I’ve been really busy this week, so I haven’t been blogging here at Steelsphere. I have been trying to keep my Mac Switch blog running though, and today I’m proud to have posted my first real tutorial about setting up a Mac to connect to a Vista shared printer.

Take a look and if you want, leave some feedback there. I’m actively trying to grow The Mac Switch over the coming months to experiment in more focused blogging - rather than the random drek you get here. It’s sort of an exercise in pseudo-journalism to see if I enjoy writing these sorts of articles.

Thanks for all your support.

Today I had one of those epiphanies that I’ll either look back on 30 years for now and say “that was the moment” or I’ll forget about it next week when I get buried under more work. I’m blogging it for posterity so I can look back on it in a year or so.

I was out running errands this afternoon, and had stopped at an Arby’s to scarf down a sandwich real fast because I was starving. Unbidden, a thought came to my mind that changed everything.

You see, I’ve had some issues over the past year or so, feeling depressed about where my life was going - how I wasn’t “moving up” anymore now that I’ve started my own business and how I wasn’t really enjoying myself. A week or two ago, I thought something along the lines of “I have no dreams - that’s the problem. I’ve hit this stage in my life where my dreams are gone, and I have nothing else to reach for.” This depressed me even further as I basically came to the sub-concious conclusion that “the best must be behind me.”

But, then, at the Arby’s, when I wasn’t thinking about it at all, it hit me: “The reason I have no dreams is because I’m already living my old dreams!” This sounds corny, but hear me out. When I was a teenager, working in a gas station or at Burger King, I used to DREAM about working a “normal” job where I could do what I loved at the time: use a computer all day. I knew some programming back then and though it would be amazing if I could just do that all day long.

Of course, I really wanted to make games, but education and lack of companies in my area really hurt that facet of the dream. Instead, I got into business systems and while it was challenging and a lot of work, I did some pretty cool stuff. (If not the most exciting things in the world.) So, I did that for a while and then the politics and the middle-management hassles really set in hard. I had the boss from hell, and I realized then that I could probably never be happy working for someone else. Then my dream was to find a way to work for myself and be my own boss and not have to put up with the political crap anymore.

A couple years later, I ended up dipping my toe in the consulting realm. My foot didn’t get bitten off, so in April of 2005 I made the leap and started doing it full time. I now have an incredibly flexible schedule, and can do work that I want to do. (mostly)

And this doesn’t count marrying a wonderful, beautiful wife and us having three children. (We had originally talked about 5 kids, but reality has smacked us upside the head on that one I think.) And yes, kids are frustrating, loud, messy and occasionally evil - but they are also beautiful, fulfilling, curious, and amazing at the same time.

But it took me until TODAY to realize that, I had achieved my goals. I’m not rich, sitting on a yacht or in the middle of the mountains somewhere just yet, but the realistic parts of my dreams have been achieved. And the reason that I was depressed was because I hadn’t set NEW dreams to work on. I cannot tell you how good it felt to have that worked out, and I’m more energized than I have been in at least a year or two.

No, I didn’t do everything I wanted. I wanted to be a millionaire by the age of 30. Didn’t happen. I really wanted to make games for a living. That hasn’t happened yet - but you never know. But I accomplished SOMETHING, and even the things I didn’t accomplish I tried to do. (One of the companies I worked at was supposed to be the meal-ticket, if it hadn’t crumbled.)

I’m still working on a list of what my new dreams and goals are going to be. I can tell you that most of them have little to do with writing code all day. Several are in related but different areas of computers. Some have no monetary value, others are about building businesses and cashing out. I’m going to expand and contract the list down to one or two over the next few weeks, then I’ll let you know what I’m up to.

Hopefully in another 5 years or so, I’ll look back at this post and smack myself on the forehead and realize that my latest dreams just came true.

I keep talking about this mythical list of the 10 living people I want to have a beer or three with. These aren’t people that I just want to stand in line and get an autograph, I really want to have a discussion with them.

Here is the current list in no particular order. I’ll update and repost the list from time to time as people drop on and off.

• Alton Brown - host of Good Eats and Iron Chef America on Food Network
• Anthony Bourdain - chef and host of several programs on Travel Channel.
• Patrick Stewart - actor.
• Wil Weaton - actor, blogger, writer, and guy who got me into poker.
• Mike Rowe - host of Dirty Jobs on the Discovery Channel.
• Barack Obama - Democratic Presidential Candidate.
• Leo Laporte - TV and radio host, blogger, and podcaster.
• Kevin Rose & Alex Albrecht - hosts of DiggNation
• Tenzin Gyatso, His Holiness the Dalai Lama - Though that would be tea, not beer, and I would only listen, not speak.

An interesting list. I think its fascinating that I have so many documentary television people on the list. I guess I watch a lot of Discovery Channel - and I find some of the hosts fascinating people. A couple tech guys on there from the old Tech TV shows that I still follow via Revision 3 and Twit networks. Patrick Stewart is just a fascinating actor, even if he never did Star Trek. Wil Weaton is a very smart, personable guy, and of anyone on the list, he’s the most like me and into the same things I’m into. Obama is there for obvious reasons - mainly because I want to tell him my ideas. And H.H. The Dalai Lama is someone I could probably sit in front of for the rest of my life and never begin to scratch the surface of his teachings.

Who are your top 10? Blog them and link me to them in the comments. Then do the same for YOUR friends and maybe we’ll be able to test the Six Degrees of Separation theory and all know someone who can introduce us.

Mr. “Vista works for me, it’s not THAT bad!” (aka, yours truly) is buying a Macbook.

