To those nice nice nights…

On December 9th it was Emma’s birthday.  Our waiter at the diner that night shoved a handful of whipped cream in her face.

What’s in a hostname?

It’s really important to name your machines so you can anthropomorphize them and talk to them.  Some names are more satisfying than others.  Sometimes you name a computer and it just feels right, and other times you hem and haw and just pick something so-so so you can move on.  I named my new MacBook Pro Kowalski and feels positively badass.  Everyday I will be working with the lead character from Vanishing Point.

Portrait of a Beardo

That’s about two weeks of growth.  It doesn’t always photograph well because I have a salt and pepper beard, so there’s plenty of blonde in there that doesn’t show up.

Mr. Mac Geek or how I learned to stop worrying and love the beard

My new employers were gracious enough to buy me a 17″ MacBook Pro to use for work and I’ve spent the last couple of days working on it and replicating all of my OS X applications and customizations over from my iMac. I have to say that I’m loving both Leopard and this machine. It’s my first Intel Mac, my iMac is a 2Ghz G5, and this thing is at least twice as fast as my G5 if not more.

Having a good laptop on which I can get real work done, with a sizable screen and comfortable keyboard, is a huge boon. I’ve never much liked working from home. It’s very motivating for me to get up and go to work, and I like being out of the house during the day. Nothing makes you feel like a shut-in quite so much as never leaving the house. I’ve always preferred to go out and get my work done in coffee shops and now I can do precisely that during the day. There’s a great place right down the street called Edgehill Studios that has an awesome coffee shop with big bright windows and modern furniture that’s not too comfortable so you can sit in it and get work done.

For Halloween this year I went out as Rick James Lipton, an amalgamation of Rick James, bitch, and former Parisian pimp James Lipton. For the role I grew a beard and I’ve kept it.

As I was sitting, working on my new MacBook Pro, wearing a corduroy sport coat, Threadless t-shirt, jeans, and bright red Reebok running shoes, and sporting a beard it occurred to me: I look like a total Mac geek. It’s unavoidable. I might as well go back to the year 1999 when I looked more than a little bit like productivity guru Merlin Mann.

Folks, don’t miss my supercool Casio calculator watch.

Admittedly, I wish I knew where that watch was. I’d probably still be wearing it.

A new beginning or why I’ve been so quiet

This past week was my first at a new job. I now work for BubbleUp. We’re a web startup focused on websites, web applications and internet marketing for the music industry. I’m very excited about it and having a blast so far. We’re a small company, headquartered in Houston, and I’m working from home and coffee shops here in Nashville. I’m 1/2 of the company’s Nashville presence right now, which we hope to expand in the future into an actual physical office and additional employees. It’s nice to be a part of a young, fast company after so many years as a cog in the academic machine. I’m working as their Systems Administrator as well as doing development work, and it is my return to some regular programming responsibilities that has me the most excited. It has been too long since that was a daily part of my job.

The first month at any new job is always very busy as you try to get up to speed on a new company, a new set of systems, and a new set of expectations. BubbleUp is a very small company and so that has been greatly magnified for me. So if my contribution here is a little bit light, it’s only because I’m working my butt off! But for a change, I’m happy to be doing that.