Once I get my new powerbook, I plan to write a lot more for this blog. Sorry for being so quiet.

I'll also have time to kill in Adelaide where I'll be for the next month working. Knowing my luck, I'm going to meet the love of my life down there and I'll be like desperately needing - in the lindsay lohan desperately needs to put back on some weight way - to stay on some deep-emotional-connection-you-are-my-destiny-like level. Ergh.

PS... Here's my brief commentary on the MacTel thing:

Apple has had a version of the Mac OS running on Intel hardware since AT LEAST System 7. As other's pointed out, Rhapsody and (probably) Copland had x86 builds. Hell, if they bought BeOS, Apple would've been x86 a long time ago. Marklar has been a very public secret. Apple's made no attempts to deny it. In fact, Darwin's dual-platformness was evidence enough.

Three years ago (or so), Steve made a very pointed comment that OS X and Cocoa (in particular) allowed them be 'platform independent'. This was picked up by the press as evidence of 'Apple moving to Intel' rather than Apple encouraging developers to move away from Carbon and Codewarrior to Coca and greater abstraction (ie portability)

CoreImage itself is about moving processing *away* from Altivec into the more powerful, widely developed and generic architecture's of GPUs.

Apple itself has abandoned niche technology like ADB, SCSI and more recently Firewire800 in favour of implementing, very well, industry standard technology. WiFi isn't niche nor is Bluetooth, but Apple simpy do it better than any other vendor IMNSHO. This they will continue to do when they move to Intel.

The history of Apple and, indirectly, NextStep (which Apple v2.0 owes a huge debt) show that the intel-switch isn't really a revolution but an evolution... perhaps even inevitable, really given the later years of NextStep. That they chose "x86" (in a broad sense) is interesting but that Apple had to move at some point to a new architecture is unsurprising. Do you still want to be using PowerPCs in 10 years?

As for the Osborne effect... I haven't checked my figures recently, but Apple had more *cash Reserves* than was Gateway's market cap. Hell, they had enough cash reserve to buy themselves out (compared to their then market cap) Weathering the storm isn't a huge problem, at the very least the iPod will see them out.

May there be interest times ahead.

So, as you can probably tell things on this blog have gone very quiet. I've probably lost my few loyal readers in the process. The new job has been consuming. Not in terms of hours - although they tend to be long, as you're expected to log 8 hours of work - but in terms of headscape. There's a LOT to get my head around - which is actually kinda cool, even if it means I wake up in the morning seeing lines and lines of UNIX terminals in front of my eyes (I'm regularly logged into two or three machine simultaneously, running various command like scripts).

I've also developed an awesome 'getting things done' style workflow system using Tiger Mail. Smart mailboxes are *awesome* in Mail Tiger because it allows you to have mail dynamically stored in multiple places concurrently. You can have your basic filters to sort mail in various mailboxes for, say, mailing lists. But you can also have new 'Smart Mailboxes' to show all mail related to, say, scheduling a project or from certain individuals... yet these mails still belong in their main home. One of the things I liked about Eudora was that it automatically opened a mailbox (whether tied to an account of a sorting filter) in a new window when that mailboxex received a new message. Now, I used filters extensively to sort my mail because I had so much coming in! So knowing which mailboxes had new mail was important for my personal e-mail MO. The lack of similar functionality in Mail, with its single-paned MDI (Multi Document Interface), was a serious impediment to my adoption of it. Now, with smart mailboxes I can have a mailbox which shows all unread mail from the last two days in one mailbox... but once that mail is read, it stays in its "physical" home... e.g. CML, or Dave Wareing, or whatever... so my generic inbox doesn't get cluttered with mail.

But my big personal GTD (Getting Things Done) methodology* of the moment is to have a smart mailboxes which shows ONLY flagged messages, regardless of their 'physical home' or their read status. I've also created a rule in Mail.app which flags any incoming message with a subject line containing 'To Do' (or flag me). That way, I can e-mail myself little To Do tasks with the appropriate information and store them in a central location, listed by date order. Once I've completed to the 'To Do' task, I just unflag it and its gone from my mailbox forever.

More importantly, because so much of what I'm doing is driven or communicated via e-mail, I flag messages which need to "actioned". They may be read, but things still need to be done in them. Once the task is complete, I just unflag it.

I really like the philosophies behind Backpack and Basecamp, and this system is really influenced by what they do.... strip back things to the simple. Don't worry about priorities or status... things are either done or they're not. I do use backpack to store lots of personal information, but I don't use its To Do list that much. Not being able to easily tie tasks to their appropriate information is frustrating.

This way I can write me an e-mail saying "To Do: Ring Adimex about the hard-drives" and the body of the e-mail includes the phone number of who I am calling and the details of what I'm ordering. Genius!

* Its a big personal GTD methodology because I haven't really got into the GTD thing. I've thought about investigating it in more depth rather than superficial scanning of the philosophy... but I'm also concerned about the idea of becoming a "human productivity machine". Cause that's really not me. I find it hard to bother with the trivial. OTH, I like their idea of 'Context' and 'Follow up'. When you set up a task, you're meant to just say what comes next... so you don't sit their after completing all your phone calls going "what do I do now?" because you have so much to go through.

OMG. You know you're getting old when you're writing a blog entry about how you use e-mail to manage your "action list priorities". OMG> I'm one of those.

Then again, I'm doing this listening to the new (to me) My Dying Bride album, Songs of Darkness, Words of Light. Sure, I may remember when their second album (Turn Loose the Swans) came out 11 years ago and defined my teenage angst... and while that means I'm no longer a teenager, I guess I haven't gone weak in my twentysomethingness.

Then again again, you also know you're getting old when the experimental album of a band you -grew up- from early in their career with suddenly goes from being "WTF?" to something you really dig despite its flaws. In this case, its 34.788%... Complete which was doom metal meets trip hop (!). Weird, but so awesome! But don't fear, I'm not going to claim that Load is a work of genius...