Entries Tagged 'personal' ↓

Wow. It’s been so long since I posted that there is a drastic change in Wordpress versions. Let’s hope I can even figure out how to publish this. I’ve been keep busy over the last 6 months or so that I haven’t posted. However, I’m finally done school for the year with the exception of taking 1 course in the summer. Here is just a quick overview of the past 6 months, and what I’m currently working on.

• As mentioned above, I’m taking one (1) course, CP317: Software Engineering. I think I’m making a fairly good move by taking it in the summer. There are only 12 people in my class, including me, and the main focus of the course is to use the knowledge taught to complete one large group project. We decided to develop a multi-player networked tank game in Java.
• I’ve been working on a side project through my business EdgeLink Consulting dealing with VoIP and Asterisk. This is a very neat technology with a very wide range of capabilities that I’m very excited to be working with. Expect a post in the next couple of days about Asterisk.
• I was very busy throughout the fall and early winter with the musical that I’m in every year with Laurier Musical Theatre. This year it was How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. It went very well and I’m looking forward to the musical next year.
• I’m also working on some other side projects that you may or may not hear about in the future.

That’s about it for now. You should see something in the next few days on Asterisk and VoIP.

A while ago on Lifehacker, they did a series called “Show Us Your Go Bag“, where the readers sent in tagged pictures of the contents of their go bag. I never got around to actually sending them a picture of mine, so I’m going to post it here. Clicking on the picture will take you to Flickr where you can see the notes attached to it.

Here is the contents:

• Leather portfolio
• Umbrella (this has come in handy lately)
• Camera
• Large notebook
• Morning newspaper
• Binoculars
• 15-inch Macbook Pro
• Graph paper sticky notes (I got these in highschool, they are fantastic)
• Various pens and pencils
• Calculator
• Ethernet cable (Very thin and small, came with my Fonero)
• Moleskine notebook (to track my to-dos and work)

What’s in your go bag?

I was just reading Jake Billo’s post These are a few of my favourite apps, and I realized that I haven’t ever discussed the different applications that I work with on my Mac. Jake breaks it into the different applications he uses on both Windows and Mac, but I’m only going to be focusing on the Mac applications I use. Additionally, I’m not going to make the title of this post a play on The Sound of Music.

Productivity and Writing

• Email - Google Mail - I was using Mail.app for the longest time, but I grew tired of the terrible search features it has. Gmail has always had superior search compared to any email client.
• Calendar - Google Calendar - I like the fact that I can access it anywhere, and that it is easy to view and share calendars with friends.
• Web Browser - Firefox - I’ve used Firefox for many years now. It crashes sometimes, but it is a very secure browser, and I love all of the extensions available.
• News Reader - NewsFire - I got this program when I purchased the MacHeist bundle. It is very light-weight and I like the ability to make smart feeds.
• Writing - Journler - I use this application for all of my writing and blog posts. It allows me to have a nice clean interface whether I’m online or offline.
• Quicksilver - A great application launche. It also makes tasks a lot easier with triggers. I can create tons of keyboard shortcuts so that I can minimize my mouse usage.

Uploading / Downloading

• BitTorrent - Transmission - I don’t use BitTorrent much at all, but when I do I use Transmission. It is very light-weight.
• Newsgroups - Unison - I don’t use newsgroups much on my main workstation. Most of this is done directly on to my file server. A great application for grabbing files quickly is Unison. It also has NZB support, which is a must.
• FTP - Cyberduck - Not the best FTP client I’ve ever used, but I still continue to use it. It’s certainly better than Fetch, which is a really old client for Mac.

Communications

• Instant Messaging - Adium - I use Adium because it’s a very light-weight client that supports almost every instant messaging protocol. This is important for me because I use almost every protocol there is on a regular basis.
• Voice Conferencing - Skype - Still the best voice conferencing program I’ve ever used. It’s great because it’s cross platform. It now has video conferencing built in.
• IRC - Colloquy - One of the best looking IRC clients on the Mac. It has every piece of eye candy you could ever want in an IRC client. It also has great integration with Growl.
• Additionally, I use Facebook and Jaiku to keep my friends updated on what I’m doing.

Programming and Development

• Eclipse - I use Eclipse to develop Java and Python applications.
• TextMate - Some people use PHP Eclipse to develop in PHP, but I prefer to just use TextMate. It is a very powerful text editor, and has some very useful bundles. It now integrates well with PHPDoc.

