There is a book out that is getting a decent amount of attention within the geek community. It has to do with mastering time management and counteracting inefficiency in life in general. It’s called Getting Things Done, and I have already purchased my copy.

I’m very anxious to see what sort of information I can get out of it, and whether or not I can use its system to counter my tendencies toward procrastination and a general lack of focus. Here’s an awesome summary of the system for anyone who wants a sneak peak.

Anyway, it looks like a great read. I’ve placed it in the queue, and once I finish all my other books I am definitely going to get started on this one.

Cherry OS has just come out with one of the coolest things to hit desktop computing in years. This software will allow those who don’t have a Mac to get all the benefits of OS X.

Basically (if they don’t get sued with extreme predjudice by Apple), this product has the ability to expose a larger group of people to what I believe is the best desktop operating system available today. As I have discussed with my geek buddies, there is plenty of room for skepticism here. Is the speed a put-off? Is the temptation too great to go back to the host (Windows) OS?

I still think the better push would be to get people to get an iMac and go from there. But for those with the know-how, I say fire up a session of Cherry OS and see what all the talk is about.

I can tell you, from my own personal experience, that I was very resistant to moving to the Mac platform for my main desktop. My main reason for this is that I dislike bandwagons. The Apple following is much like a cult, and I have always been repelled by the fervor with which many of the more dedicated zealots fans of the various Apple products push them.

Many respectable geeks are still in this mode and I’d like to reach out to them and send them a single message:

Think of OS X - not Apple.

In other words, just because there are sorry people using Gentoo, Postfix, or sporks doesn’t mean that to use these things makes you one of them. It’s harder to resist this feeling when dealing with Apple stuff, but it’s worth it to do so. It’s especially difficult to do what I am doing now (evanglizing Apple) when it is percisely this behavior that I abhor so much. But again, I’m pushing OS X - not Apple in general. I hated Macs before OS X, and I still hate everything about them before OS X arrived.

So, Chris Pirillo and others - I ask you to shed, or at least set aside, your distaste for Apple. Think more about the products themselves. OS X is a godlike OS, and iPods are utterly sick music players. Take this at face value, and when faced with a psycho Apple-fanboy who offers a secret handshake when he sees your iPod, school him on how you don’t swing that way. Similarly, when you see a PC guy who gives you the “oh, you’re one of those people” looks, take some time to explain the difference between loving products and being in the club.

Ultimately, don’t let your fear of being branded as “one of them” keep you from experiencing what FreeBSD with a awesome GUI has to offer. ::

For those not aware yet, here’s something you should take notice of. Podcasting is hot right now among the geekiest of the new-tech geeks, and if you are into knowing stuff that most don’t (but will be known by everyone soon) you should study up.

The basic concept is the same as news aggregation - something I’m very fond of - but the diference is that this is for audio and other “heavy” content. So you subscribe to certain types of content, and as things come available they are downloaded for you and put on your audio device (I sugges an iPod). This is the software I am using.

Anyway, do check it out; it’s new, and new stuff is better.

For anyone not familiar, Davezilla.com is an excellent site to check out during one’s daily browsing (or via RSS if you are cool like that). The latest gem was how to win an argument with your cat - a nice piece of geek-humor.

Well friends and neighbors, it seems that according to this article (along with a few others) that the forces that be are working to bring a single Linux desktop to the market.

This is big.

If I were evil, and worked at Microsoft, I’d dump a whole lot of money into Gnome right now. Having “the Linux desktop” standardize on KDE is a big blow for Microsoft - whether they are aware of it or not. What this means is that a functional Windows replacement for the average PC user is on the way.

Go Linux.

Hmm, that was quite interesting. Going through my previous *ogs/journals was an expeerience. It’s funny how lame you can sound to yourself, but I attribute a lot of that to the fact that none of this was supposed to be seen. In other words, I wasn’t writing for it to sound good; I was writing to remind myself of something that I was worried I would forget. Plus there was the fact that it was just theraputic to write it down I suppose.

