And soon I shall have my chance.

Are they good books?  Yes.  Are they great books?  I don’t know — I just know that I must finish this, and that this year that may actually be possible.

I do end up posting a fair bit on twitter as well. If you happen to be on there, feel free to look me up. I tend to only authorize folks I at least somewhat know though, so at least take the trouble to send me an email first if you don’t know me already.

Let’s see, in case you don’t read any other blogs (Hi, Mom! Wait, do you even read my blog, Mom? Mom? *sigh*), here’s the rules for this silly thing:

Rules:

1. Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
2. Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
3. Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged.

To satisfy the first, thanks Jeremiah for the excuse to post again, even if it’s for such a trivial reason. Also, you will note that I’m merely using this seven facts thing to save from actually having to write a real blog post with updated information.

Seven facts:

1. Someone once pointed out to me that I consistently misspelled the word “weird”, as “wierd”. He suggested it was likely due to my last name, “wiens”. I’ll never be able to write the word weird without thinking about that comment. And I don’t think I’ve misspelled it since. Thanks, Joe!
2. I surf with vimperator. I know, I know. I’m a masochist.
3. My third grade girlfriend broke up with me over the phone. The reason for the dump? I was too focused on my budding career as a magician for her. Neither she, nor any worthwhile magic tricks remain from that time.
4. I live within a half a mile from the beach, and yet went less than a half-dozen times last year. And of those times, only went in the water maybe three-times.
5. My wife bought me a leather man-bag for my birthday this year. Like a purse, but for men. She was embarrassed with how much gizmos and junk I filled my pockets with. Of course, “leather man-bag” sounds kinda weird, maybe I should rephrase that.
6. The last published article I wrote was from early last year. As guilty as I feel for letting magazine email pile up, it sure feels great to have free time again. And now I only feel guilty for not answering email, not for not submitting articles until weeks (or months!) after their original due date.
7. Warning: This last fact is not a happy one. Last week my wife and I were told by our doctor that the baby in her womb (our second — a boy) suffers from an open neural tube defect, AKA: spina bifida. We’re still reeling with that, but there you have it. Not a happy fact, but certainly an important one.

Seven people:

1. John Sawyer and Ben Preston – Because those punks are both enjoying Sundance right now and deserve some misery for all that fun they’re having.
2. John Biesnecker – Because I don’t get to chat nearly often enough and this will have to serve as a cruel, cruel apology for that. Also, it’s worth mentioning that he’s the only person I know who’s gone through more websites than years he’s been alive. I stopped counting just before the second dozen domains, urls, etc.
3. My sister – Because she just had a cute baby-girl and I fully expect there’s no way she’ll be able to respond to this, thus helping it die sooner rather than later.
4. Brett – Because I have never met him, know him for no other reason than I’ve been reading his blog forever, and would like to see what he says.
5. Mark V – Because he’s traveling and will also hopefully break the trend.
6. No one else — I just realized the fastest way to break the trend is to stop naming people!

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.

• 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.

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!