billpalmer.net

I'm moving the billpalmer.net website over to the new iProng web server, which means that this blog may disappear from sight for a few hours or a few days, depending on your ISP's swiftness in associating the new server with this domain. That's geek-speak for "don't worry bout a thing" :-)

Took me long enough, didn't it? Some of you will recall that two months ago, after having been a Mac laptop user for the past decade, I decided that it was time to shift back to Mac desktop computing. The reasons, while numerous, boiled down to a few simple points: my current MacBook has reached the point where it's just old and obsolete enough that I was going to have to move to a newer Mac one way or the other. My iPhone has changed my computing patterns to where I rarely use my laptop as a laptop, instead leaving it parked on my desk nearly all the time unless I'm traveling. And my workflow has evolved to where a bigger screen and beefy hardware specs are now more important to me than they have been in a long time.

So a couple months ago I picked up a nice Intel iMac with a twenty inch screen with the intention of making it my everyday main computer, and hanging onto the MacBook solely for when I'm traveling out of town. It was a good plan, but like so many other plans this past summer, it fell victim to those multiple-times-daily DSL internet outages that plagued me for the first two months I lived in this apartment. I wanted to transfer all my data over to the iMac and make it my main computer, of course, but the internet situation forced me to run to internet cafes at one time or another nearly every day, and I needed the laptop for that. Was it ironic that right after I acquired a desktop because I was no longer using my laptop as a laptop, circumstances changed such that I was suddenly forced to use my laptop as a laptop again? No matter how you classify it, the bottom line is that I couldn't transition my workflow over to the iMac and so it ended up being a really nice-looking paperweight whose giant beautiful screen I did occasionally use for watching movies, but that was it.

Six weeks ago my life magically changed for the better when TimeWarner decided to finally allow me to partake of their cable internet services, and of course the frequent runs to the internet cafes came to a halt. My laptop had gone back to being nothing more than a stationary desktop machine with a small footprint, and so it was time to move everything over to the iMac and start that chapter. Except I didn't do it. Part of it was that it's a several-hour procedure to move everything over from one machine to another, and while it's a nearly automatic process that can be left to run overnight, I was faced with equal parts fear and uncertainty. Fear, because after living through a professional nightmare thanks to the internet situation, I'd finally gotten back my ability to do my job without distraction, and it was like I'd been shot out of a cannon. Did I really want to risk throwing off what had suddenly become an incredibly productive period of my life by transitioning to a new computer? Maybe it wasn't rational on my part, but after having just lived through the internet nightmare, I was more than a bit paranoid about allowing anything to throw my productivity off again.

Uncertainty, because the longer the iMac sat there idly while I continued to do my work on my MacBook, I began to wonder if I'd made the right choice in acquiring it. After all, the iMac didn't even have a battery in it. Unplug it and it shuts off? Are you kidding me? Wow, had it been that long since I'd been a desktop user, that I couldn't even imagine a computer that had to be plugged into a wall socket in order to remain turned on? Yeah, I guess it had been that long. The last desktop I bought was also an iMac, but it was an original iMac, back in August of 1998, which was a little more than a decade ago (gee whiz, am I old enough to have done anything a decade ago?). Within a year I'd moved on to the newly introduced iBook, and it's been nine years since I've used a desktop as my main machine. So yeah, a little culture shock on my part - what do you mean, I have to find space for a keyboard on my desk? Why is the power button hidden on the back? And what do you mean, turning the brightness setting to zero doesn't make the screen go completely dark? Don't desktop users sleep in the same room as their computers?

So I was wondering if maybe it was time to give up on the idea, dump the iMac, and go in a different direction. Not a new MacBook, as I don't think I can keep myself constrained to a thirteen inch screen any longer. Perhaps a MacBook Pro, but then I dug out my old beat up PowerBook G4 (which I keep around strictly for emergencies) and spent a little time with it and realized that even its fifteen inch screen seemed way too tiny compared to this big iMac. Maybe a seventeen inch PowerBook? Eh, I don't know.

