Site Admin...

One of the great regrets I have in terms of education is that I never learned the nuts and bolts side of computing. I can generally make them do what I want, but don’t have a clue when it comes to explaining why it actually happened. To be honest, the in depth details of why it works isn’t as important to me as knowing that it’s going to do what I expect each and every time. That said, I would like to know more about designing and managing my own website. I have photos hosted on one site, a blog hosted on another, email on a third, and a Facebook account that can take on a life of its own when I let it. I’ve integrated with Google for most of those services, but that doesn’t quite make it a seamless experience. In a perfect world I’d like to have all of my “outward facing” web presence integrated into a single space. I’ve been sitting on a handful of domain names for the last few years without really doing anything with them (of course the one I really want is already owned… and has been static since 2006… grrr). In the vast amount of free time that I have, maybe it’s time to teach myself a little about site development.

As always, if anyone has any suggestions as far as reading material for a complete noob, I’m all ears. It’s going to be a good, long while before anyone sees any results, but everything has to start somewhere.

Fanboy...

I’m hopelessly addicted to all things new and shiny… Gadgets make me happy in a way most people will never fully understand. That I’ve switched my allegiance to the bright and shiny products developed by Apple for my computing and telecommunications needs is letting me develop a personal pool of electronic gadgets that is becoming more and more tightly integrated. My phone talks to my laptop talks to the cloud… If satellite phone service ever gets to a point of being almost reasonable on price, I’d have nearly 24/7/365 tie-in to the grid. I get a warm fuzzy by being able to reach out at any time from any place… Ironic, I know, for someone who doesn’t have all that much use for people. But where I don’t know much about people, I do know that I like having access to the data that populates the web. While maybe not the sum total of human knowledge, it’s getting damnedably close to the sum total of human knowledge that most of us will ever need to know. The more data that I have available at any given time, the more I like it.

Tomorrow, I’m hoping to hear an announcement out of San Francisco that will add one more layer to connectivity. Apple’s iPad, iSlate, iWhatever should fill the gap between where it’s inappropriate to have a cell phone out and about and where a laptop could be considered overkill. I’m thinking here about 2-3 day road trips, a bevy of staff and project meetings, and all manner of places around the house and the office. I’m thinking here of something that could reasonably replace the pens and legal pads that I tote from meeting to meeting and from city to city… One more link in the chain of perpetual connectivity tied to the cloud by 3G and WiFi.

I’ve been a slobbering fool for technology long enough to know that many “game changers” aren’t… But my last two years with Apple have taught me to expect the unexpected and that sometimes game changers are exactly that. I know some will argue that other companies have done it first, but they would be hard pressed to argue that any previous attempt at a true tablet is as elegant in form or as integrated with a hardware family as whatever Apple rolls out tomorrow. I’m planning to be all geeked out and tuned in to the real-time tech bloggers tomorrow afternoon at 12:00 CST as Steve throws down the gauntlet one more time. This ought to be sweet.

So I made the switch this weekend. The iPhone finally won me over completely (poor battery and all) and I embraced the dark side... or would that be the hippy side of the force. Getting all the files over has been something of your standard issue trauma, but now that most of what I need is set up and running (when I can find it), I'm very pleased with the setup overall. I've got a super-speedy laptop that when hooked up to the ridiculously beautiful 24-inch LED monitor produces some of the most amazing graphics I've seen in a long while.

The learning curve is a little steep and I'm doing my best to get by using wordpad until I can get a copy of Office and start accessing the vast bulk of my documents again, but otherwise I'm extremely pleased with how it's working out.

I wouldn't say that I've gone all zen crazy over the experience, but the longer I live with it, the more I suspect I'll like it. I'll need some time to really get into the nuts and bolts of the thing and start putting it through its paces, but for the time being, my satisfaction level is high... except, of course, for the ridiculous price tag they put on these things.