this family of mine–and just like mom used to tell me I know that everything is going to be OK.

1. The parts for my fancy-pants headlight retail for approximately $300, and that doesn’t count the labor that involves disassembling the front of the car. Tires are tires, about 90 bucks a pop (so to speak, please don’t let them pop). ↩

In my experience with content management systems, default settings drop “inside pages” into directories to create URLs like www.foo.com/bar. I prefer mapping subdomains to those directories so URLs look like bar.foo.com.
After putting this design in practice, I ran into problems. For example, any attempt to use the search box from one of my subdomains would lead to an error page.
Movable Type’s configuration file links key directories such as cgi-bin/mt with identifiers like $MT_HOME in the config file. These point to the root directory (something like ~/pub_html); however, for pages within a subdomain it pointed to the root directory of that subdomain instead.
This broke many things, and I was sad.
After some trial, error, and discovery, I found that creating two symbolic links from the subdomain directories to the corresponding root directories corrected the problem, like so:

/sub ~ % ln -s ~/pub_html/mt-static mt-static
/sub ~ % ln -s ~/pub_html/cgi-bin/mt mt

After creating those symlinks, the pieces fell correctly into place. If you have been having similar problems, this symlink tip should set you straight.

With its new responsive theme–Rainier–it looks like Movable Type 5.2.2 now delivers what I have been looking for to serve up this humble writing collection.
The key word there is “responsive.” Since 2010, when Ethan Marcotte introduced the concept in his seminal article Responsive Web Design, the word has been overused alongside “curated” and “”air quotes.”” It grates on some designers frazzled nerves to hear it used and used and abused, but it’s an important concept that anyone designing for the web must consider.
Continue reading “More responsive MT 5.2.2 worth a look”