Asymptomatic

There must be intelligent life down here

My Mobile Office
March 16, 2011

It’s a pain hauling around a huge notebook computer in a gigantic bag with a ton of accessories, but I feel like I’m crippled if I don’t have everything that I usually have when I’m at my desktop computer. I usually end up carrying a lot more stuff than I really need, and regretting it. But I’ve narrowed down my on-the-go work bag to a few essential items, and make continued refinements to it.

I have several notebooks, all with different aims, but the one that I use primarily these days is my Acer Aspire Timeline 1810, which is a great netbook - 8GB of RAM, HD screen, fast (Core2 Duo, not Atom) processor, and rated for 8 hours of battery life. It’s just the right size, too, being slightly bigger than the $200-300 netbooks like the Aspire One and the HP variety, but not so big that it qualifies as something to “lug around”. Of course, that’s the most important part of the office kit, but there are a bunch of other essential components.

Starting a Business
March 14, 2011

Why I’ve been resistant to the idea, I can’t say, but I think it has to do with a perceived difficulty dealing with paperwork, accountants, and government officials. Regardless, it’s becoming more obvious every year that I need to separate a lot of the stuff I do online as a hobby financially because it’s making too much money.

Over the weekend, we dropped off our paperwork do begin our tax preparation process. Our tax preparer says that it’s a good problem to have, but it’s generating this mini-cascade of other problems because I’m not operating the “business” I am being taxed for like a business.

Graphic Design for Web Developers
March 04, 2011

Berta and I were talking a bit when she got home from work today about how it would be neat to team up with a designer and spew out great new web sites. I mentioned to her how with many of the designers I’ve worked with, you get about 5 designs in, and then the designs start to look the same, or there’s a style between them that’s very similar, then making the sites look very similar themselves.

To me, that was a clue to switch designers every few projects, just to keep things fresh. To her, it was a clue that a developer could clutch a design theme and run with it and get away with doing design too, an insight I hadn’t had before. And this all got me thinking about how many times I’ve urged web designer friends to produce some kind of post or video or course that explains the basics of design to developers. But nobody has stepped up.

The New Chain Letter
March 03, 2011

Yesterday, someone who I was friends with in high school, but wasn’t really “friends” with, asked everyone to repost something about curing multiple sclerosis in their statuses. I can appreciate the sentiment. Who doesn’t want to cure these horrible afflictions? But this is not how you do it.

This is the same problem I had with Neil Gaiman and the “save the libraries” campaign. Ok, sure, it’s great that you want to save the libraries. Who doesn’t? But just tweeting about it doesn’t get the library saved.