First things first, no drama. I haven’t changed jobs, run off with a lover or changed chewing gum. There is nothing interesting, exciting or gossip worthy in this post.
If you don’t know me you might not know but I like to change things in my life - not large things (see above) but small things, how I use my computer, my brand of shoes, walking somewhere, choosing a new path, etc. I really don’t like things becoming routine in my life. I decided to record some of the things that I changed in 2013 for the heck of it so here you go.
- Goodbye physical alarm clock, hello cell phone alarm with Sleep As Android. I now know that I don’t get nearly enough sleep and I have the graphs to prove it.
- I’ve been a PHP developer from the 3.x days. Lately I’ve been enjoying Javascript and have been working on making a serious move to code more in Javascript. If you are thinking “but already do jQuery” that doesn’t count. No offense but do some full applications in native JS and read a few books on the subject.
- I switched from Spotify to Google Play Music All Access. I mostly use Android devices so this was kind of a no-brainer for me. I do think that Google really screwed the pooch in delaying the release of their Google Play Music software for iOS.
- I have an iPad and a Nexus 7. I now use the Nexus 7 much more that the iPad. It’s a size thing, really. I mostly read books and consume text so I feel really odd bringing out a dinner plate (iPad) on a plane.
- I walk my son to school every morning. I’m glad that I can work from home and have this opportunity. I spent between 10-20 hours a week driving to and from my old job. I’ve decided to reclaim that time as family time.
- I never mastered over easy eggs. For some reason this pissed me off more than it should so in 2013 I mastered over easy eggs including the pan flip.
- I work in Drupal every day but I moved my blog over to Jekyll. I did this for many reasons and there is a blog post somewhere around here that goes over them. The good news is I save a ton of money since I no longer have a VM (my current hosting on S3 is less than a dollar a month.)
- I try to walk or ride my bike anywhere I can. This isn’t new thinking but being that I live in a nifty neighborhood and work at home I decided to take advantage of it.
- I’m an OS X user. Mavericks finally fixed the multi-monitor issues that the OS was plagued with for years. Well, it turns out they didn’t really. I’ve tried using my multi-monitor, multi-desktop in different ways and pretty much went back to the old way. Does this count as a change? For the record I have started to use maximized windows on my laptop display but not fullscreen, thats rubbish.
- I fully adopted VIM as my text editor, I had been using it along with others but now I can say it is truly my one and only. I even have git hooks tied to ctag generation, yeah, I’m that cool.
What do these changes mean? Absolutely nothing. I just feel that if I stay set in my ways I’ll eventually be one of those dinosaurs talking about wearing an onion on their belt (it was the style at the time) and I really don’t want that to happen. I know to some extent this will happen regardless of my efforts but I’m trying to stop that from happening to the things that matter to me, myself, family and computers.