I never would have guessed thirteen years ago when I started working on my high school newspaper that I’d actually end up doing something vaguely similar.  Being an actual press person just seemed silly.  Don’t get me wrong, I loved the experience, the people I got to work with, and it was a heck of a lot more interesting than most everything else in high school, I just didn’t equate that with anything I’d actually do for a living.

While my livelihood has never really depended on the articles I’ve written as that work has all been on the side, the work has changed a lot of things about my life.  My current job is at least partially a result of going to RSA for the mags, I’ve been able to meet some amazing people in the industry, and in general I’ve learned a lot about technologies I might not have otherwise had an excuse to experiment with.  Also, I’ve learned just how often I write run-on sentences.  It’s my blog, I’m allowed to be sloppy here.

Anyway, here’s to Deborah Jepson my journalism teacher for giving me a good start on a road I never even expected to travel.

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There’s always some good reason why I’m not posting.  Well, there are always reasons, anyway.  I’m not sure they’re always good.  Not that anybody cares, but the following is a non-exhaustive list of things I’ve been working on besides writing here: finishing my presentation for Rational, playing Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Ring of Fates, being a proud papa, re-reading the WoT series yet-again (for the last time, I swear — if I do it right, I’ll be able to transition right into the last book when it comes out), doing a different presentation from the aforementioned one for the office, doing an early draft of the aforementioned presentation for the office, and even enjoying a little bit of beach and other relaxation time.  It’s been fun. 

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I was writing an email to a friend when I realized that I’d written most of a blog post I’ve been meaning to do for a while right into the email.  So in the spirit of eliminating the fowl with stones deux, here’s a quick summary of the many reasons I love Quicksilver.  If some of these options don’t work for you, first check Quicksilver’s “Plugins” tab in the Settings.  That, and enabling “advanced features” under preferences/application might be necessary for some of these tricks.

• Open Source: The first item on the list is also the most recent change as QS was Open Source relatively recently.  Unfortunately, the development has been a little big fragmented, so sometimes you have to wade through the forums and find some alternate build or what-not, but I’m a huge fan of any project willing to open-source their work.  And I’m sure things are even better now though I haven’t looked lately.  To be fair, I’ve been using QS since before that, but it never hurts.  Plus, the new license has likely helped Gnome-Do along which is convenient since I’m relying on it in Hardy Heron for some of the features I miss from QS.  It’s got a long way to go, but development has been pretty solid, so I have high hopes.
• Working with contacts: When I want to email someone, I just cmd-space (I swapped the default spotlight and quicksilver hotkeys on my machine), person’s name, tab, “email”, enter.  Voila.  Likewise for other contact info, except instead I use the forward-slash to drill into the contact item and see the detailed results.  Often times it’s nice to display an address or phone number using the “large type” action.
• Alerts: Speaking of “large type”, here’s a really sweet trick I used to use when I was at UF (not so much anymore since I can’t bring my laptop to work with me).  I send myself quick little reminders.  So say I want to focus on one particular task, and switch in an hour or at a particular time.  I activate QS, enter text mode (use a “.”, or you can have it default to text mode when nothing else machines), tab, select large type, then do “ctrl-enter”.  This does a modification on the action basically.  In this case, I tab to the third field and select “run at time” or “run after delay”.  You can give it natural text (like “five minutes” or a variety of formats for time) and it just works.  Might require some tweaking to get the options enabled.
• File manager: I use QS all the time both as a file manager itself (move, delete, open, find, etc), but also with other dialogs.  Say, for example, any time I’m in an open dialog box in any program and it’s in the wrong folder, I use quicksilver to locate the folder I want, then just drag the folder icon from the left pane of quicksilver straight into the open dialog box.  Poof, I’m looking at the right directory.  Same applies to working with files as well — if I need to move a file into a different directory, use QS to find the new directory, then just drag the file straight into the folder in the QS panel.  Incredibly handy once you get used to working with QS objects like that.
• Calculator:

<CMD>-A
.
40+38*33 (or other formula)
<tab>
calc
<enter>

Result! (for an added bonus: tab, copy to clipboard, or use the “paste” action which uses the paste function of whatever program you’re into dump the result).
• Email templates: I frequently need to send an email with the same body text.  Here’s looking at you, PR folks.  No offense intended, but I figure it’s fair since I know most of the emails ya’ll send me are templated anyway.  Regardless, QuickSilver has a nifty feature called the “Shelf” that you can place items in.  I put text snippets into it that I can then quickly place into an  
• Music: Rather than launch itunes to select a particular song, using QS to manage my current playlists, rank songs, display track information, etc.  I do this through some judicious triggers I’ve assigned to hotkeys, as well as the usual Quicksilver iTunes interface.

Gratuitous Tech | No Comments »

At the Lin wedding last week, each table was invited to write a poem or story beginning with the line, “Ellen and Eric were just wed…”  My table decided the most equitable thing to do was to let each person at the table write two words at a time and send the card around until our story was done.  So let it be written, so let it be done.

Ellen and Eric were just wed last Saturday and they went home before going down to the reception.  Their first dance was suddenly interrupted!  “Oh no,” said Ellen, “what will that astronaut do without oxygen?”  “Don’t worry”, Oprah said, “Obama rules the world,” so he called 1-800-FREE-AIR.  Republicans everywhere heard the stock exchange go boom.  London bridge wasn’t falling for her until just then a chaste kiss interrupted the peace conference.  London wondered whether France was interested in Eric’s Captain Underpants.  Worn outside on sunny Panamanian holidays.

Truer words may have never been spoken.

Incidentally, congratulations Eric and Ellen!

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I sleep funny. Or rather, I sleep in strange and awkward positions that for some reason I find entirely comfortable. Most people upon seeing me sleeping assume I’m a corpse with a broken neck. I was digging through some backups recently looking for a document when I stumbled on my trove of webcam videos from my dorm. Any bets on how old I’ll be before I develop spinal problems?

Nostalgia, Random | 2 Comments »