John's finally writing that book...
Tuesday, 16 June 2009
Since getting back from Canada, we've been doing a lot of spring cleaning round the place; working out what we don't need, what isn't important and securing the valuable stuff incase of the worst.
Michelle's got my old MacBook, half because I needed her on the same hardware and secondly that it protects her against all those crashes and virus outbreaks.
Apple's WWDC announcements were not all I wanted to hear, having recently forked out on a new MacBook for myself it's a dull thud but who cares in the end; it's not what you've got but what you do with it that's important.
I've signed up for the iPhone Developer program and moved all my mail into individual email accounts, rather than routed to one box, seriously makes life a lot simpler and easier to manage; hooked up to my iPhone and the Mac.
On top of that we've gone thru the accounts and shaved off anything that's not needed, attacking the whiteboard to track where everything's going and get a better picture of the big world.
I'm building Fallon, which should make generating a basic but tooled-up rails app a lightning-quick task and improve my productivity a hell of a lot; plus I'll get to try out some new things I've learnt that aren't in the rule-book, but when are they :-)
Then there's security, I've beefed up my passwords (you don't even want to know how long the github one is), given all the servers I interact with individual keys so one key doesn't break them all and passphrased them just in case. Created Git repo's for the important stuff and shelved off our notes so we both don't lose them.
Regarding websites, I've also moved my blog and some others onto my Joyent box that I never have to pay for as they don't really need their own box and I don't really want to pay for monthly hosting for something like that; better to leave it for the bigger apps.
...then there's the books
Now Michelle's going thru her bookcases, reading them all and then donating them to charity so I better do something similar. My dad taught me a load of things when I worked with him, all those stories and crufts of advice, don't really want to forget them, so I've decided it'd benefit me to go thru all these books, glean from them what I can and start compiling something to help me in those dark hours; so a book is in order.
I can't believe I've got nearly 500 posts on this blog so I must be able to write something, let's hope it's a cracker.
Software I've sorted by purchasing a copy of Scrivener, I originally hunted around for something to help me write a script or story idea I had but things are just too busy and I can never nail down the plot just develop really nice scene layouts. Scrivener from trawling the reviews and trying the demo really shines. You start off with your document you can generate out of several initial templates that are given to you, screenplay, BBC stageplay and most notably novel.
This then gives you folders to store Research material (which can be broken into folders if you want), your working Draft (which can be re-generated to whatever font or layout your publisher requires separate from what your using) and Trash which is only ever deleted if you really want to; making sure you don't lose anything you may actually need. For $39.95 it's a very polished app and a pleasure to use, one of the better ones.
With everything set in place and two weeks to Vegas I've got time to shave down that book pile and gain something in the process. Kind of reminds me of something I heard about a person who once they've read something, writes an essay about it, smart guy; let's see if I can do something similar.
As always, take care out there
Black Creek Pioneer Village
Wednesday, 28 January 2009
Nice guys at Day-Trips.ca published my photos of the Black Creek Pioneer Village in Toronto.
My website features day trip destinations from all over Canada as a free service to help our users discover new and exciting things to do "in just one day"
link here
We visited the Pioneer Village back in 2007 while staying at the Canadiana Backpackers Inn, takes about 2-3 hours to see it all but really gorgeous location.
