Digital Impulses

Who cares about my life?

I will be 45 in August and I find myself increasingly worried about the impact I am having on the people around me. Consider this: Is it egotistical to worry about whether what you do with your life is important or not?

I mean, who cares right? Everyone has their own little life wagon that they drag along behind them, with their own set of problems, worries, concerns and issues. So if that's the case, then why not just go through life just living your life, day to day, trying not to expel negative energy in the hopes of avoiding having negative enery fall on oneself?

Or is it all random? Chance? Does the Universe, in a grand cosmic sense, not care about the individual lives of humans and only acts in a manner that affects great groups of people at one time?

I don't think so. I think the Universe IS aware of me and becuase of that I, for one, have a very healthy respect for Karma and I consider most of the decisions I make within the realm of the possible negative ramifications it might have on the people I interact with.

Like a rock falling in a perfectly calm pond, the concentric circles of water that pulse out of the place where the rock hit the water, every action we take has a reaction on someone, somewhere and if we as a species took that more seriously, the world would be a much better place.

Getting back to the question about who cares about my life, I do. I'm going to try and re-focus on living a life of Purpose and strive to do something good every day that has a positive impact on the people I come in contact with.

If I care more about what and WHY I do the thing I do with the amount of time I have left on this spiritual plane, then the odds are that I will lead a better life and I will make the lives of tghe people I care about better as a result also.

Hopefully it's not too late to start doing something worthwhile and memorable. I'd hate to think that I wasted what little precious time I had, however much longer that may be.

From Windows to Mac OS X to Windows

In late 2007, as a result of the debacle of Windows Vista and how ripped off I felt as a result of paying almost $500 for a retial copy of Windows Vista Ultimate (Microsoft promised a series of add-ons specifically for people who bought Vista Ultimate and they never delivered on them), I decided that I was going to make the move full-time to Apple OS X.

I got a Mac Mini in December of 2006 (my first Mac ever) and was very happy with using it on a day to day basis for the next couple of years. In August 2007, Apple released the 1st generation of all-alumunium iMacs and I purchased one in May of 2008.

My first Apple MacBook Pro

In October of that same year, Apple released the 15" Macbook Pro featuring an aluminum "precision aluminum unibody enclosure" and I bought one the very same day it was released.

I've used that laptop over the last 2 1/2 years with out any problems, except for the fact that I find it rather heavy and as a result, I put off hauling it out of my backpack, plugging it in (the battery is only good for less than 3 hrs) and using it regularly.

Using Windows on a Macbook Pro

I tried all of the options to boot into Windows on a Macbook, including Parallels, VMware Fusion and Apple's Bootcamp, ultimately settling for Bootcamp as the best solution, as it runs Windows 7 natively and with the least performance hit.

However, having to boot the Macbook, wait for the Bong!, hold down the Option key to select what partition to boot from, then finally booting into Windows proved to be too cumbersome to be productive.

Also, the keyboard on a Macbook Pro keeps with the Jobsian minimalism and just feels lacking when you're working in a Windows enviroment. Of course, there's always the option of a USB or Bluetooth wireless keyboard, but that's just ANOTHER thing to carry around, pair, worry about batteries, etc. More productivity impact.

The Trade

So, I used the Macbook on and off for nearly theree years until just very recently when a friend wanted to get his wife a Macbook and was looking into used/refurbished units. he bought his wife a top-of-the-line Sony VAIO in May of last year, paying $840 for it a local Best Buy.

Looking into what I might be able to get for the 2008 Macbook, I checked Gazelle, eBay and a couple of other places and it semeed like $650~700 was what it was going for on average. When we realized that both units were so close to each other in relative value, we thought a simple swap might just fit both our needs well.

After a week of going back and forth and thinking about the possible tradeoffs and potential downfalls of the daily use of a Windows laptop, I went ahead and pulled the trigger, based primarily on Microsoft Office OneNote, believe it or not.

You see, we bought a Bakery in late 2009 and from the get-go, I started recording pretty much all of the business transactions (and personal also) that happen on a day-to-day basis in OneNote. Now, all I have to do to find the details of something is type the first few letters of whatever detail I can remember into the Search box in OneNote, or the integrated Search box in Windows 7 which searches inside OneNote by default.

Having quick, native access to OneNote and the familiarity of using Windows in a native hardware enviroment is something that I simply didn't have with the MacBook Pro. Now I boot the Sony Vaio and 90 secxonds later I am ready to go, working in OneNote, Excel or Google Chrome to use GMail.

As pretty and sophisticated as the Macbook Pro was, it simply wasn't meeting the PRACTICAL USE NEEDS that I have in my day to day running of a small business.

So that's it, I was a Windows user who tried to integrate a Mac laptop into the daily workflow of running a small business and in the end found that returning to the familiar environment of a Windows laptop was less stressful and more convenient.

Back

I used to write in this blog almost everyday years and years ago, until one day my best friend told me that my Blog was useless, that nobody cared what was happening in my life and that it was a gigantic waste of time.

Unfortunately, I allowed that scathing criticism to pierce my psyche and just got out of the habit of writing on a daily basis and when you lose the muscle memory, well... yeah.

This is what happens. A blog that sits abandoned and collecting dust and pretty soon, it's been such a long time since you wrote anything that it's hard to shake off the lethargy and just start writing again... A colleague told me years ago that when you're facing Writer's block, a sure-fire method of breaking out of it is to write. WRITE ANYTHING, it doesn't matter what... just WRITE TO WRITE and pretty soon you're out of the rut and writing again.

Well, this is my attempt to break off the shackles of those twin agents of evil Lethargy and his brother Procrastination.

Away with you! Off with your heads!

I'm back! This blog is MY HOUSE and I can put in my house ANYTHING I WANT. As such, I am going to write here the things that I find interesting, important, funny, scary or whatever else. It's my blog and I can do whatever I want with it.

I'm looking at you, Bert.

Osama Bin Laden Killed

Huge news on Sunday night 1 MAY 2011:

Barak Obama held a very late, unscheduled press conference from the East Room at the White House to announce that a team of U.S. Special Forces Navy Seals had raided a compound in northwest Pakistan and killed Osama Bin Laden.

Twitter immediately EXPLODED with the news and I watched Obama’s press conference on ABC News from my bedroom at home.

I will be collecting the newspapers tomorrow morning.