Fragments From Floyd

I will have to confess, as I head toward the end of my 90 days of Apple free tech support, I still have problems. Unfortunately, they’re not the mechanical kind that Macintosh can help me with. It’s sort of like when the department store clerk asks “May I help you?” and all you can really say is “Yes, help me make up my mind if I really need (sought item) and should I pay this much for it and should get it here and get it now.”

Apple can’t help me get my blogging and web research mojo back. I just have to settle down and catch the rhythm, but I am having the devil of a time doing it.

When I realized how much of my 2 Gb of RAM gets called on simply by calling up Parallels to run a single PC program (almost always either OneNote, EccoPro or Quicken) I’ve started trying even harder to stay inside the Mac environment. And I’ve met with partial but not complete success–some coin spent, some freebies tried and discarded, a few kept. But the search goes on.

Issue du jour: OmniOutliner (trial download) allows the quick and flexible brainstorming of EccoPro. But it does not allow alarms to be set. ReminderFox extension, IWantSandy, BackPackit, Remember the Milk, and/or ToDoist have alarms, some only in paid versions. (I haven’t settled on a program for this function, either). These apps don’t speak to OO which doesn’t speak to iCal or Google Calendar so there is duplication of effort using it for task creation.

For text storage and searching and inter-doc relevancy linkage DevonThink Pro is great and paid for. However, it doesn’t do a very easy job of recording clips from FireFox (and I’m unwilling to give up Diigo, InterClue and a few other FFx add-ons and go to Safari or Camino). Plus, I don’t want to trash DTP’s text database with a lot of temporary or trivial blather associated with blogging and my random thoughts. Enter Evernote.

The recently released (still beta) Mac version of Evernote is far superior to the “endless tape” approach in the PC version I tried to love but never did. It will capture from any app and store it is such a way I can access it from the desktop or from the synced web version of my notes. I’m writing this post in Evernote and have a “blogging” notebook whose entries I can sort and search and transfer to DTP if it seems worthwhile. OmniOutliner I think could work well for daily writing, and I like being able to collapse “levels” of my work and quickly resort paragraphs by idea line. But the free Google Notebooks does most of this, and captures live links and the url of clipped pages. Hmmm.

Meanwhile, there are persistent rumors (that might just be wishful thinking) that OneNote for Mac will happen, perhaps this year. So I’m reluctant to spend $70 for OmniOutliner Pro and will grudingly open Parallels once or twice a day until I get my Mac mojo workin’.

Did you ever have a wonderful-terrible moment of catastrophic comprehension when your vision suddenly broke through the thin surface film we call waking consciousness to deeper, truer levels of REAL-ity than you saw just seconds before? I had such a moment when I first read about the coming of the World Wide Telescope–the same kind of weep-for-joy wonder I experienced when I zoomed home in Google Earth for the first time. My God, our tiny personal here and now makes us ignorant of so much Other stuff.

I pretty much knew better than to try to share such an experience only to be set up as a maudlin, geeky old coot. So my honest and unconfessed gut reaction to the World Wide Telescope is validated to find this morning Robert Scoble’s reaction to the WWT– He cried. Good on you, Mr. Scoble, I understand. Here’s how he explains it:

So, why cry over a telescope?

Because I just saw the world I live in, er, excuse me, the universe I live in in a new way that I never had imagined before.

I cried because I imagined all the kids, like my sons, who will be inspired by what they see. It took me back to the days when John Kennedy wanted us to go to the moon. Hint: there’s a lot more out there to explore.

I cried because I realized just how much work, money, and all that went into making these images. I never had access to them before. Certainly not in this way so I could compare them by clicking a button. As a taxpayer who’s helped pay for some of these telescopes it’s the first time I’ve seen the results of my and your, investments in our scientific research.

It’s human to look out at the sky and wonder what’s going on out there. This takes us a LOT further into our understanding of just what is.

And,, yes, that’s worth crying some inspirational tears. Thank you to Microsoft Research for inspiring me in a way that Microsoft hasn’t inspired me in years.

And, also, sorry to the teams that I caused some PR troubles for. I hope you’ll forgive me for getting a little excited. I couldn’t contain myself. It isn’t everyday that you get to see such an inspiring piece of software.

Got a call from a friend I’d helped last year set up some music clips on his blog. He needed another dose of the same but I realized I didn’t have the same software now that I’m on the Mac. But hey, Audacity that I had used is open-source and there is a Mac version that should work on my Intel Mac under Leopard 10.5.2. Should I say.

I installed it and all was well. Until I tried to play a video on a website and got no sound.

I can open a wav file in Audacity 1.2.5 and hear sound. Otherwise, nada.

I’ve spent a half hour trying to find help and no dice. I used AppZapper to delete Audacity. I repaired permissions. I rebooted. I hear no sound. Except me railing at all the time I’ve wasted with what used to be a helpful program.

Anybody has ideas, I’m all ears–though they don’t have a whole lot to listen to at the moment.