I'm strictly a one-computer user. Give me five computers, and I promise you I'll keep four of them in a box and only use one of them. I've tried over the years, but working on multiple computers simultaneously just isn't for me. File Sharing, Remote Access, Timbuktu, they're all band-aids for the fact that at any given time, no matter which machine you're on, you don't have immediate natural access to all of your data. I know that using multiple computers simultaneously works for some other people, but I'm not one of them. So my original plan was to essentially keep the MacBook sitting on a shelf except for those times when I was heading out of town, in which case I'd fire up Migration Assistant overnight and take my iMac computing experience with me on my MacBook. Then when I return home, run Migration Assistant in reverse, and move my computing experience back to the iMac. If it sounds like a hassle, it's not. I only travel a few times a year. And I absolutely refuse to try to do any work on a computer that has any less than 100% of my data on it, as it creates the dual problem of A) not having immediate access to what I need, and B) creating new data on the second machine that won't be on my main machine when I need it. I know some of you will write in and insist that I adopt your method of repeatedly syncing data between the two machines on the fly, but I can't stress enough that I have absolutely no desire to have two computers sitting on my desk simultaneously under any circumstances.

The big hole in my plan, though, is that my MacBook's hard drive is 80 GB, which I've filled to the point that I have to be careful about what else I put on it. I knew that as soon as I migrated to the iMac and its 250 GB drive, I'd immediately take advantage of the new breathing room and while not filling it to capacity any time soon, I would quickly expand my data footprint to the point that I'd never be able to migrate it back to the MacBook.

So interestingly enough, it was the arrival this week of a new 250 GB internal hard drive for my MacBook that motivated me to finally go ahead and migrate to the iMac. I was going to need to get my data off the MacBook so that I can swap out the hard drives anyway, so why not just go ahead and move everything over to the iMac? This not only allows me to upgrade the drive on the MacBook, it also allows me to take it in for warranty repair (the entire topcase needs to be replaced, but I've been putting it off because I didn't want to be without it for a week). So yesterday I pulled the trigger. Everything is on the iMac now (I'm typing this on the iMac's cool new keyboard), and I'm going to use this time to try out life on a desktop. Actually, after firing most of my regular applications, I can't see myself ever going back to anything less than twenty inches; this is like a whole new workflow. Windows are open at full size and palettes aren't piled on top of each other, and yeah, I can see myself being a whole lot more efficient on this machine than I was on my last.

After my MacBook gets upgraded and fixed up, it'll likely just sit for awhile - until it's time to head back to Florida for the holidays, of course. With the equal hard drive sizes, it'll be easy enough to migrate my entire user experience back to the MacBook when it's time to step on that airplane. Until then, this is a tryout period for the iMac. I know there are other routes I could have taken (for instance, buying a newer faster MacBook and connecting it to a twenty inch external monitor, or ditching both the iMac and MacBook and instead ponying up for that seventeen inch MacBook Pro), but this is the path I'm trying out for now. For at least the next month and a half, I'm now a Mac desktop user...for the first time in a decade.

The past few days I've been going to bed tired at ten or eleven at night, and then arising wide awake and well-rested at six or seven in the morning. I know, that's called "normal life" a good number of people. But let's just say that my internal clock has never, in thirty-one years, tolerated such things. I can go to bed at 10pm, but falling asleep won't happen for several hours. And I can wake up at the crack of dawn, but don't expect me to be anything other than tired, confused, headache-laden, and inexplicably shivering whether it's cold or not. Except that this week, none of that's happening. And I don't know why.

It's not that I haven't tried in the past. For five years I had a day job which required me to be up that early every weekday, and let's just say that my body fought it every step of the way, never did come close to adjusting, and I don't think I got one good night's sleep in five years of trying (thanks, but this isn't the part where you write in with suggestions; if you can suggest it, I've already tried it). Anyway, the beauty of self-employment is that while you do sometimes have to work ridiculous hours, and the idea of being "done with work for the day" just because the clock has struck a certain hour is a mere myth, you do in fact usually get to sleep the specific hours that your body wants you to. And for me that's been a huge blessing. I don't care how lazy people think me for staying up working til four in the morning and then sleeping til noon, it's what keeps me productive.

