Who am I and what do I do?
My name’s Ian and I live in Glasgow, Scotland. I currently work as an Application Developer and Business Analyst in the IT department for a large manufacturing firm based in Glasgow and at other sites across the UK.
Since Sept 07 I’ve been trying to lose weight and gain a bit of fitness. The live weight chart shows my progress and act’s as motivation to keep going and not drop out of the new habits.
Every time I change the about me page I always struggle with what to write. The following is all quite geeky though and based on The Setup which is a great site which details the computer setup’s of some well known bloggers and developers.
What hardware do I use to get work done?
At work I use an HP 6910p laptop. I use this alongside a 19″ HP monitor to give me a dual screen setup. While not ideal and fairly low spec, the laptop has an excellent keyboard so it’s not too bad. Ok, it is. Still on Windows XP although by year end we’ll have moved to Vista by all accounts. Yes, it can get worse. When travelling I use a Logitech VX Nano mouse which is very comfortable despite it’s size and I backup onto a Western Digital 320GB Passport drive which is compact but large.
At home I use a 24″ Apple iMac and a 15″ Apple Macbook Pro. Both are last generation picked up in late 2006. I hate Apple mice so I use a pretty old Logitech MX1000. I’ve also got a Bamboo Fun tablet which is great for editing photo’s. Currently using a 16GB iPhone. Quite simply the best phone/media device I’ve owned. The computing hardware is only part of it.
For gaming I have an Xbox 360 and a Sony PS3. Both console’s have their strengths, the 360 enjoying the better games library and online experience, the PS3 a far superior media player with excellent Blu-Ray playback. There are many other gadgets, too many to mention apart from my current camera – a Panasonic TZ5.
And what software?
At work my most used app’s are Toad, Oracle APEX and Notepad++ and Firefox alongside Office and Windows XP. Firebug is also pretty essential.
At home on the Mac I use Textmate, Transmit and CSSEdit for development and website maintenance. I use Firefox mostly, sometimes Safari for browsing and Adium for messaging with Tweetdeck my Twitter tool of choice. Pathfinder makes file management easier, SuperDuper! backs up my data and Quicksilver makes launching files and finding data a snip. For notes, serials, reference material etc I use Evernote. It’s clients aren’t perfect but I love being able to see the same notes on any platform – Windows, Mac, iPhone and Web. Foxmarks is also an essential app for sharing bookmarks between Firefox on Mac and PC, Internet Explorer on PC and Safari/iPhone.
Google Reader, Flickr and WordPress are key cloud based tools that I use daily.
What would be my perfect, ultimate setup?
I’m not greedy, just want something slightly better than I’ve got now. For me perfection would be using just one laptop. I intend to move from the two Mac setup to just one laptop at home this year. However I’d love to use just one machine for both home and work. Unfortunately in my current job that will be impossible(ish). So I’d like to pick up a new Macbook Pro later this year. It’s drive would be large enough to hold all my data – no need for external drives. I’d also like a battery life greater than 3 hours – would really like to see the extended battery of the 17″ Pro’s appear on the 15″.
Of course, this is supposed to be an ultimate setup. I’d love to have an LED Cinema display to hook the laptop to and a Drobo locally for backups and acting as a movie library. Broadband speeds locally could also do with a boost and not just downloads. 50Mb down and 10Mb up sounds quite nice. How good would a laptop be if it could last one full day before needing charged?
Where else can I be found?
The Stream pulls together most of my online content, but the sites I use most are:
ian_d at Flickr. Where all my photo’s (and friends photo’s) live.
shweepa on last.fm. What I listen to, mostly.
shweepa at Twitter. Where the small rants go now.
Scrapbook for t’internet bits and pieces.
shweepa at del.icio.us. Links to cool stuff.
Ian D’s shared items on Google Reader. More links to cool stuff.
iand at Digg. Anything I’ve dugg
shweepa on bungie.net. My Halo 3 stats. Oh dear!
What about this site?
I’ve ran this site on WordPress since July 2003. Previous to that was a three year stint using my own HTML skills and Movable Type (and yes the posts weren’t worth bringing over to the new site). I moved hosts to A Small Orange in 2007 and so far they have proved to be an excellent host.