The hand specialist I saw last week was not surprised. “Massage therapists and PTs have a high occupational risk of the kind of joint damage you have” he told me “due to the frequent compressive loads on the thumbs from manual modalities like trigger point massage.” Small comfort and not news.

But we all run the risk of using our joints, tendons and muscles in ways to which they cannot adapt.

The American Society of Hand Therapists issued a consumer alert in January saying that handheld electronics are causing an increasing amount of carpal tunnel syndrome and tendinitis. With that warning, the society included directions on how to properly hold the devices, urging users to take breaks and, if possible, place pillows in their laps so their wrists are in a more upright position.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, ergonomic disorders are the fastest-growing category of work-related illnesses for which it receives reports. In 1981, only 18 percent of all reported illnesses were repetitive strain injuries, known as RSI. By 1992, that figure had grown to 52 percent. link

The consequence of repetitive strain is often chronic tendon injury–previously and in apparent error referred to as “tendinitis”. -itis indicates an inflammatory condition, and it turns out that for the most part, we we suffer from is “tendinosis”.

The suffix “osis” implies a pathology of chronic degeneration without inflammation. Doctors prefer the term tendinosis for the kind of chronic tendon injuries that most of us have. The main problem for someone with tendinosis is failed healing, not inflammation; tendinosis is an accumulation over time of microscopic injuries that don’t heal properly. Although inflammation can be involved in the initial stages of the injury, it is the inability of the tendon to heal that perpetuates the pain and disability. Most of the pain associated with tendinosis probably comes not from inflammation but from other irritating biochemical substances associated with the injury. tendinosis.org

If you want to know more, I suggest you read Overuse Tendinosis, Not Tendintis in The Physician and Sports Medicine. It does matter, because if your doctor or therapist is treating an inflammation or if you think simply taking NSAIDS (non-steroidal anti-inflammatory meds) is going to do the job, I have bad news for you.

Tendinosis is much, much easier to get into than it is to get out of. And we have scant remediation other than avoiding the offending injury (Blackberry, Nintendo or your job!) and gradually working to improve your strength and body mechanics and the ergonomics of your activities of daily living–at home and work.

As a physical therapist I’ve often told patients that “if you spend all your workday sitting, then a chair isn’t a piece of furniture. It’s one your most important tools”. Emboldened, they might go back to their boss and demand a proper ergonomic chair. They often get it, and neck and shoulder pains and carpal tunnel problems diminish or disappear!

In the same way, I’d advise somebody who was on their feet all day for their work–and especially if they have foot or ankle problems–that they should spend whatever it takes to have the best footwear–even down to the kind of socks they purchase for work. Spend $20 on a pair of Spenco inserts, I tell them, even if your new Easy Walkers come with footbed liners. You won’t waste money making your workday safer, less painful and less tiring.

So here, I think of it not as rationalization but as taking my own best advice. Well, maybe a little rationalizing, too.

If one spends a good bit of his day using his hands at the computer and his work is done there, AND if he already has pre-existing hand joint problems, then spending a little more for the right tools is the best investment a fella can make. Right?

And so I spent a gob on a mouse–the Logitech MX Revolution. But by all accounts, over time, my thumbs and wrists will thank me. And, after using the two $25 “reward certficates” I got last week from Amazon, I will have a heckuva mouse for a good price. Should be here soon!

Reviews: –The Gadgeteer–ThinkMac

Mind you, I’m very happy here on the other side of the Mac Divide and already spoiled to a new way of thinking about installing software, finding files and text and making applications do their tricks. But I am digitally bipolar yet. Search as I have for that single program that satisfies the needs that were met in MS OneNote, I’m not there. But not for want of trying.

I’m typing this in Circus Ponies NoteBook. I have 30 days to decide, then it’s $50. I’ve blogged from VooDooPad Lite (free) and Mori (shareware that nags until you pay) and Journlr (60 day trial I think). They all have their strengths and quirks. And none of them gives me the whiteboard space of OneNote with drag and drop clips from the web with the ability to outline both within notes and within sections, folders and notebooks.

They all search indexes vastly faster than OneNote 2007 (I understand the lastest version that comes with Office has a much faster search.) They are all within the OS I paid so much to use versus switching back to the Parallels-run XP apps (OneNote, Ecco Pro, NoteTab Pro and an instance of Firefox at times) though that is fairly painless–enough so that I am not yet persuaded to abandon those programs for any of the ones I’ve mentioned. Yet.

Circus Ponies Notebook so far seems to offer the greatest variety of types of data organization and offers decent text display, which is the main thing I need, along with its own indexing engine (doesn’t seem to work in Spotlight–is this good or bad?) so that I can store passwords, serials, etc and find the quickly. It will let me pull in web clips from Firefox (paying the price of automatic saves from Safari) but it won’t let me nest and collapse those multiple clips in an outline like OneNote and you can only place them in a linear fashion on the page.

