lizards on toast :: surgery and minimalism (computing, personal)

20100305 1703

.  So, I just recently had surgery on my right ankle. To make a long story short, I was riding cross-country on a motorcycle in ’08. I thought I should be the only one in my lane at the time, the driver of a car disagreed. The car won the argument, and I rolled down the interstate at about 60mph. The end result is that two years later, I’m on my couch with a wrapped up ankle, vicodin, and a month off work.

.  I was hoping that I’d be able to use all this time to get a lot of cleaning/sorting stuff done, but as it turns out, it’s more difficult to do those things when you can’t put weight on one leg. Instead, I’m stuck working on cleaning up some computer stuff. So I rebuilt my long-neglected blog and set about sorting through photos and media. If you’re reading this directly off of toasterlizard.net (and I’m assuming that you are), then you’ve obviously seen the new design.

.  I’ve been trying to work on trimming a lot of things down, both on the computer and in life in general. If you know me well, I’m sure you’re scoffing a little bit, because I’m quite a bit of a packrat. It’s a really hard habit to break. I’ve started with the blog and social sites, like myspace and facebook. MySpace was the easiest; I just deleted my account. Facebook was a little harder, since I actually use it and communicate with a few people pretty actively. But then I’d read this not too long ago, and realized that I had done a lot of the same stuff unintentionally. So, I purged my friends list, following the criteria of “would it matter to me at all if this person died?” Not too surprisingly, there were a lot of people deleted.

.  I guess I never really got around to writing about my switch to mac, which surprised and confused a lot of people. My line of thought basically goes like this: You get what you pay for. I know, I know, there are very nice high-end PCs out there. There’s nothing quite like the unibody macbook pros, though. Up until not too long ago, most of my computing hardware was trash, in the literal sense; I salvaged most of it from trashcans and dumpsters after other people had discarded it. Now, there’s nothing wrong with this, because most of what I run (linux, bsd) doesn’t need the bleeding edge of technology. Plus, a lot of the stuff that gets thrown out has been quite modern compared to what I had been running at the time. Other than discards, the last machine I actually purchased was the Athlon XP 2200-based system I pieced together when I was still in college and needed more recent hardware for a required programming class. It’s still quite functional as the media centre PC, and servers up HD video quite nicely.

.  Anyway, the mac hardware is quite elegant. Also, I’d been meaning to try out OSX for a while now. Something about a commercial OS built on a BSD base is just exciting. I can use my beloved terminal and ports as well as have the perks of the beautiful gui. I still spend a large portion of my time working from the console, whether it’s local on this machine or running stuff (via ssh) on one of the linux or bsd boxen.

.  Back to the minimalism kick, if you’re using a mac, you should definitely check out OmmWriter.  It’s actually replaced WriteRoom as my favorite distractions-free text editor. I’ve always been a fan of simple apps that pick one thing and do it extremely well, and OmmWriter is a perfect example of this.

.  I guess that’s it for now, except that Cat’s been a bit ridiculous about making sure I don’t need anything while I’m stuck here on the couch. She still refuses to admit that she’s too good for me, which is a bit endearing. No offense meant to any of you that are married, but I’ve got the best wife in the world. Fact.

.  I love you, Cat.

out.