Except now. Maybe it's just a quirk, as my sleep patterns tend to drift out of sync from the twenty-four hour clock, and sometimes I do randomly end up awake that early. if feeling like (and wishing) I were dead, just because things were bound to cycle through that time of day eventually. But these past three days have been different. Each evening I'm asleep before the late shows even come on, and each morning I'm awake enough that I could watch the morning shows if I wanted to. It's only been three days, but I wonder how long it might last.

Am I more productive? No, of course not. Fifteen waking hours is fifteen waking hours, no matter which ones they are. If anything, trying to work in the morning is less productive, due to all the various distractions that come as a result of everyone else also being awake and wanting to contact me. I know I can close out all the various forms of communication, but then I start to worry what I might be missing out on and so I invariably open then all back up. Contrast that to sitting down and writing a feature story at eleven o'clock at night, when businesses are closed, people are going to sleep, and I don't even have to close out my email program or phone or chat clients in order to attain the ideal level of isolation required for me to do my best writing. Except that the past few days I've been asleep before 11pm even rolls around. So I'm doing what I can. For instance there's that oddly quiet period from 2-5pm pacific time, when the east coasters have already gone home for the day and the west coasters seem to go fairly quiet as well, which makes for a decent window for intensive work.

One of the habits I've developed in my years of sleeping til noon (funny how there's such a societal bias against doing so that "sleeping til noon" is an actual phrase of hyperbole intended to insult people for being lazy, but I digress) is that shortly after awaking, it's time for lunch. Sometimes I eat in, sometimes I head out, depending on how awake I am, but lunch is generally one of the first things I address when I wake up. And in the past three days that hasn't changed - except that I'm awake by seven in the morning and starving by nine. And if I'm going to eat breakfast food, it's not going to be for my first meal of the day. So lunch it is, at nine in the morning, except few restaurants are open this early and even fewer are serving lunch food yet.

So I'll just sit here and eat this tuna fish for lunch, and even though it's nine in the morning, it feels like mid-day or later. And suddenly Panic at the Disco's "Nine in the Afternoon" has a whole new meaning for me.

Busy few weeks, but it's time to watch some Monday Night Football, or at least have it on in the background while I'm working on the next issue of the magazine. It's Green Bay vs Minnesota, and while I imagine new quarterback Aaron Rodgers just might do well, I can't help but wonder how it's possible that Brett Favre made his season debut yesterday as the quarterback for another team. I know, I know, Favre was being ridiculously wishy-washy about whether he was going to retire, just as he has been during each of the past few offseasons. But as we all saw yesterday, he's still a long way from being washed up.

In fact, best I can tell, the Packers decision to dump him had nothing to do with the fact that he's getting older or any questions about his ability to continue playing well. Instead, this was all about the fact that they were simply sick of his indecisiveness. They'll still have a chance to be a good team this year with the new guy, but they don't strike me as a Super Bowl contender - and they would have been a contender for sure if they'd kept Favre. Sure, Favre had actually gone so far this time as to officially retire for a few months in the offseason and then un-retire after the new guy had been told he was going be the guy, but that's simple enough to deal with: "Dear Aaron Rodgers, our apologies but Brett Favre is coming back after all, and we can win the Super Bowl with him but we can't win it with you, so we're going to pay you millions of dollars to hold a clipboard for one more year." It's really just that simple. If you want to succeed, then it has to be. Sure, you try to take care of your people, but Rodgers would have gotten paid the same money this year whether he touched a football or not.

As a business owner I've always wanted to strike up friendships with the people who are working for me, always hoped to build the staff as one big happy family, and I'm probably too sentimental in that way sometimes. And basic human instinct dictates that you don't like having people around that you like having around you. But even I know that you don't fire an employee with Brett Favre's talent and productivity just because you find him annoying.

