At EconoCon

We are out this weekend in Plymouth New Hampshire attending a SciFi/Gaming convention PSU. Its a great group of young folks and they are treating Jess like a queen. The public network here requires an account so I am writing this during the day and will have to post it at the hotel in the evening.

We went out to dinner at a wonderful place last night “The Italian Farmhouse” hosted by the Gaming club here. Wonderful Italian food and excellent desert. It was good enough were it could have actually been a dining destination.

Speaking of destinations, the trip up here was absolutely beautiful. We came up from Mass to Vermont over East through southern NH. Everything was frosted white with the last snows. We drove through delightful little townships and hamlets all the way and I can definitely see the charm of rural New England now.

Breakfast was yummy! We ate at the retro little diner in downtown Plymouth (Insert Name Here) Probably the best homefries and Eggs Benedict that I have ever had.

PSU itself is a charming little campus of about 5000 students. The Union building where we are attending the con, is very well laid out. Nice architecture and good colors. Lots of windows and light.

Overall a lovely place!

Forgot to catch up the blog after my trip. Lets see… made it back! Yay!

Learned a lot in Iowa about Systems Thinking and the process surrounding it. I am going to grab some books on the theory and try to learn more.

We are off to another Con this weekend. Should be fun. I will post more tomorrow and try to catch up on stuff.

Ok, managed to make Cedar Rapids. The hotel is nice and the view is.. well, it is of a bunch of other hotels and fast food places. Dinner was Wendy’s chicken sandwich.

Not much to do tonight. Going to catch up on some reading, writing ,  some TV, and some sleep!

Current Meatspace Location: Lat:  41.94563 N   Lon:  91.67202 W  Alt:  846.46 ‘

Well, I must say that this airport is much busier than the last. Wow! Chicago is packed. Lots of folks coming and going and I do love people watching. Unfortunately, the wireless access here is Boingo and cost $ 6.95 per day.  Tempted to go ahead and pay for it but may actually wait until I get to my hotel to post this.

Lots of folks with laptops. From what I can see, I would say that easily 80% are PC. Just noting is all…. 

Well, here I sit at the Bradley airport at 8:30 am  on a Sunday. My flight to Cedar Rapids leaves at 10:40. There are at most, 10 people in this terminal. I think the airport staff outnumber the travelers 3 to 1 so I am thinking maybe the TSA advisory to arrive two hours before your flight is probably overkill here.  All in all, I think I would much rather be stuck in the Kona airport…

And in other news, I am traveling with an old IBM X40 ultralight running Windows XP. Six months ago, I would have never even mentioned it, but I am completely jonsing for my Powerbook ( Darn You Topher!!). We went to put additional memory in the PB and found it had a defective motherboard. Seems some of the PB G4s would not recognize any more than 512 M on a DIMM, no matter what the capacity. Topher made some calls to Apple and even though the PB was a month out of warranty, they agreed to fix it. So Friday we stuck it in the box that Apple sent and off it went to the great orchard in the sky for upgrade. With any luck, it should be back next week!

I am continuing to be enthralled by my use of OSX as my primary work platform. I have a great custom built AMD system in my home office and I find myself leaving it turned off while I drag my Powerbook around the house working. At my office at HEC, the powerbook travels everywhere with me, meetings, offsite, and of-course my own desk.

The ease of use and amazing diversity of simple, robust applications have rapidly made it indispensable in everything from network diagnosis, to web design, programing, and project management.
So, here is a list of the applications I am currently using on a daily basis.
NeoOffice – Faster, lighter, feature rich and free, this application has removed all need for MS Office in my daily work.
AbiWord – A light fast word processor, I use it for writing at home. Very quick with low overhead.
Check Off – A great “To DO” list manager for tracking those little naggy notes.
GanttProject – Who needs MS Project? Now, don’t get me wrong, MS Project is an incredible feature-rich tool, but this free software package really has everything you need to get the job done without the overhead.
Adium – If you IM in any form, this beats the old XP standby “Trillium” hands down!
Chicken of the VNC – Remote connections to anything…
Jumpcut – If you are like me and live or die by the clipboard, this multi buffered clipboard keeps a running history for you.

And most often of course, I can’t live without:

Firefox – Why use any other web browser?
Thunderbird – Cross platform mail client works well and looks good in OS X!

Ok… there is nothing like coming home. It’s even better when you come home to 12 inches of snow and have to park in the street and shovel your driveway before you can even get to your house!! Weeeee!!!!

The count for computers here this weekend is about 60 % PC ( Dell , Vaio, IBM) and 40% Apple.
Looking at what Jess is doing , I am going to look into writing tools for OS X because I think that she may be happier with a Powerbook/Mac when her ancient Sony Vaio dies…. I’ll see what I can come up with and post a list.

If you don’t know, my Ladywife, Jess is a writer and author. She writes fantasy fiction and role playing games. As part of her career, we are spending time this year attending Science Fiction, gaming, and writing conventions.
This weekend we are at LUNACON in Rye Brook, New York. Its a very nice convention with lots of wonderful panels and topics.
Jess is serving on several panels and I am acting as her “rifle bearer” helping her setup and haul her stuff. Its a great way to meet a variety of very interesting people, like you would not find in any one place anywhere else on the planet.
These are not Trekkers/Trekkies, they are SciFi and fantasy authors, fans, writers, historians, and geeks. I am really enjoying the whole thing!
As a side note… here at the Hilton in Rye. Avoid the in-house restaurant. Very expensive and poor quality…. order out. Even Dominos is a better deal.
More later.

Looking at the article on Top 22 Mac OS X Products from my last post, I downloaded a trial version of ecto.

I did not think that I would care for a blogging client, but I really like the flexibility it has given me in producing and updating my posts. There is also a Windows version that I recommended to Jess. We will see how she likes it.