Missing Link

Lately I’ve been suffering from a lack of inspiration and motivation.   It’s something that happens to everybody from time to time,  and something I’ve faced many times in the past.  The downside of when this happens is that it’s significantly more difficult for me to be productive – both at home and at work – and I end up not getting very much accomplished.  Quite often I feel like I’m just spinning my wheels, which leads to higher levels of stress and frustration, leading to my general morale to be much lower than I would prefer.

It’s not for a lack of desire to be motivated and inspired, or a lack of desire to get things done.   Quite the contrary – I feel anxious and uneasy that I’m not getting as many things done as I want to get done.  I’ve been re-reading “Getting Things Done” from David Allen,  the father of the GTD movement.   I’ve even recently started reading “Making it All Work”, his followup to GTD.  Part of the hope there is that I can jump-start my productivity again, get back on the wagon and start getting things done again.   Some days I do great and feel like I get a lot accomplished,  but the next day I don’t feel as though I really accomplished anything and the motivation that built up the previous day disappears. (continue reading…)

Like most professionals in the high tech world in which I work, I carry a laptop around with me very frequently.   Also like most high tech professionals, I have a lot of different gadgets and various cables I need to carry along with me.  We can go a step further and add a couple of notebooks,  a pad of paper, some books (or Kindle/iPad/Tablet), power cables and/or folders.  In short – I have a lot of stuff the carry around.

Currently I am lugging around a 17″ Macbook Pro w/power cables,  external firewire hard drive with FW cable,  half a dozen flash drives, two notebooks, one folder, one pad of paper, a couple books and an external hard drive connection kit to use to collect forensic images.  For the most part it all fits in my Timbuk2 messenger bag which I got a few years ago.  I am, however, now looking for a new bag to hold all of my stuff.   While I love my Timbuk2 bag, it doesn’t have enough carrying capacity for me – I need something that can carry all of this stuff without it feeling cluttered and.. well… FULL.

I quite like the bags from Timbuk2, and am considering trying to find another messenger bag from them that can carry everything and not feel so cluttered.

And now I ask you, dear reader, if you have any suggestions.  If you were in my position, what would you buy?

Earlier this week at work I had the good fortune of having a solid state drive loaned to me to test and play around with in my Macbook Pro.  Figuring that the only PROPER way to test a drive like that is to make it my system drive I had the occasion of doing a fresh install of Snow Leopard and setting up a fresh (and FAST!) system.

I don’t usually do fresh installs anymore.  With the advent of Time Machine I usually end up having all of my applications, files, directories, etc there waiting for me after a restore.   This time, however, I had no easy way of doing that as the SSD is not large enough to house all my files.  This gave me the excuse, and opportunity, to clean out the cruft, start with a clean slate and have only those files and programs that I know I’m going to use.

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If you own a Roomba, and also own an area rug that happens to have dark colors, you’ve probably run into an issue where your Roomba thinks the dark colors are actually perilous drop-off’s that will lead it to it’s doom.  In other words – it won’t clean that rug, or will freak out and get stuck.   This is because the Roomba’s Cliff Sensors have trouble distinguishing between dark colored carpet and an actual “cliff”, so to be safe it backs away.

The easiest fix for this is to tape a piece of white paper (cut to size) over the cliff sensors (four of them).  While this works fairly well,  I found with my Roomba that often this taped on paper gets torn up and dirty over time, requiring it to be replaced – which means further upkeep and maintenance beyond the fairly high routine maintenance you already have to do.  I often would not have the motivation to re-fix the cliff sensors,  meaning my Roomba would be benched for weeks.

Last night I got tired of fighting with my Roomba over this, and decided to implement a more permanent fix.

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As I write this, I realize that its usefulness to most of you who read my blog regularly is limited, at best.  For that, I apologize.  If you’re not someone interested in information security (and specifically, the technologies involved therein) you can safely skip this without missing anything you care about reading.

Back in January, PGP Corporation released a much anticipated update to their PGP Desktop lineup -PGP Desktop 10.0.  This update was much anticipated because it finally added support for Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.  The great benefit here is that those who would be so inclined to utilize whole disk encryption on mac, and choose PGP as their platform of choice, could now upgrade to Snow Leopard and have their drive encrypted.

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