Meanwhile, Favre did a nice job yesterday of beating my Dolphins, although just barely. The Jets weren't a very good team when Chad Pennington was their quarterback, and while they're clearly better not that they've replaced him with Favre, they're still not a very good team - and the quarterback position was far from their biggest liability to begin with. But in this case, both the coach and general manager of the Jets are probably one more losing season away from both being fired as it is, and while they won't win a Super Bowl this year even with Favre, they'll be a modest contender and that'll probably save their jobs for another year or two. It seems that the Jets ownership is making a basic business mistake of a different sort: never allow employees whose jobs are in trouble to start making business decisions that are geared toward keeping their jobs intact. Again, it's just human nature, but as a boss you've got to step in and prevent that from happening.

Not that I ever bought into Chad Pennington as some kind of savior when the Dolphins signed him, as some in the local media did. The fact that the Jets dumped him for someone better and he immediately became the Dolphins starting quarterback simply tells you how bad the Dolphins are right now. If you fired an employee for being consistently mediocre, and another company immediately hired him and put him in charge, you'd have to assume that no one in their current ranks was even able to achieve mediocrity. But on the other hand, the Dolphins do have a pair of young quarterbacks, one of whom has shown a lot of potential, and they know their future lies with one of those two and not with Chad Pennington. He's simply their best option right now for bringing some mediocre stability ("mediocre" being a big upgrade for a team that only one won game all last year) while the rest of the team figures out what it's doing, and allowing the two young guys to keep their noses clean in the meantime.

The funny thing is, the Dolphins are the only team I've mentioned so far that aren't trying to win anything this year. The team's new management knows that the franchise and the roster were made into a mess by the last three or four incompetents who ran the team (I've honestly lost count), and they know that they have no chance of truly contending this year, so they're using it as one big long dress rehearsal to see who's going to be with them for the long term and what's going to work down the road. The reason they're comfortable doing so is because they know for certain that they're not getting fired any time soon, and so they don't have to put on a show and they know they can afford to make decisions that are best for the long term even if those decisions to end up making this year's mediocre-at-best season look a little worse. And that's fine with me. After all, the last guy running the Dolphins was trying to win every game, and he lost pretty much all of his games anyway. If the Dolphins happen to win a couple games this year by accident while trying to build toward the future, then that's still more games than they won last year.

Bottom line is that you can learn an awful lot about how things work (or how they should and shouldn't work) just by watching others. And while we tend to think of football as a game, the truth is that it's big business - and the people making the business decisions are, out of public relations necessity, forced to make nearly all of their decisions in broad daylight for public scrutiny. It's fairly easy for us to sit back and think we could do a better job, and most of us probably couldn't, but it does give us the opportunity to maybe learn a few thing about business if we watch for the right things.

Dear Twitter,

First I have to congratulate you on managing to keep your servers up and running, even as Rick Sanchez keeps steering more and more of CNN's mainstream viewers toward Twitter today for the sake up keeping up with the latest news centered around Hurricane Gustav. It's fairly self-evident that a site like Twitter will never be taken seriously outside of its most addicted users unless it can demonstrate that it can keep the lights on during important high-traffic moments, and while you've struggled with that mightily in the past, you seem to have finally overcome that particular obstacle. It may have something to do with the fact that it's Sunday night and many of Twitter's "regulars" aren't particularly active right now, but the bottom line is that your servers are still up and running despite the presumably massive influx of new users and traffic from CNN.

Here's the problem, though: despite the fact that Rick Sanchez has been careful to point out that his Twitter username is twitter.com/ricksanchezcnn, that isn't going to stop any number of CNN viewers from heading straight for twitter.com/ricksanchez. Don't believe me? Then explain how this obviously "dead" account suddenly has 555 followers, a number that's jumping higher every time you reload the page? There are no updates to the @ricksanchez account, not even a photo, and only two people are being followed. There's no other explanation other than that people mistakenly think this account belongs to CNN's Rick Sanchez, and they're following it expecting updates and discussion centered around hurricane Gustav.

