I’ve decided to make my year ender post two parts. Part one would focus more on my brushes with technology for the year that passed. Second part would focus more on personal events and realizations. So here goes..
Hello Apple
2008 is the year I became part of the cult of Mac. I was always intrigued by the Apple experience. I’ve been hearing a lot how intuitive and easy to use Apple’s products are especially when my girlfriend got a MacBook a couple of years back.
Come April 2008, I got a taste of the Apple experience when my colleagues got me an iPod Touch as a farewell gift. The user experience was just beautiful and refined. Having gotten a taste of Apple’s definition of intuitive and easy to use; and knowing how easy it is to run Windows through BootCamp or virtualization, I was totally convinced that my next portable would be a Mac. And a MacBook Pro it was specifically.
Buying Technology Online
This is probably the year I started buying more technology online. I signed up for Amazon S3 so I can use JungleDisk to archive my data. I upgraded to a Flickr Pro account to archive photos I want to keep. I bought VMWare Fusion so I can run virtual machines on my MBP. I got JoikuSpot Premium for my E71 so I can have an instant Wifi hotspot in cases I need to access the Internet on my MBP and it has proven to be a good investment time and again.
Buying more technology online also lead to me to start living in the cloud.
Living in the Cloud
I’ve been using Gmail since the time it was invite only and this year I have routed and migrated all my email to a single Google Apps email address. My calendar is also now in sync across my devices.
To avoid losing data, apart from getting external firewire desktop drives, I’ve also started using JungleDisk on a more regular basis to archive my files.
Dropbox has also been quite handy making files easier to access when I’m on my MBP or in the office as compare to keeping a USB thumb drive. We’re also using it now in the office when exchanging files until we get NAS.
Living in the cloud helped a lot in making me a mobile warrior.
Mobile Warrior
My MBP is probably the first notebook computer that i really used as a mobile workstation since it can actually run on a battery long enough to accomplish any real work.
I also got to experience the convenience of having mobile Internet and tethering when I had to go home twice quite unexpectedly because of my father’s condition.
After getting my E71, it has now become the primary device I use to check email. If I can reply to emails from it, it saves me time to do more things when I’m on the MBP. I’ve also been using it as a digital calendar to keep track of meetings and other things.
Google Maps on my mobile has also become quite handy when I’m trying to find my way to somewhere I’m not particularly familiar with. It’s very useful here in Singapore since the map data is relatively extensive.
2008 has really been a year where technology has helped me a great deal. And I’m looking at 2009 as the year where I’ll start creating technology rather than just using it. I’m hoping to build my first mobile or web app this year.
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