Sure as I PAY for one of the programs, the killer Mac OneNote will come along. I guarantee somebody is working on this, because it is the only instance I know of where Mac can’t better Windows in application performance and ease of use.

EccoPro replacement? Nothing close on the Mac side to let me quickly create and reorder multilevel outlines (with different formatted text at each level) and quickly set alarm dates and times and reoccurrence on the fly. Should I rely on online paid equivalents like BackPack?

This ambivalence is taking its toll on productivity–spending way too much time in the helps of the different programs, testing each for ability to do what I need to do in an way that “fits” my old habits. I’m trying not to be tied to old habits, but when they arose out of using a system that worked, I really want to match with Mac. Til then, I’m wandering in the digital desert.

Picnik. Just tried this online image adjuster, useful for those times one doesn’t need an elephant gun to swat a mosquito. Someone had asked me to recommend a small app for sharpening images and I gave Picnic a try–in this case, for color correction to the image above (from 2006 when we actually had snow in winter.) Picnik saved it back to the folder of my choice on my hard drive almost instantly.

And PicLens. Awesome! Mine lives as a FireFox extension and its most impressive use for me so far is to view my Flickr Galleries. To see it in action, load PicLens, use it for starters at my Flickr link and browse my life in full color Fragments!

It works in Google Images and other places as well–great for browsing through large volumes of images in certain locations for just the right match you’re looking for. Very Mac-esque. You really need to take a look, you visually oriented sorts.

Meanwhile back at the ranch…I’ll be taking a pdf on a thumb drive by Kinkos in C’burg later today to get a half dozenfull color copies of some twenty pages of “the book” ready to send off to folks–once I determine who those folks might be other than the definite #1 to whom it will go by Wednesday. Thanks to those who have requested the link to this sample of pages, and especially those who have provided feedback. This is very helpful. And the offer still goes. Just let me know you’d like to take a peek–either in a comment or by email, and be sure I know how to get back to you with the link.

Okay geeks and geekettes, here’s your chance to use your computer hack-trickery and knowledge to good purpose. I need your suggestions.

Needs: a common place for a half dozen committee folks to submit relavant web links with comments; post ideas about the logistics, timing, space allocation, and responsibilities for an April 19 Earth Day Event; set up a calendar; and maintain a running conversation in an easily accessible web location, some not being familiar with wikis and such.

What is the quickest, easiest and best suited Web 2 collaborative location to do what we need to do so all can participate without a steep learning curve?

I’ve seen so many such sites in the past six months and not needed this sort of thing. Now I need this sort of thing, and I’m asking you to share from your experience–as many of you work regularly with groups like this. Here on Goose Creek, not so much.

I started working this direction on a WetPaint wiki site here. Maybe this is as good as any. Whaddaya think?

One good resource already found: maps of Virginia’s watersheds. Yes, there are other kinds of geeks than computer geeks.

I was sitting in a meeting at the Floyd High School one day recently with my laptop conspicuously up and running.  (I’m not that much of a geek as I am painfully awful anymore at longhand and use OneNote on the ThinkPad to keep legible notes, and set alarms and put things on the calendar.)

But here’s the point: Out of curiosity I told my wireless connection to find wireless access from that high school conference room. In addition to the encrypted high school routers I expected, there appeared a Holiday Inn wireless. That’s weird. The nearest was a good 25 miles away. But then I often pull up this kind of inexplicable and impossibly far-off routers in Café del Sol and such places around Floyd. What gives?

I never understood this, but here’s the scoop: It has to do with the benignly but uselessly “viral” spread of individual computers that have connected to specific “access points” that then appear to others as “ad hoc networks” that look like access points but aren’t.

Read the TechBlog piece for all the details, and next time you pull up the Baltimore Sherton Wi-Fi from your local Blacksburg bagel shop, you’ll know why.

In anticipation of the Mac move I read for months about the relative merits and demerits of Parallels versus VMware Fusion to allow cross platform accessibility on the new machine. When MacMall added Parallels for free, installed and with the purchased copy of XP up and running, that made my decision between the two software programs.

I can’t say I’m unhappy with Parallels (mostly just leaving it the heck alone) and can’t blame it for any program hangs (none in the past few days) or slowness, though I have no way to compare WITH and WITHOUT Parallels to know what effect it is having on machine speed.

Yesterday I got an offer from a VMware rep offering me (as a blogger) a free copy of VM Fusion, which conveniently includes an easy migration utility to move my Parallels Virtual Machine “seamlessly” into the new software.

What to do? VMware has been around for decades doing what Parallels just started doing. On some machines and set-ups, Fusion is faster and more stable. Is it worth a gamble for the long haul, or is it a matter of six of one, half dozen of the other?

If anybody has strong feelings backed by experience, I’d appreciate it so I can decide. Otherwise, I suppose inaction will be my decision. I confess it is nice not worrying about what’s under the hood anymore and being able to just steer and honk the horn and enjoy the scenery and get where I’m going. Now where was it I was going, anyway?