Derek Scruggs

This is a picture of a laundromat I used to frequent a few years ago. Now with free Wifi!

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After my initial frustrating disorientation with switching to the Macintosh, including a couple times where I almost decided to return it, I’ve drunk the Kool Aid and decided I’m now a Mac-head. I won’t rehash all the great stuff about the Mac that so many others have been saying for years, but I think the ultimate reason I’ve decided to stick it out is because Mac OSX is simply a superior operating system to Windows. During the 90’s Windows started to catch up to the Mac and in some ways became the better OS, but Apple’s embrace of a Unix-based OS, combined with their truly world class design sense. Has put the Mac back out in front by a mile, and I don’t really see how Microsoft can catch up without doing something radical. Vive la revolucion!

One of the few political bloggers I read regularly is Andrew Sullivan. One neat thing he’s been doing lately is to invite readers to submit photos of the view from wherever it is they happen to read his blog. Lots of good ones have been submitted from all over the world, including one from Antarctica just last week.

Anyhoo, last week I got a great shot from my office in Boulder and so I submitted. I was happy to discover that Sullivan published it today.This is not the actual view from my office window, but it’s close. This shot was taken on the front terrace of the building, just down the hall from me.

After years of hearing about how great the Mac is, especially from the geek set, I finally went out and bought a MacBook Pro.

So far I’d have to say my experience is very mixed. Yes, it’s very stable and the Mac UI is nice, but some of the design decisions are very puzzling to me. For example, why is it so friggin’ hard to assign a shortcut key to, say, launch application X or open folder Y? And why the heck isn’t the delete key a shortcut for “Move to Trash?”

I’m also very disappointed in the lack of a truly integrated email/calendar/contacts client. I’ve heard a lot of people complain about Outlook vs., say, Eudora, but over the years I’ve developed a deep understanding of it and thus become something of an Outlook Ninja. It’s pretty much the center of my everday life. The reason? It’s really useful for closing loops between my email, contacts lists, task lists and calendar. I’ve mastered all the shortcut keys, so I often navigate around Outlook without even using a mouse. I assumed Entourage on the Mac would be a similar experience. Nope. It has all the same apps as Outlook, but the integration sucks. The worst part is, it’s not even easy to import my Outlook contacts into Entourage. In fact, it’s a gigantic pain in the ass, so much so that it may be the straw that breaks the camel’s back and sends me back to XP (which, given the market penetration of Outlook, is a pretty smart yet evil strategy for Miscrosoft).

Speaking of which, people often rave about Apple’s own Mail and Mozilla Thunderbird, but I don’t see what the big deal is. They seem like pretty straightforward mail clients to me, not much improved from the state of the art five years ago.

Maybe it has to do with the way I practice Getting Things Done. In particular, I don’t keep a huge archive of messages. My inbox rarely has more than 3-4 messages in it, and that’s not because I filter everything into other folders. Usually I act on a message immediately, which generally means responding, assigning it to a task, filing it for reference (very judiciously – something has to be truly useful for me to keep it) or nuking it.

When I first made the cutover to GTD about four years ago, I was nervous about deleting so many messages. But since I did it, there have only been a handful of times where I couldn’t find what I needed (i.e. I had deleted a message with relevant info). And you know what I did? I asked the person or persons it related to for help. No harm, no foul, and in the interim I didn’t have piles of electronic noise staring me in the face when I did search for something I needed. For example, when I search for something involving the name of one of my investors, it doesn’t return every single frickin’ message we’ve exchanged over the years (because I deleted most of them), but only the ones that had information that may prove useful as reference material.

Back to the Macintosh. What about the other features, you ask? Well, Spotlight and Quicksilver are pretty cool, I suppose, though they don’t really seem like much improvement over Google desktop on the PC. iPhoto and iTunes are overrated IMO. Picasa on the PC is better than iPhoto. iTunes is decent on both the Mac and PC, but it’s really no better thanYahoo Music (though less buggy).