Anyway, if you check out the archives section you’ll see a bunch of stuff from back to 96′. What’s interesting is the fact that all of the old stuff was done before my entrance into the world of computers. I actually used a pencil to “write” that crap. Weird stuff.

I have decided to go through both my electronic and paper-based journals from the past and put some of the less personal (and less lame) entries here on the blog. This doesn’t, incidentally, leave room for too many. :)

I’ve always wanted to have a central place for such things and this appears to be the time and place. I have stuff from way back in 96′, so this should be interesting.

Well, I have decided (again) to go with WordPress as my blogging tool of choice. This time I am going to stick with it since the benefits of the database backend do in fact outweigh my quirky desires for every page on my site to look the same. That will come in time, but in the meantime I need an easy way to write to the blog, and updating html and xml files in BBEdit wasn’t it.

This theme is one of the ones featured on the main style site, so it’ll be changing soon. It’d be o.k. if it wasn’t for the image I suppose, but I’ll be matching the colors and fonts to the rest of my site in the near future.

Well, I finally got to go to the U.K., and it was badass. I just got back on Thursday, and have been there since last Saturday. I got to stay in York, which happens to be the major British town that William Wallace sacked as seen in Braveheart. Quite cool; the entire city was still encircled by the remnants of the original city wall that he had to contend with. It actually used to be the capital of England - back during the feudal times.

There were, however, a few quirks over there, but I have come to realize that some of them were associated with York as a small town and not the U.K. as a whole. York, as I understand now, is very similar to St. Augustine in the U.S. It even claims to be the most haunted city in its respective country. Anyway, resturants, for example, were quite different. They closed from like 2 to 5 in the afternoon, and very few seemed to be open after 10. The pubs, however, were quite open; those folks do like to drink. They also didn’t like to bring checks in the resturaunts. You basically had to ask a few times in order to convince the waiter/waitress that you were serious about leaving. Food was also very expensive. We were spending close to 80 pounds per meal out there between the 4 of us, which is like 40 dollars a piece. And for the most part the food was equivalent to roughly half that in worth in the states. There were also no free refills, and the glasses were micro-mini. So for the cost of roughly $2.50 you’d get like half of a standard U.S. glass of coke or juice. Then of course, since it was such a small glass you’d naturally want more. After getting a couple refills you will have just spent around $8 on beverages. Oh, and don’t expect to get salad or bread free either; that’s all extra. To add insult to injury, they have some sort of perverse obsession with putting lemon wedges into perfectly decent glasses of coke. You’d think I’d catch on and tell the person at the next resutraunt that I didn’t want it, but I don’t think I was hit with the reality that every single resturaunt could be so severly maligned as to think it was a good idea. I was wrong.

Another major bonus was all the food I was able to try. I had my first Indian, Greek, and Bangladeshian (sp) food, and they were all awesome. I liked the Indian quite a bit. Luckily for all involved, I didn’t have any English food other than breakfast - which is basically the same as it is here.

The highlight of the trip (without question) was the trip to Scotland. My goals were simple - eat haggis and drink Scottish beer. I made good on both accounts and I am better for it. I now look down on mere mortals who have not done so. My ultimate goal was to reach the highlands and swing a Katana on a mountain, but alas it was not to be. I need Tim there for that one anyway.

Overall the trip was a success on a massive scale. I’ll be posting pictures shortly.

I have an obsession with learning and being able to recall everything that I have learned. I feel somewhat panicked when faced with the notion of having forgotten things that I spent time absorbing. This is actually the main reason I have a website in the first place. My goal with the /study portion of my site is to eventually have tutorials in my own words on every single subject that I find interesting (or at least those that are technically difficult) so that if I ever feel fuzzy on one of them I can refer back to my own stuff. This way, I can learn via various methods, absorb it, then regurgitate it out in my own way for later use. This project is my main long-term, tech-oriented goal.