Back and it Went by like a Flash

Posted on Monday March 31, 2014 by Jacob Campbell.

The view of banner with the dates for next years Macworld / iWorld event.

I’m back at home now. The rest of my trip was fun, and went by very quickly. My last day in San Francisco was a little obscured by rain. I went back for one more trip to the expo hall and made my way around all of the smaller iOS and OSX Developers. I signed up to try to win a ScanSnap Scanner (they are really amazing, and I’m planning on buying one at some point). If I had money, I would have also bought a File Transporter because there was a great discount and I’ve been wanting one for a long time. There was a ton of other stuff that was very interesting, and I could see myself using and purchasing in the future. I got to sign up for the public beta for BusyMac new contact management software which will be released soon.

I walked around the Financial District for a while and went to the Apple Store (I’ve actually never been to a real apple store. It was cool, but I was much more blown away by the Macworld Event. I went to bed early that night, because I had to get up at 3:45 AM to be able to catch my 7 am flight. I arrived at Sea Tac Airport and started making my way back to the Tri-Cities to see my Family. You can see the following video’s that I uploaded to YouTube of Mateo playing with the Slow Motion controls on my iPhone 5s. It makes me laugh :). I hope you enjoy it.

Make sure to check out my album, Macworld / iWorld 2014. on Facebook, as I’ve uploaded the rest of my photos from the trip.

The First Look, Conference Beginnings and Sights

Posted on Saturday March 29, 2014 by Jacob Campbell.

The view of the Expo Hall at Macworld / iWorld coming down from the elevator at Monscone Center in San Francisco .

It’s been a whirl wind of a trip so far. I arrived in San Francisco at about 12:50 at the airport, but it was a real mission getting to my hotel, as I didn’t get there until about 3 something in the afternoon. I ended up taking the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit), which was a great ride. I found myself really disconcerted with the app I had downloaded to try to navigate my trip. I ended up using the Embark iBART. I didn’t realize that it was not going to give my any of the other transit directions. It told me to to get off at station at 22nd and Mission and walk two miles and something. I read it, and figured it wouldn’t’ be too bad. While it’s not that far, walking with my Indiana jones style bag and towing my Swiss Gear carry on bag behind. Not only was it an hour and a half walk, but it started me off walking down Mission in one of the poorer areas of San Francisco lining the road with the homeless or vagrants.

22nd and Mission San Francisco CA

Tweet with My Bag in It…

@MacSparky Listened to your gear episode. David, figured I'd. Show off my own Indiana Style bag... $5 at Goodwill. pic.twitter.com/Nec4bP9B2C

— Jacob Campbell (@campjacob) July 16, 2013

I checked in at my hotel, Aida Plaza Hotel. It is clean, but very antiquated hotel very much near the financial district. It was the cheapest hotel that I could find with short notice last week. The room I paid for has shared bathrooms and showers. The room is pretty small, but is perfect what I need it for. After getting myself settled in and getting my bearings (and resting my legs a little bit) I made my way to Monscone Center where the conference and expo hall is being hosted. I was able to get over there and get my first glimpse of the exposition hall. More than the trade type show floor, there is a conference with various trainings regarding how to use various software and other creative activities. There is also an IT conference and training all combined into this event. I was only able to purchase the lowest cost ticket (just the expo hall) for financial reasons. This being said, there has been more than enough to keep me busy wandering around the conference.

The first day, I just walked around and really tried to take in the whole scene. I didn’t really stop at many booths or connect with anybody too much. As the hall closed for the first day, I walked to Mel’s Drive-in for Dinner. Back to the Motel and then to The Box SF for a party and live recording of the Cultcast Podcast. They are a pretty great podcast, and always make me laugh. It’s much more news / rumors related then the other shows that I listen to. They had an open bar, which made me feel a bit like a VIP. I got to meet a number of people, but especially a IT consultant from Seattle.

The Rock Stars! David Sparks is the one being hugged in the middle and Katie Floyd is on the far right. It was cool to get to meet them.

The next morning, I made my way back to the Expo Hall. I spent the majority of the day doing a bit of deeper dive into all of the booths, asking questions, and looking at all the cool stuff being sold (I really wish I had some money to buy stuff, there are some great deals). I’ve been able to meet some of the developers for applications that I love on my Mac. I also got to meet Katie Floyd and David Sparks of the Mac Power Users, my absolute favorite podcast. It felt a bit like meeting some rock stars, at least in the geek circles.

Afterwards I made my way down to China Town. I walked down a ways, and ended up having a Mai Tia at a bar, that the bartender told me is the oldest bar in China Town and having a good conversation with a guy from Brazil and another guy who works as an activist for an environmental organization.

