Tao of Mac

Jun 17th 2007 · 2 min read

Flushing my system

Now that the launch pressure has evaporated, I’ve been blissfully resting since , splitting my time between Terry Pratchett’s hilarious “Thud”:ISBN:0552152676, watching and puttering about the site doing minor fixes.

That included adding a ‘People Using This’ section to , which, considering I got half a dozen e-mail messages about it in the past month alone, means it’s probably a lot more popular than I realized.

And I badly need the rest – I feel like I was run over by a herd of stampeding lemmings (got these little irritating aches all over, surely the result of accumulated stress), and the rainy, humid weather is giving me sinus trouble again (always a major nuisance, especially considering we were supposed to be kicking off Summer now).

Still, there are some things that I’d like to get out of my system before going back to , though, and the first is that Scott Adams needs to stop doing this to me:

The rest is mostly about the fun aspects of being an engineer in , and cannot really be posted here – maybe I’ll save them for some sort of memoir, but it boils down to this: you occasionally get to pull some stunts that people would never expect from your ‘average’ product manager.

The really fun thing, though (and that is something I can write here) is to have a along for the ride.

As it happens, I borrowed a G4 to do some testing throughout the project (remember, I practically never take my to the office), and it turned out to have a lot more uses than we bargained for:

  • as a fallback machine when Update struck my laptop (I just fired up and kept on working)
  • as a generic, all-singing, all-dancing, file format viewer/converter/slicer/dicer
  • as a web test machine, letting us fire up four different browsers to test web forms and sites
  • as a localization aid, using and to look at and tweak strings on firmware
  • as a box, sniffing at stuff with and poking it with wbox
  • or (my personal favorite) generating call tones with Audacity

This kind of versatility is something a lot of people don’t value, and most of the things I pulled off on that G4 will be forgotten in the fullness of time (plus I’ll have to return it, since still aren’t “standard” gear at the office).

But yes, it made a substantial difference (at least to me).

Thanks, .