DVD/CD Burning / Video / Music

• DVD Ripping - MacTheRipper - This application is great because you can easily get rid of the blocks that they put on DVD that prevent you from skipping FBI warnings.
• DVD Shrinking/Burning - DVD2OneX2 - I like this application because it both shrinks and burns the DVD. No need for two separate applications.
• Music - iTunes - The best music management application I’ve ever used. It has the typical extremely user-friendly Apple interface. iTunes doesn’t necessarily run very well on Windows, but it runs impeccably on the Mac. I also purchase a good amount of music from the iTunes music store.
• Video - QuickTime Pro - I try to use QuickTime as often as I can because of the integration with Apple’s FrontRow. When I can’t run something in QuickTime, I use VLC.

Photos / Graphics Editing

• Digital Camera - iPhoto - I use iPhoto to pull all of the photos from my digital camera and make simple adjustments such as brightness, contrast and red-eye. This application makes it very easy to distribue photos.
• To upload photos to my Flickr account I use Flickr Uploader. It is a very simple tool. It also will resize your images for you in order to save bandwidth.
• Graphic Editing - Photoshop CS2 - I use Photoshop at work because it’s the most advanced photo editing tool on the market. It also has great integration with Adobe GoLive CS2, which I also use at work for the website.

That just about covers all of the applications I currently use on my Mac. For a more indepth look you can go check out my Wakoopa feed. Wakoopa is a Web 2.0 website that tracks all of the applications you run on your computer.

What is your setup? Do you have any suggestions to my setup that would help make my life easier? I would also like to invite any readers to try Wakoopa out and post their feeds here. It’s very interesting to see how other utilize technology. It has certainly made me a more productive person.

Upon reading a post on Jake Billo’s blog, I decided that it’s been far too long since I’ve written a post. School has been finished for a while now, therefore it is time to start updating on a regular basis. I find that if I put off writing blog posts, it just makes it harder and harder to start posting again. I would like to thank the Waterloo Wellington Bloggers Association for not booting me for being an inactive blog for a while.

I’ve actually been up to a lot lately. There have been many projects I’ve been working on.

• Jake Billo, Warren Gray, and I have registered our business EdgeLink Consulting
  For the past few years the 3 of us have been doing computer repair and consulting for several of our clients in our spare time. Now that business has picked up and we are conducting more sales, we decided to register the business and started operating officially. If you have any computer repair or consulting needs, please contact us through our website.
• At the end of April I started doing full-time consulting for Household China & Gifts in Waterloo
  Throughout the school year I was doing consulting on a part-time basis. Now that I am done school for the summer I have been consulting full-time. I have been working on several projects for the store, due to the fact that most of their systems are very out of date. Apart from the computer side of things, the store has undergone huge changes since it has changed ownership. The store now features a new Flower Shop, and a kitchen loft, where our full-time chef teaches cooking classes to groups. Just a few weeks ago there was a wine-tasting in the store for a group of about 25. If you haven’t been in the store lately, I urge you to check it out.
• Continuing to learn Ruby on Rails and AJAX
  I’ve been trying to keep up with all of these Web 2.0 technologies. I’m aware that Ruby on Rails doesn’t exactly match up with the power of PHP, but it has proven to be very useful in some internal web applications I’ve been developing at Household China. For the amount of users of the applications, Ruby on Rails is a perfect solution. As a result, I’ve been devoting a good portion of my time to gaining more knowledge on the framework.
• Maintaining Organization
  I’ve also been setting aside time to keep myself organized. The starting of the business has added a lot of paperwork to my calendar, and a lot of files to my filing cabinet If I don’t keep up, I can easily get overwhelmed. I’m currently using iGTD in combination with Google Calendar to try to keep track of everything. I can’t wait for the release of OmniFocus. It should make the task of keeping organized a lot easier.

I think that is about the extent of the current projects I’m working on. I’m aiming to post 4-5 times a week. We’ll see if I can keep up with this. I will make this my June Challenge.

It’s been quite a while since I last posted. Although there isn’t much excuse for neglecting my blog for this long, I have been quite busy. Just at the end of January, I performed in Laurier Musical Theatre’s production of Bat Boy. This took up a significant portion of my time from October until the end of January.

There is a pretty detailed description of what Bat Boy is about on the LMT website. In short, it is a story about a half bat, half boy. I had a great time performing it and meeting all the great new people I got to work with. I’m really looking forward to being in LMT for the remaining 3 years that I plan to be a Laurier.

Another reason I’m crediting to not updating my blog is school. I’ve been pretty swamped with work, and that doesn’t leave much time to ponder some of the stuff I was writing about before I started university. Keeping this blog updated is a lot of work to do because the posts take some time to author, but I hope to do it more. It’s really rewarding once all is said and done and I want to keep it as a record of what I was doing and saying at this time. It’s quite interesting to look at some of the old stuff that I’ve written on the internet. From time to time I google my name and it keeps me amused for many hours.