All in all, it’s been a lot of fun. Today, I’m going to go back to the Expo Hall for a little while. I’m hoping to do a bit more of the tourist thing. I haven’t decided yet, but I’m thinking the Worf. Make sure to check out my album, Macworld / iWorld 2014. on Facebook.

Bitten Years Ago, I’ve Got the Bug

Posted on Thursday March 27, 2014 by Jacob Campbell.

Yes, I have the Travel Bug. A graphic I quickly put together in Adobe Illustrator depicting the words “Travel Bug” and some other graphics taken from All Free Downloads The Bee

I’m getting more and more excite for my Trip to San Francisco for Macworld / iWorld – See my post It’s Final, Tickets Bought. I’m currently sitting in the SeaTac Airport, waiting for my flight to leave in about an hour. I’m sure I will have more to share in the next couple of days (so expect to see some for frequent posts from me this week if I can get around to it.).

Last night I got to visit my aunt and cousin. It is so good to be able to get to spend time with family. In doing calculations, it seemed as if it wouldn’t be much more expensive to stay somewhere and do the sleep and fly thing and not have to pay for parking. I had previously called Knights Inn Sea Tac Airport and was told the price would be around $58. I calculated the cost for parking, it looked like it would be around $40, so the sleep, fly, park option seemed a great deal. It ended up costing closer to $88. I really dislike when things are somewhat deceptive.

Anyways, it all works out. While you wait for more posts, you can read all of my former travel journals, or my Jaunt Down South 2010, or European Excursion 2008.

Word Salad and Technical Jargon

Posted on Sunday March 23, 2014 by Jacob Campbell.

A graphic I created in Adobe Illustrator depicting a vegetables, a salad bowl, and the text “word salad.” The veggies used are from All Free Download’s Salad the and I got some inspiration from the Dreamtimes stock photo: Bowl with Vegetables. You can download the Illustrator File.

Working in the mental health field when I am working with my clients, I attempt to steer clear of technical jargon. There are times and places that I do use more psychobabble, but if I do use it in session it’s coupled with a description in plain English. This is especially relevant for the clientele that we serve at my agency, which is predominately Medicaid clients. Being a community mental health center, a large percentage of my patients tend to be chronically mentally ill, impoverished, and undereducated. It is always important to make sure that what I am teaching, working on / through is understandable. While, in my conversations, I attempt to include the smallest amount of specialized terminology as possible, in my documentation I strive to be as technically accurate as possible. This means that prefer to name things using the most appropriate and specific verbiage.

Word Salad: Noun
A confused or unintelligible mixture of seemingly random words and phrases, specifically (in psychiatry) as a form of speech indicative of advanced schizophrenia.

– Oxford University Press

While I do not profess to be experiencing anything remotely close to word salad or more clinically defined as schizophasia. Realistically, its not even in the same class of thought disorders. The last couple of weeks, I’ve been noticing that at home I find myself using an excess of opaque non-technological expressions. Very often for me, this means referring to everything as “the thing.” For example, I’ll ask Minnie “can you hand me the thing,” to which she replies “what thing?” and I realize she has not idea what I’m talking about and say “you know, my water bottle.”

For all of us, this is a normal part of speech, and not abnormal one bit. It’s very common for all of us to have a word not come instantly to mind, and so we use some sort of filler word. I almost wish that the stock word I absentmindedly choose was something with more novelty like doohickey, thingy-a-bob, dongle, whatchamacallit, widget.. etc, mine is pretty Plain Jane. We all use different placeholder terms. You should read the the list on Wikipedia article for placeholder names which has some really interesting ones that I’m trying to figure out how to incorporate into my everyday speech.

The same way, if you are doing public speaking and are attempting to stop saying “Umm” (or more frequently “like” for me personally), that I see myself calling any object a thing. It might be, that I’ve been thinking about my over use of “thing,” but it made me wonder if some of it could be because of my days being spent attempting to be clear, concise, and as accurate as possible. Just maybe, it’s as if I save up all my casual phrases and use an abundance whenever I’m away from work.

It’s Final, Plan Tickets Bought

Posted on Friday March 14, 2014 by Jacob Campbell.

I’m GOING!

I’ve been itching to travel again, as it’s been a really long time since I’ve gone any considerable distances (since I came back from my Jaunt Down to South America). In two weeks, I’ll be heading down to San Francisco for the Macworld / iWorld event. It’s a trade show and conference. This year, I can only really afford to do the expo hall, but hopefully in future years I might be able to attend the actual conference portion. Minnie has been calling it my nerd conference. I guess I have a lot more nerdery that I partake in, then I share here. Minnie’s always reminding me about it. When I’m driving, and want to listen to my podcasts, she calls them my nerd casts. She makes fun of me because after she goes to bed, I’ve been watching my nerd show. Netflix is amazing. I’ve never watched Star Trek Next Generation, and I’ve always been much more of the original Star Wars Fan. I’m enjoying it.

