First off I apologize to those who actually read my blog, I have been busy with work and have had very little to write about.

On July 21st my contract position at Google ended and my position as a fulltime Googler started.  With that came a new Macbook Pro, my first experience using a Mac.  For a long time I have had this view of Macs that the applications lacked a lot of options and most Mac users just wanted simple point and click and were willing to give up some funtionality.  I think Kevin Rose put it best when he said that Apple has picked X number of priorities with each OS X release and they do each of them very well.  Unlike Microsoft who choosed X*4 number of features and none of them are done as well as they could be.

Since getting my Mac I have absolutely loved the experience.  There have been some headaches.  One being the lack of home and end keys and that the combination of keys change in applications, but if you can adapt quickly it doesn’t really pose much of a problem.  The other thing was quiting applications, I always knew that command+Q would quit, but I am so used to WIndows/Linux that I was still in the mode of just clicking the X.  I sometimes miss being able to maximize a window with a mouse click, but I have gotten used to always leaving some space on the sides of my applications.  It really only took me a day or two of using it on a regular basis to get past these annoyances (if you can call them that).

This last weekend was tax-free weekend in GA so I grabbed a 22″ HP LCD.  I now wish I had grabbed the 24″, but I may go back in a week or two (when I have to pay tax grr) and grab it.  The glossy screen is really nice, if I had more lights on or had a window behind my desk it might be a big problem, but with my setup it is awesome.

I recently bought Ooma, which put simply is instant VOIP. You pay $250 for the hub and a scout and you just plug it into the network, activate and start calling. No monthly fees. You do have the option to pay $99/yr (8.25/mo) to have instant 2nd line, and some other features. One thing that can be a draw back is that it uses peer to peer connectivity to handle call bandwidth or something like that, so by paying for premiere you bypass that and go straight through their servers. All calls are supposed to be encrypted I believe, but I don’t really talk about anything that important on the phone.

I am going to try to keep this updated more often, sometimes it is hard to think of anything worthy of posting.

A few posts ago I mentioned how happy I was with Slicehost. In the last 85 days, which is my current uptime, I have had 14 minutes that the website was unreachable and 4 minutes that the machine could not be pinged.

If that reliablilty doesn’t encourage you to get a slice account than I don’t know what will.

Being able to find emails that do not currently have labels is a feature that has been requested a number of times and for me would be very very nice. On some of my accounts I have gone through and setup filters for absolutely every type of email I get, but those accounts get less random email. The email coming in is more predictable like friends or certain mailing lists. For my main DIGITAL39 account I get a lot of random email, and a lot of predictable email. I am also using it to archive email from accounts I no longer have. So I looked at my email today and I found out that 4370 out of 8735 (remember these are threaded so it is actually a lot more email) were not labeled. You could go through all of the email and move all of the ones without labels to another label called _FILTER_ or something with a symbol in the front so it will be at the top of the labels list. However there is a better way, which still takes time, but nearly as much.

Create a new label “..filter..” and go into “All Mail”. Click the “All” link to select all of the email and then click the link to select all of the emails in “All Mail”. Label all of the emails with the new “..filter..” label. Once all of that has been done, go down through your existing labels and select all emails and remove the “..filter..” label. After you go through all of these steps you will be able to click on the “..filter..” label and see only email that does not currently have a label.

This doesn’t help for new email coming in, but it will allow you to setup filters for email that has not been filtered or labeled yet. You can easily label incoming mail with this label to make sure you catch new email. One account that I have that has thousands and thousands of emails I have done this with and there is only 1 or 2 emails a week that slip through without a filter.

I spent the evening moving formatting my desktop and moving to Linux full time for my desktop. In some ways this was a difficult move and in other ways it wasn’t. What made it difficult is that there are applications in Windows that I have not found a decent replacement for. An example would be FlashFXP, I have tried other apps, but so far none have given me the feel that FlashFXP did. Another is Photoshop… now I am aware of GIMP, but I am not a fan of it, I am sure over time I would enjoy it, but right now I enjoy the feel of working in Photoshop. Also with the way I have everything setup Windows wasn’t bad. Most of the complaints I hear about Windows are from people who hardly ever use Windows, or haven’t used Windows since 3.11. They complain about things they don’t know anything about or they say they tried to fix a Windows machine for someone and spent X hours trying to get something to work. In some cases it was simply because they don’t have a lot of experience with Windows and it is not fair to blame Windows for that.

I use Linux on my company laptop, so I have gotten pretty used to using it the majority of my day for all kinds of stuff. I found myself coming home and getting on my Windows machine needing to write some bash scripts or integrate with Linux machines better or just little tasks that are, in my opinion, easier in Linux. All the days of using Linux I never said to myself… if I only had Windows, but at home I have countless times said… if this was only Linux.

I do need to continue to run a Windows virtual machine so I have been testing out VMware server and VMware workstation on Linux. Server is free, but does not handle USB and will most likely not support unity anytime soon. Unity will make a lot of things much better, it will allow me to use the few apps I need to without having to be inside the Windows vm all the time.

When I opened the Linux VMware server client it would crash and I would get the following errors.

I had to install gcc 4.3, and run the following commands to get it working

I couldn’t resist upgrading… even though it was expensive. Now I pay like 115/mo for TV and internet