Except that those 555 (now 564) people aren't getting any updates. And if they're Twitter newbies being shepherded in just because they were watching CNN, then they're not even going to know why they're not getting updates. And while many of those 564 566 people are just rubberneckers anyway, I'd bet at least a few of them live in New Orleans, perhaps still in their homes, perhaps evacuated, and they're legitimately trying to use Twitter to get hurricane updates.

You can debate the sageness of that all you want (and in fact I can remember Rick Sanchez getting booed loudly at a hurricane benefit concert in Florida back in 1992, when he was a local newsman in the Miami - Fort Lauderdale area and not particularly respected), but the bottom line is that whether this really puts anyone's life or peace of mind in danger or not, it does point to a larger problem: why isn't Twitter doing anything about it?

Come on, this one's easy. Not in a million years would I suggest that Twitter take the @ricksanchez account away from an actual legitimate user whose name happens to be "Rick Sanchez" just because there happens to be some guy by the same name on CNN who's more popular (I certainly wouldn't give up @billpalmer just because a newscaster happened to share my name). But while it's not clear whether @ricksanchez is a never-used and long-dormant account that people are finding by accident, or whether some prankster created it this weekend just to have some fun, the bottom line is that @ricksanchez is not a legitimate Twitter account. And all Twitter would have to do to put a happy face in this situation would be to redirect @ricksanchez to @ricksanchezcnn. Maybe those 566 579 people are too stupid to be using Twitter in the first place, but let's throw them a rope - especially considering that there might be some chance in some way that this might actually have some kind of positive effect on the hurricane situation.

So to whoever it keeping the lights on a Twitter headquarters this evening, I'm calling on you to make the smart move, make the easy move, and redirect a dead account to the user that every last one of those 579 581 users was trying to follow in the first place. These are the gimmes, the easy opportunities that when handed to you, you've got to jump on them. With a few exceptions, Twitter's history has been that of not jumping on much of anything in the way of an obvious opportunity. But facilitating those 581 623 679 confused folks in being able to follow along with hurricane updates more easily would be great way for Twitter start transitioning toward a more proactive, socially conscious, and important calling.

When we last left our fearless blogger, he had just escaped from being trapped inside a laundry room. Armed with his trusty screwdriver, he headed off to the depths of the laundry room again, and wasn't heard from for two weeks...

What a two week period that was. I'm not even sure where to start. Every time I thought I was going to be able to sit down and write a blog post, something else happened that changed the game yet again. I'm watching television right now, something I haven't done in three months, and yes I have television now. I have three remote controls suddenly, I can't remember what any of them do, and I'm pressing random buttons like I'm somebody's grandpa. Oh, I have internet too. Real internet that works. My good friends at Time Warner somehow managed to waif on all three appointments they scheduled for me the day before I left for New Media Expo, but one fearless installer showed up the day after I got home and took care of business. He also wanted advice on buying his first Mac, wanted to know how much I was paying for my apartment, I think maybe he wanted to be my roommate. I'm not really sure. But my internet works now.

And that's changed everything. The latest issue of iProng Magazine actually went out the door three days early (which is what happens when my internet works consistently and I can actually get that work done without having to trudge down to an internet cafe I don't know how many times a day), we somehow managed to get Olympic gold medalist swimmer Natalie Coughlin on the cover, which wasn't supposed to happen, not the day after the Olympics ended, but there you are. Don't worry, the next issue is back to music on the cover - and it's a band you've all heard of.

New Media Expo? Wow, it's still a blur. I'm still catching up on my post-Expo networking, which is later than usual for me. I've got two stacks of business cards, and the one I've worked my way through is finally a little taller than the one that I'm still working on. Coverville 500 concert at the Expo? That was fun in too many ways to express here. I'll have more to say about it once I can wrap my head around any of it, but that won't be this week.

LeRoi Moore is dead. I just wrote a long, long tribute, and it's still not all out of my system. I could write about Dave Matthews Band all day, but twenty-seven hundred words later and I still don't know what to say about it.

