Missing Link

Unlike a lot of bloggers, I’m going to completely ignore the fact that last week was Thanskgiving here in the United States, a fact which seems to compel many to post about something they are thankful for.   That’s not to say I’m not thankful for anything (I am, quite a few things actually), but rather that I just don’t care to share that with you

Thanksgiving, along with the help of two days of PTO (Paid Time Off, for those who don’t know), allowed me to enjoy a nice six-day weekend.  I did thoroughly enjoy the time off as it allowed me to unwind quite a bit and disconnect myself from work.

Over that weekend I finally broke down and installed our new garbage disposal – which we’ve had for almost six months – replacing the old battered and abused garbage disposal that came with the house (and couldn’t perform it’s primary duty at all, was loud as hell and made the entire countertop shake).  The new unit, an Evolution Compact series from Insinkerator is nothing short of wonderful in comparison.   We can put things down the garbage disposal now that would have resulted in a clogged sink before.  It’s a lot quieter as well, and does not cause the counter to shake either – making it better on all counts.

The installation was significantly easier than I was expecting,  even though I decided to remove the old mounting from the old unit (same mounting type, or so it looked) in favor of using the new hardware.   Installation – for me anyways – required nothing more than a little upper body strength to hold the disposer in place, plumbers putty, and enough wiring knowledge to connect wires with wire caps.   Thankfully I had my wonderful wife to help me,  which did prove to be quite helpful.

This weekend I also found myself looking at Bento (from Filemaker) again as a tool to get some things organized.  I’ve had mixed feelings about Bento since I first tried their beta release,  not FULLY understanding what I could use it for (or would use it for). With the release of Bento 3 recently, though, I decided to give it another look (since the upgrade was only about $30 since I had a valid Bento 2 license).

I have to say,  when combining it with the $5 iPhone app,   Bento has become a bit more useful for me.   I’m working on building a home inventory of our electronic and expensive equipment – a project that is going very well since I can take my iPhone around with me to the various equipment, enter in the details, and sync it back to Bento on my Macbook Pro.   I’ve also used it to organize and catalog my wine collection.   Admittedly it’s not a large collection (currently only 9 unopened bottles),  but Ann and I are planning on going to a local wine store to find some new wines to try.  This will help me organize the new arrivals.

My Dad has been using Bento to catalog his wine as well, though he is using a custom built template to do so (whereas I’m using a new template in version 3 for wine collections).   He’s got a very large collection of wine,  and his process involved going to each bottle and taking a picture with his camera,  uploading into Aperture, Selecting the images, exporting to a directory, and importing into the correct record in Bento.

My process was much easier (and I believe he’s going to switch to my process after I showed it to him):   I create the library on my mac, and sync the blank library to my iPhone.   I then take my iPhone with me, enter the data straight from the bottles – and from within Bento on my phone, use it’s camera to take the picture of the wine.    It’s then already stored in Bento and I can sync everything back to my Macbook Pro.   I think all told it took me about 15 minutes to catalog my wine.

As I’ve gone through this process, I’m starting to see more and more of the capabilities of this software, and I’m actually starting to get excited about some of the things that I could possibly do with it.   It’s certainly not for everybody, and some people just won’t get any use out of it,  but I am really starting to enjoy it myself now that I’m finally “getting it”.

And lastly – while setting up my old Macbook Pro (after Apple replaced BOTH of the dead batteries I had for it.  Applecare FTW!) – I got to thinking about how great it would be to have my 1Password data sync between my various macs like it does between my iPhone and Mac.  I tweeted about wanting to be able to do that, and had SEVERAL people (Including the folks who made 1Password, which is just plain awesome) suggest using Dropbox to do it.   This turned out to be incredibly simple to do and has me wondering why the hell I didn’t do this sooner.

The fact that the folks from Agile Web Solutions responded to my “I wish there were an easy way to sync 1password data between my macs” tweet with the answer to how to do so, is awesome.   They’ve proven to be very responsive to their customers, and in the process are building a lot of goodwill and a solid base of supporters.  I think that’s definitely an example of “The Way It Should Be Done”.