Black Friday Sales

Right, Black Friday is in full swing. Here are some great apps you really need to add to your collection. I have all of these in my bag of tricks, and they are fantastic. There might be more coming, but I know these are on sale now. Escape Motions – Rebelle 3, Flame Painter, Amberlight, Inspirit Affinity Photo, Designer, Publisher – Mac and iOS JixiPix – Mac and iOS Curio DevonThink, DevonAgent Wondershare – Uniconverter, Filmora AdGuard on StackSocial – BFSAVE40 Mellel – Mac and iOS Paprika Recipe Manager – Mac and iOS Project Office – Mac an iOS 2Do Scrivener – nanowrimo And let's not forget all the games on sale during the Steam Autumn Sale – Nov 25-Dec 1

Quarantine Summer Reading List

With kids going to back to school, such as it is, I thought I would offer up my small, but interesting Quarantine Summer Reading List. I chose a couple of books focused on Steve Jobs, another on Richard Garriott, and one for Jacques Pepin. It's not all biographies as I read most books in the Allan Quatermain series. Quatermain may not be most recognized character, but for many he's known as Indian Jones. For Steve Jobs, I picked up Becoming Steve Jobs and Insanely Great. I've previously read the Walter Isaacson tome, and wanted some other perspectives. First, it's clear that early in his career, Jobs was an absolutely terrible manager. He had to have things done his way, enjoyed creating chaos, believed he was the smartest person in the room and was very quick to call someone a bozo. He is/was ridiculously arrogant and self-centered with all sorts of entitlement issues. Some times his style work. Most of the […]

8 Weeks of working remotely, and all’s well

I am now at the 8 week mark of working remotely, and I have to say, not only do I really like working from home, I would be fine if we kept working this way. I have really adapted to this change and much prefer how my day is now structured. Not being stuck in traffic has given me back 2 hours of my day. Every day. I take multiple breaks during the day to take a short walk around the house, or stretch, or lift a set with the kettle bell, or use the resistance bands. When the sun is out, I can eat lunch on the deck. At the end of the day, I can exercise and be done before I would normally get home. I am probably more productive than I was before since I really can't be interrupted. I know my automation project gets new features each week. I can't be late for work or a […]

Still playing Godville after all these years (10 to be precise)

Huzzah! Happy 10th anniversary to Godville! My goodness has it been that long? And when I look at my stats, indeed it has. My little hero is 8 years and 9 months old. For all that time he has been slogging it out, battling monsters and bringing glory to my name. Except for the times when he's caught drunk in the tavern. I can excuse that though, I would have done the same thing. So, congratulations to the great folks behind Godville. This really is a game that runs 5 days a week on my work machine. My little hero sits in a dedicated window on my screen, and keeps me up to date with all his adventures. I'm amused by his little puns. I appreciate the sculpture of empty beer bottles in my likeness as a tribute. And during these trying times, I love his eternal optimism. Now, if we could just improve his battle skills in the arena.

Chin up! It could always be worse

Even with the doom and gloom, you need to look on the bright side, things could always be worse. Not only could you work for a POS company like Wells Fargo, it could actually be the year 2000, which is the technology they seem to be using. If this were 20 years, or even 10 years ago, things would truly be in upheaval. We have tools like Slack, Zoom, and others so we can hold conferences with dozens of people not only in different parts of the city, but different parts of the country. The technology to host that was abysmal 10 years ago. We have an Internet backbone that can actually support this traffic. We previously had DSL, which was great at the time, and fast compared to dial-up, but egad, there is no way you could conduct business over that connection. Sure, it can be a little saturated at peak times, but it's working 95% of time, so […]