Rui CarmoOne of the problems with being constantly on the bleeding edge of things is that other people have trouble believing you can actually be tired of it.
(Another is what some people will make of this post, but hey, misconceptions are a dime a dozen. Let them think whatever they please, I'm not out to get anyone...)
Besides the planning, the technology analysis and the business cases, even the "fun" sidelines like phone testing (in which I lend a hand, mostly because I have a knack for finding odd bugs and can set up end-to-end test cases with ease) begin to pall when you realize you go through more firmware versions in one year than most people go through phones in a lifetime.
In case you just tuned in, I am now doing mobile network and technology planning, which is a fantastic way to see five to ten years into the real future of telecoms - not the "pie in the sky" crap that the pundits blog about, but what's really on the cards. However, it is an incredibly demanding job and has an extremely high attrition rate (which shouldn't be surprising given the tremendously broad range of technologies and services involved). It's addictive, but like all addictions, it's not very healthy.
Being somewhat depressed at my current career options (not at the options themselves, but at the process of actually making a choice), I went on a shopping binge and bought myself copies of Wired, Edge and... an iPod Shuffle. I guess that if Apple sold ironing boards, I'd have a couple dozen steam irons.
New Macs
Incidentally, there are new Macs out, with Bluetooth 2.0, slightly faster CPUs, and (finally) a perfectly sensible 512MB RAM.
(Yeah, I know these aren't the first 512MB Macs, I'm just driving the "no way you're going to enjoy Tiger on less" point home.)
My take? Bluetooth 2.0+EDR will soon become a key feature for people relying on high-speed 3G data, and it's something I'll be looking forward to when I replace my iBook - which, by the look of things, won't be any time soon.
Mail.app 2.0 Seriously Sucks
So, I've just deleted all my mail accounts from Mail.app and am re-creating them by hand. It turns out that I've been "replying" to e-mail for the last couple of days and it hasn't been going anywhere. Period. Nothing on any of my Sent folders, and (what is infinitely worse) nothing left my iBook (I checked my mail server logs).
Anyone who thinks they should have a reply from me by now, please drop me a line.
I have no idea why this happened, but I'm not happy with it at all, especially since there were a couple of important documents I was supposed to have sent over the weekend, and I only just discovered they didn't get sent at all.
In the meantime, I've been investigating the new Mail.app 2.0 .nib files. It turns out that the preview pane is programmatically resized when searching (and clicking on a search result), so my previous hack for a vertical preview pane is not likely to be completely usable in 2.0.
I hope to be proved wrong on that, but unless I find something I really like about Mail.app, Thunderbird will soon become my default e-mail client.
Backpack
Like Melo, I've been fiddling with Backpack. It has the makings of a great personal (web) workspace tool, and as all successful things, it is the simplest thing that could possibly work.
I'm too Wiki-oriented to take to it, but I think people will flock to it in droves as soon as they realize the shared workspace potential.
And that's about it for today, I guess.