skeptomai

Please, everyone! Encrypt your email!

I'm on a quest to get everyone to use encrypted mail. It's still a bit of a hassle, with the reality of key exchange and key management between you and all your friends. Still, most platforms and mail clients are trying to simplify the process. I'm an all-Mac guy these days and my combination of choice is Apple's Mail.app with Sente's GPGMail. Here are some reasons for encrypting your mail, and some suggestions how. As for me, here are my keys. Feel free to email me anytime, encrypted of course.

Success with Photoshop Elements (at last)

Thanks to Phil I finally have a working installation of Adobe Photoshop Elements and Bridge! The culprit was a wayward font of some sort that I don't ever remember installing and even the name looked corrupted. I opened Apple' Font Book application and deleted anything that looked dodgy, including that corrupt font. I also recalibrated my display as the Adobe troubleshooting says ICC profiles can be troublesome. I restarted the apps, and everything works like a charm. Now I can actually get some work done.

Another note about work...

I ran across Mark Morford's column linked on reddit.com the other day. Remember I was whining about "progress versus intensity"? This column comes at it from another angle, talking of bucking what the establishment has brainwashed us with from childhood. I'm also reminded of Alain De Botton's Status Anxiety If you are constantly experiencing work anxiety, struggling yet feeling unfulfilled, ask yourself what value system guides your actions. What are you working for? Is it a promotion, more money to buy more things, or greater status in the eyes of those around you? Does that change how you feel about yourself when the lights are out and you are the only one in the room?

My Book List

	A number of my friends have asked from time to time that I post my reading list. Sometimes it's all tech, sometimes literature, sometimes a weird mix. The only constant is that it's long. I'm always reading about a dozen books.
I've recently finished a few of these, and several are more for reference (e.g. ANSI Common Lisp) than for reading. The picture represents a snapshot of my brain in time.. Oh yes, I believe they are all available on Amazon.com :)

Demos and startup funding

I bet we are all following the adventures of Paul Graham's Y Combinator lately. I found this blog entry on demoing for funding. Having done *tons* of demos during my time at Microsoft, speaking in front of small groups of 10 or so, up to a large room of 1000, I'd agree with pretty much everything here. I'd add to this, for small groups, *Know your audience*. If you have a canned demo, ask yourself if it plays better to your non-technical mom than it does to highly experienced VCs & angels. If you can tailor the demo to positively stun and simultaneously answer the obvious questions, you are one step closer. There is no excuse these days for not having the entire demo running from a single laptop. With virtualization, you could have two different machines bundled in one, database server and client, etc. Recent laptops can be stuffed with 2gigs (or more) of RAM which hopefully is enough. You would be surprised how little memory a Debian Linux instance running MySQL takes... Put it in a Xen VM and run the rest of your demo from Domain0.

Ah, the smell of Nag Champa in the morning...

I'm sitting at the G5 tower, doing work.... real work, like for my job. It's Saturday and I can't remember the last time I didn't work at least 60 hours in a week (unless I was on vacation :)) Last November, I worked 52 hours in 3 days. I'm getting too old for this. I had a minor epiphany the other day. Someone asked me "perhaps you'd be interested in as much accomplishment without as much intensity?" That's when it struck me. It's possible to confuse "progress" and "intensity". I've been running around *CRAZY* for months, but feel I've accomplished very little, at least not much I can be proud of and say that I've grown from. I wrote those first two paragraphs a few weeks ago. Today is again Saturday but here I sit, attempting to relax with the incense burning, Emacs glowing, and CSI Season 5 on the DVD player. Not sure where this is going, but I've had some great conversations with close friends and I see striking similarities. Many senior engineers are deciding to slow down, build lives and trade pay for fulfillment.

Test-driving Jungle Disk

I posted a while back about Amazon's S3 (and that I'm an Amazon employee). I'm testing Jungle Disk, which is basically WebDAV over S3. I like the S3 guys and I wish they'd gotten around to this first. Nonetheless, it's a good step toward making S3 easy for everyone and to proving out the model of very cheap, reliable, universally-accessible storage.

Much less TV since moving to South Africa

Sorry if this offends anyone, but the selection of broadcast TV here in South Africa sucks. Fortunately for me, it was a great incentive to get off a fairly serious TV addiction brought on by TiVo. I hadn't given it much thought until I ran across this blog post

I do find that I buy more DVD box sets... maybe I have a lower-grade habit rather than addiction now.

New Gadget, new hassles

I picked up a Motorola Razr V3 in the states, locked to T-Mobile. Ok, that was problem #1. My cunning plan was to have the phone unlocked and trade SIM cards back and forth between Africa and the U.S., as I did with my Nokia 6600. Turns out that T-Mobile's policy is that you must own the phone 90 days before they'll unlock it. I sent mail to their customer support detailing my unique circumstances and describing how willing I am to be their paying customer while in the States. I received a boilerplate restatement of their policy from the front-line support person. It's that lack of attention to detail and real customer service (by the way, CS is more than just answering the email...) that sends me looking for the competition. Anyway, I digress. I did what any self-respecting geek would do: I ordered the unlock software and codes online. Worked like a charm! I'll have to find the link and post it here. Now I have an unlocked phone which I've verified works in both Seattle on T-Mobile and in Cape Town on Vodacom. Hmm, and when I return, will I continue to use T-Mobile? Guess that will depend on their stellar customer service. What I really meant to write about was my travails getting bluetooth working between the phone and the MacBook (purr, kitty kitty.... love this laptop). iSync works great, file transfer works great - loving it so far. Wait..... I try to pair with Address Book and nothing... It keeps asking for the code and re-pairing. Damn. My favorite feature doesn't work. You see, I send lots of SMS's here and have enjoyed typing them from the laptop and sending via Address Book (click on a mobile number while bt-bonded and select SMS Message). Seems this doesn't work with the Razr and I'm not the only one to find out (Google for it). Wish I'd paid a bit more attention before buying. Still, I did find a solution. Blue Phone Elite is great. It looks up phone numbers in the Address Book and is the next best thing to an integrated solution. I'm bummed about spending yet again more money for an integration app, but I'll do it.

Back from the reunion..

I had a great time. I stayed with John and his family and what amazed me is how many of us, John included, have kids in the same age group. John's are 6 & 4, mine are 6 & 3.5, Brent has twins of 7. Of course, there's the other crowd who started just after high school and now have high schoolers of their own. Sigh. Those people make me feel old :) I'm not really old enough to have teenagers. Seeing everyone again somehow renewed my energy. My class is aging well and getting along in the world. I did really miss those who didn't show up, which included about 75% of the crowd I ran with. Still, so many and so much laughter. I won't name everyone here, but it was great to see you all. I have some pictures, and I hope to get copies of the ones Bob Meyer took too.

Rosetta Apps crash with Application Enhancer

I bought Photoshop Elements 4.0 for my intel MacBook, and either it or Adobe Bridge crash within a minute of launch everytime. According to a quick Google search, folks running old versions of Unsanity's Application Enhancer have been seeing this. I'm experimenting with it now (upgraded, added these apps to the Master Exclude List) and have disabled APE for this session. Hope it cures the problem, because for now I'm out 100$ for nothing :(