Okay, so that whole reCAPTCHA thing didn’t work worth a crap. Hopefully comments are functional again, with antispam via Akismet.

So today I hopped a plane to Dallas to go to MileMeter headquarters for a week. Super awesome. In Charleston, the guy at the gate asked me to help carry a car seat out to the tarmac for a woman traveling along with a little baby. “Sure,” I said, lifting it up. “Where’s it go?”

“To the same plane,” he replied. Well, I pretty much assumed *that*, dingbat…

Here’s a couple pictures Doug and I took in the office – more soon.

I’ll be going to bed now… been up rather long…

My former boss asked me for some suggestions for OS X tools. The entire list got a bit long for a twitter reply, so here they are:

Productivity

• Microsoft Office 2008 For Mac
  Yep, you’ve got to pay for it. Yep, it’s actually really good. It’s from a different team, not the apparently drunken monkeys that put together the Windows office product. OpenOffice *just* released native Mac support, and it’s pretty bad. I’m hopeful it will improve in a few revisions. NeoOffice is acceptable in a pinch, but it’s not exactly a smooth experience.
• Mail.app.
  I’d really like to give the nod to Thunderbird here, as I like the way it looks and handles much better, but at least in my environment, hitting a handful of IMAP servers, it just doesn’t hold up. Folders don’t get updated, deleting messages takes a few agonizing seconds per, it’s just not pretty.
• Safari and Firefox (split decision)
  For web development, Firefox plus the Firebug and HTML Validator plugins are utterly crucial. I can’t imagine doing AJAX development without them. Wait, I can, because I did, and it sucked. But Firefox still hasn’t gotten over that get-wedged-up-and-die thing it started doing a few revisions ago, so it’s Safari for day-to-day browsing.

Communication

• Adium for IM
• Twitterriffic for twittering

Tools

• Parallels, because everybody still needs to run Windows apps from time to time.
• Textmate for text editing, duh
• Acorn for light image editing. It’s not Photoshop, and that’s intentional. Does the basics, and does them well.
• SimplyBurns
  This is for the basic sort of CD burning/copying operations that the OS should do out of the box.
• DigitalColor Meter lets you find out the color of any pixel on the screen – very handy. It comes with the OS, but you’ll have to search for it.

Well, I saw that one coming. The Russian company that bought LiveJournal a while back sacked a whole bunch of employees. LJ’s future seems pretty questionable at the moment, so as a result, I’m moving over to self-hosting here at rineysoft. Old posts are moved over, save some tweaking.

WordPress is pretty awesome though. Way better integration with, well, everything. More later…