I've got nothing to say about Apple's rumored September 9th press event until I'm sure that they're having one. I am sure, however, that the iPhone 2.0 software, even at 2.0.2, is unacceptably buggy and slow - to the point of making third party applications so useless that I'm not even using any of them. The only reason I haven't downgraded to version 1.1.4 yet is that I've been too busy since I got home from the Expo. Busy in a good way, though.

Thank you, Time Warner, for giving me a remote control whose "Guide" button brings up a guide that isn't really a guide, and whose "Exit" button doesn't actually exit you from the guide that isn't really a guide. And the off-putting Mario Brothers sound effects are a bonus. That kind of crap drives me nutty, and it'll help prevent me from wasting too much time watching television. No sarcasm. I mean it. Too much potential here to accomplish too much to waste it sitting in front of the tube.

1:15 am Conclusion came to me: I'm locked inside a laundry room. Literally. Now what?

-----

Heading to New Media Expo in about thirty-six hours so I thought it might be a good idea to get the laundry done now instead of waiting til the last minute. Yeah I know it's the middle of the night, but my building's laundry room is located in an offshoot of the parking garage, isolated from the actual apartments, so it's not like I would be disturbing anyone. Plus, all the machines would be available.

So I take my clothes down to the laundry room, start up two washers worth of clothes, set a timer on my iPhone so I'll remember to come back and move them to the dryer, turn off the light, and head out. Except the door doesn't seem to want to open.

"That's kind of funny actually," I think to myself, "because it's one in the morning and if the door really were stuck shut, I'd probably be in here all night." But after a few minutes of playing around with it I can see that the door knob really is busted, and I am in fact stuck in a laundry room. In the middle of the night. With no one around. This is new territory, even for me.

You know how I like to joke that overwhelmingly improbable things tend to happen to me as if it were impossible for them not to? How many of you have ever been locked inside a laundry room in the middle of the night? You see my point. I knew I could call the building manager to come get me out if it came down to it, but I really didn't want to have to wake anyone up unless I was out of less severe options.

So I thought hey, I just started up my laundry anyway, might as well sit here for a bit and let the washers do their thing for now. Anyone who comes home and parks in the garage is going to have to walk right past the windowed laundry room door on their way to the elevator, so I'll wait for someone to do just that. In the mean time I've got my iPhone with me, which means that A) I can have some fun telling people about this on mobile twitter, B) it's time to play some Crash Bandicoot, and C) there's really nothing much to worry about because I know I can fix this with a phone call if I eventually have to. And because I've got a really sick sense of humor about these things, I fired up that old Nirvana song in which Kurt Cobain incoherently sings about being stuck in a laundry room. All these years I never knew he wrote that song for me.

Not that I didn't spend the next forty-five minutes trying to wriggle, jigger, and/or dismantle that doorknob. At this point it's already broken so it's not like I'm doing any undue damage to the building if I, say, happen to destroy the doorknob in the process of springing myself. But Houdini I'm not, and eventually both my iPhone's timer and the sudden silence in the room told me that the washers were done. Okay, time to move my clothes to the dryers. I mean there's only one productive thing you can do while locked inside a laundry room, so you might as well do that while you're there. Good thing I'd brought enough quarters with me.

About fifteen minutes after I'd started up the dryers, after I'd been locked in the laundry room for just about an hour in total, one of the other tenants did indeed come home and park in the garage and proceed to stand right next to the laundry room door while he was waiting for the elevator. Took a bit of convincing to get him to believe that I really was trapped inside and not just messing with him, but he eventually determined I was for real and went upstairs and got a screwdriver and came back down and popped the doorknob open fairly easily. You know, if only I'd thought to take a screwdriver down there with me in the first place, I probably could have done the same thing from the inside. Lesson learned.

The kicker is that now I have to go back and get my clothes out of the dryer. Don't worry about me, I'll be fine, I'll just prop the door open with the trash can. And this time I'll take my toolkit with me just in case.