Instead of going into the number of reasons and my thinking here, I invite you to read a new blog I just put up today: http://macswitch.steelsphere.com/

The point of the blog (as explained in the About) is going to be to talk about the process a long-time Windows user goes through when they are starting to use a Mac. I’m probably not the first person to do this, but I figure I can bring a unique angle to the topic, and by documenting my thoughts as they are happening (even before they are happening) maybe it will be useful to another person out there who is having the exact same thoughts.

So, subscribe to the RSS if you’d like. Invite your friends. Comment away when I get onrey about right clicking. Click a couple google ads and help me pay for my new Mac.

I also hope to build a sort of reference of software and tips that I come across as I start using my Mac. Those will be listed as Pages, and will link over to relevant blog entries when I post them.

Also – I need help from a Wordpress user who has added Google Adsense to their page. For some reason, I can’t get it to work. Take a look at the page’s source around the “Sponsors” section and see if you can tell me why. The javascript there DOES work if I paste it into an empty page – so I assume that WordPress and the script are fighting. If there is a better way to do it, please clue me in. I’m using WordPress 2.5.

It’s 8:17pm. My wife and kids are out of the house this week (wife at a conference in Texas, kids are on spring break and are at their grandmother’s house). I’ve been working pretty much non stop since 8am. My task list that I wrote up this morning is half-done, but only the things that I wrote on my list after about 10am when I started exchanging emails with clients about various issues are checked off.

I didn’t screw around at ALL today. Didn’t read google reader all day. Didn’t go off and do house work or anything. I took a break to make dinner (wife’s in-laws are in town today, leaving tomorrow, so I made dinner for myself and them) and watch about 10 minutes of Wheel of Fortune while I ate. Oh, and my father-in-law and I took about 15 minutes to try to get a toilet to stop leaking. Other than that, I ate my lunch at my desk and worked while I did it.

What the hell. I mean, I feel good that I got something done, but I REALLY need to be making some forward progress on some projects this week. I need to do better than forward progress actually…

Zero-sum days suck. Maybe tomorrow will be more productive. If its not by noon then I’ll just shut off my email entirely.

Update: It’s now almost 11pm - and I haven’t moved since the above post. Still haven’t accomplished anything - though I spent the past 2.5 hours spinning my wheels on something I can’t get to work. Sigh.

From a speech in Mississippi today. It’s about time we started fighting back. Hopefully the “Obama slanted media” will start actually COVERING him again.

Update: At least MSNBC picked it up.

Something a father should not have to hear while walking past his 7 year old little girl’s bedroom:

My water broke! Get me to the hospital right away!

Then, a short time later, your four year old shouting out:

It’s a boy!

I’ve had a real love / hate relationship with email this year. Its not that I get 1000’s of messages a day, it’s just that I get messages ALL day, a good 90% of which I don’t really need to do anything with immediately. However, the other 10% are “important” meaning they are from one of my clients and could indicate a server issue or software bug that I need to deal with ASAP.

I’ve tried only checking my email twice a day, but apparently I worry more than that and end up just checking it anyway. The main issue is that I need to have my calendar reminders coming up in Outlook, which involves Outlook to be running, which means that I have it up all day. Even if I work in disconnected mode, I find myself hitting “F9″ all the time to check my messages.

So, I devised a new solution:

• Create two new folders called: “1-Important” and “2-Review” The numbers in front are important because they make the folder names sort above the other folders. You could probably even make these be outside your inbox too, if you wanted.
• Removed all of my “Favorite Folders” in Outlook except “Sent Items.” (so I can get to my sent emails quickly for searching and reference)
• Added the 1-Important folder to my Favorite Folders
• Set up some email rules. One rule funnels any high priority email, or any email from my wife or my clients, into my 1-Important folder. The other rule puts EVERYTHING still left in my inbox into the 2-Review folder. If you have any other rules set up, make sure to set the “And stop processing more rules” flag for each one, and do the same thing for these two new rules.
• When I have my email open, I collapse the Inbox folder so that I can’t see it or see how many new messages have come in.

So, in summary, I end up with a folder called “1 - Important” that I can easily see if any new messages have come into, and then can IGNORE everything else. I might expand this later and start moving all of my email lists that my friends and I share into their own folder(s), just so I can go through that stuff when I know I have time to read it all. This makes my 2-Review folder a lot slimmer, and makes it easier to search through in case another important email comes in.

The other thing I’m doing is making sure that both of these new folders are empty whenever I’m done dealing with them. Client emails to save go into their own folders, personal stuff to save into other folders, appointments go onto my calendar, and everything else gets trashed.

It’s working well so far. My amount of email hasn’t gone down, but it FEELS like it has. Just by knowing that I’m not missing some critical piece of info, I can safely ignore everything else and don’t end up clicking on every Washington Post email I get until I have time to look at them. This is also starting to expose those things that I ALWAYS delete, meaning email lists I need to get myself removed from.

If you have any other Stupid Outlook Tricks, let me know. I’m doing some work for a client writing some code to talk to an Exchange server soon - I might just build myself a mini client that does nothing but tell me my appointments and tell me if an important email has come in…

This is excellent - Slate runs these every once in a while where they show an ad to groups of people who give real-time feedback based on what they are seeing. So, you get real-time reaction meshed with the video.

They showed the results of Clinton, Obama and Undecided voters on Clinton’s “3 A.M.” ad. I think the results are pretty stunning among undecideds… It’s a real pity that the only way she can even come close to winning is to try to go negative. It’s even more of a pity that voters actually buy this message. You know - we all bitch and moan about politicians and politics as usual - but in the end maybe we’re all getting the politicians we DESERVE, instead of the politicians we think we WANT.

I’m not sure what to make about this - but some (DailyKos) are already comparing this to the O.J. Simpson cover on Time magazine years ago.

The link actually goes to ANOTHER blog that reposted the Kos story. I can’t seem to get a direct permalink to Kos that works - but you can go to see it on their front page right now.