As someone who spends entirely too much time hunched over in front of my laptop, the occasional reminder to get off my ass more often is A Good Thing.
In a story amusingly titled "Our office chairs are slowing killing us", the Sydney Morning Herald reports on the dangers of spending so much time sitting down:
New Australian research shows that half-an-hour in the gym will not make up for the waist-expanding damage caused by spending the rest of the day sitting.
I should probably know better by now.
¶ 4:08 PM 0 Comments
When I was a toddler, like many other little boys, I grew very attached to a particular blanket, and insisted it join me just about everywhere I went. It was, of course a phase (unlike many adults, I don't still have the darn thing). But I've recently felt myself similarly exposed, this time when working without a particular tool: version control.
I'm not saying that I am as enamored of this particular technology as I was that square of cloth; just that when I find myself without it, I get anxious and worried, like something very important is missing.
I just started putting together a few slides for the opening remarks for tomorrow's TOC conference, and I'd barely gotten the first few slides sketched out when I felt a nagging sensation like I was driving without a seatbelt. (Or toddling without a security blanket for that matter.)
In reality, I hardly ever need to revert to an old version of a document. But having an infinite history of a project means the ability to work without the fear of irreversible catastrophe.
While I'm not ready to take things quite as far as some do in putting their electronic lives in version control, these days I rarely work on any document or project of significance without checking it into Subversion. The latest version of the Macintosh operating system actually includes a similar feature baked right in, so you get that same infinite history for free with the OS.
For now, I'm going to stick with Subversion, in part because I'm still running Windows, but also because SVN lets me access my files from anywhere. Sure beats a blanket...
Labels: tech
¶ 3:34 PM 0 Comments
Readers from the Chicago area will remember Eagle Man from a series of TV commercials in the 90s (he even has a Wikipedia entry).
It seems I spotted a relative at the Waldorf=Astoria in New York today, looking rather dapper:
It's not uncommon for me to have trouble falling asleep at night, and something I've done since I was very young to help drift off is listen to news radio.
As a child growing up just outside Chicago, that meant WBBM ("Newsradio 78"; I can't help but hear that in jingle form in my head). But when I got to college, there was -- surprise! -- no 24-hour news station in Champaign, Illinois.
The local NPR affiliate did, however, carry the BBC during the overnight hours. Because I was both involved with student media, and a student of media, I was particularly attuned to the contrast in interview style between the reporters on the BBC and their US counterparts. Stateside, reporters are just not very good at asking tough questions, but more importantly, I find them almost universally terrible at calling bullshit. Our media is just too obsessed with maintaining the precious illusion that there are "two sides to every story."
I was reminded of this while reading The Economist today when I came across the following (sorry, behind a paywall), which you'll never see in a US newspaper or newsmagazine (the emphasis is mine):
Florida's popular governor, Charlie Crist, tried to persuade the candidates to back a federal subsidy for home insurance for people who live in hurricane-prone places like Florida. This is a terrible idea. By making it cheaper to build in risky areas, it would ensure that more houses are destroyed in future hurricanes.
Isn't that refreshing?
¶ 11:45 PM 0 Comments
Different machines at home/work? Desktop and a laptop? You need Google Browser Sync for Firefox. Syncs your history, bookmarks, and passwords among multiple computers. Pure awesomeness.
¶ 12:40 AM 0 Comments
One of my computers has recently escalated its ongoing insinuation that its hard drive is about to fail catastrophically (the noises are getting weirder, and the crashes more frequent). The last time this sort of thing happened, it was a terrifying, miserable ordeal, culminating in a (successful) data rescue using a bootable Knoppix CD, and my copy of Knoppix Hacks.
This time, I'm merely resigned to the machine's fate, and am happy to merely wait out the final days.
What changed? Online backup. About a year ago, I installed Carbonite (see also Mozy Backup, or for the more adventurous, JungleDisk). Since then, my entire hard drive is automatically, incrementally, backed up over the Web (the data is also encrypted). Ah, Serenity Now.
(BTW, I have no affiliation or connection to Carbonite; just a satisfied customer.)
¶ 11:46 PM 0 Comments