And I guess the biggest thing is lack of software. There is a lot of innovation going on righ now. And while there are some cool things for the Mac, there are still far more hackers developing stuff for the PC.

Ultimately, I guess a lot of it has to do with the fact that I’ve built a highly customized environment on the PC over the years, and the Mac is throwing a major wrench in the works.

As an example of how idiosyncratic my PC environment is, I don’t have a desktop, A little known feature of Windows is that you can deactivate the desktop, so it only shows wallpaper and no programs or document icons. Instead of a cluttered desktop, I use a working folder for temporary projects I’m working on and another set of directories for permanent reference These are accessed via shortcut keys. If you abandon the desktop metaphor in favor of a little more structure optimized with shortcut keys, you find that screen real estate is no longer as important as it used to be.

I’ve toyed with the idea of moving everything to Gmail along with the GTD Gmail extension, but it’s ultimately a round peg in a square hole, and Gmail’s keyboard shortcuts are limited, so Im forced to use the mouse way too often.

I’ll give my Mac a little time to grow on me and see if my habbits evolve, but the lack of a world class PIM is really bugging me. One saving grace is that I was able to replicate my Firefox environment pretty quickly thanks to Foxmarks.

I will say this, there are two things Apple nailed. One is a power transformer that is narrow enough to only take one space on a power strip. It’s so annoying when a 6-socket strip gets reduced to three becaue bulky transformers spill over onto unused sockets. The other is that the power jack on the computer is magnetized, so when you hook up the power cable there’s a satisfying click as they come together. The magnetic force has a quasi-magical feel to it that enhances the Mac mystique.

One last thing: Parallels is impressive technology, but it still sucks to start a virtual machine every time I want to run some of old PC apps.

I don’t have anything profound to say about September 11. I’m not a good enough writer or original enough a thinker to add to what others are saying. However, below are a few links to things that most powerfully bring back the memory of that awful day. I’d rather not dwell on images of the Pentagon and especially the Twin Towers. After all, to see the planes hit is to witness murder. Rather, I prefer to focus on how people responded during and after the attacks.

NPR’s coverage of Bush in Florida, before the attacks.

I think I had a slightly different experience than others. I don’t have television. (Well, I do, but the reception is really bad so I never watch it.) So I listened on the radio and read CNN.com when I could (though it was terribly slow). So for most of the morning I actually just continued business as usual in my home office, occasionally pausing to listen to NPR. Finally around lunchtime I decided to try to pick it up on my television.

The understated, reassuring competence of NPR’s Bob Edwards on Morning Edition: Part I, Part II

I got a snowy but passable view of things on the ABC affiliate. When I saw footage of the actual collapse of the towers, I totally lost it and cried my eyes out. At that point they had no idea how many people were still in the towers, but there were estimates that each one could hold up to 50,000 people, so there were believable estimates that up to 100,000 people had died. For perspective, that’s roughly the population of Boulder.

Photos showing support from around the world in the immediate aftermath

For the rest of the day and until about midnight I watched Peter Jennings anchor the coverage. I thought he and ABC did an amazing job at conveying the magnitude of the tragedy without turning it into an orgy of blood and recrimination. A couple of times I got the impression that Jennings himself was about to break down and cry – a slight hitch in his voice, a pause between sentences – but he stayed calm and professional until he went off the air at around eleven or twelve (mountain time). I have no idea how long he’d been in the studio, but he looked exhausted. I was exhausted just from watching it.

This has a “happy” ending, but it hints at what was to come over the next five years: Video of protesters arguing in Union Square

The first time I laughed after the attacks:

I’ve had my nosed so buried in code lately that I forgot to announce our latest site. Rock climbing at YourClimbing.com went live about three weeks ago and is starting to get some traffic. We have some more features that we’ll roll out next week. Then we need to upgrade the server, probably next weekend, so no new code until after then.

BTW, “we” refers to Enthusiast Group, the company I co-founded with Steve Outing. I almost forgot to mention that we’re moving into an office next week too. Now my spare bedroom will be able to be an actual bedroom.