With all of those great nerd activities, it makes sense for me to be going to a nerd conference. I’m sure that I will be posting more as I go along.

Review of David Sparks’s Markdown Book an Investigation to Formatting Documents

Posted on Sunday March 2, 2014 by Jacob Campbell.

With the hard drive on my MacBook Pro out of commission, and that over the last year I’ve completely changed how I manage data storage, I figured it was time to write a review of David Sparks ’s Field Guide Markdown (buy it iTunes).

Book Cover for David Sparks’s Field Guide: Markdown.

I wrote really briefly about Markdown in my post, Been So Long. I’ve been transitioning most all of my documents into plain text files. For the non plain text nerds out there, this might sound a little strange. In my viewpoint, there is a real case to be made for plain text files:

• Space: Plain text files take up almost no space on your hard drive, can be stored easily and quickly in the cloud.
• Size: Even on my MacBook Pro, Microsoft Word and Apple Pages (although Pages seems to load significantly faster and I really prefer it), documents take time to load. Text files are so small and simple, it loads almost instantly.
• Search-ability: With programs like nvALT, I can easily find and edit all of my text files, even if they are just small little snippets of information, I can find it quickly and easily.
• Survivability: File formats change. There are a number of word processing files types that I wouldn’t have any way of ever opening anymore. Storing files in a plan text file isn’t ever going to go away. It’s kind of like the very base structure that you can have, so it is easily importable, and exportable and will always be able to be opened.

Markdown is almost like a very simple (super simple, really you probably already do it) way of writing that that can be written in plain text and exported into a rich text format. For example if you’ve ever written an “*” or a “-“ to make a bulleted list, then that is markdown. It gives you some of the basic features that you might want to use in your writing to help with the formating, but nothing nearly as complex as you can do either in HTML or in a word processing docuement. Many programs can take your plain text file, and export it into a rich text format so that it looks pretty as if you did in a word processer.

John Grubber at Daring Fireball: Markdown Overview, was the one who first created Markdown. There are other syntaxes that are similar in nature for plain text to that of Markdown that have expanded purposes, features, and uses. There is even a syntax called Fountain for writing scripts in.

David and Eddie’s book was written in iBooks Author, and is created and especially for iBooks. That means it has features not normally available to other e-books. Along with the great descriptions, design astetics, it also has hours of audio and video embedded in the e-book. You can also purchase the PDF version and have access to the additional features through David’s website. If I’ve peaked your curiosity, I’d highly recommend downloading the book on your iPad! You should also check out my favorite podcast, Mac Power Users, in which David is a co-host. I’ve written about their show frequently over the several months.

Adventures Unexpected, Going iPad Only

Posted on Monday February 17, 2014 by Jacob Campbell.

My life always seems to be full of adventures, or maybe like so many other things, it’s only a matter of perspective. Especially when I’ve been traveling in the past, I’ve found my self with all kinds of difficulties and random adventures.

I’ve been using my MacBook Pro very heavily over the past year and a couple of months since purchased it. I take it with me to work, and use it there. I use it for creating graphics and other design projects. It seems like I’m almost always on it. On Friday, I got home and I was going to keep working on the Keynote presentation I’m making for work regarding Getting Things Done and Mental Health on Wednesday. I had used it prior in the day, and there seemed to be no problems.

When I clicked the on button, there was the happy chime saying that it was starting, but it just never actually started. After about a half a minute I was accosted by the white screen of death (similar to the blue screen of death on a windows machine I’d imagine). There in front of me was bright white screen with a blinking folder with a question mark on it.

A graphic I found with the white screen of death.

I purchased my computer at Best Buy and with any large purchase like this, I get a couple of years of Geek Squad protection. It means even if I throw my laptop a cross the room, I can get it replaced for free. It great, that even though my Mac is out of warranty and my hard drive failed, I’m going to get it fixed for free. It will just take a couple of weeks.

My plan is to go iPad only. I’m actually pretty sure I will be able to get by pretty well. It should be an interesting experiment.

Glad Mateo’s Cute, Reasons to Not Be Ugly

Posted on Sunday February 2, 2014 by Jacob Campbell.

A photo I took when I was living in Cusco Peru, asking “how’s your facial symmetry?”

I used a photo of from Mateo’s baby dedication to complete a Ana Faces Facial Beauty Analysis. He got a 7.37 although I think he’s much cuter than that.

Freakonomics recently had an episode of their podcast, Reasons to Not Be Ugly. The episode looks at beauty, and how it effects peoples lives from being a cute baby to working and marriage relationships in adulthood. It was pretty interesting.

It made me think about how fussy people are for Mateo. When I take him to the store and other public locations, people are always fussing over him and saying how cute he is. This helps me to justify my feelings and bias that Mateo is by far one of the cutest babies out there.

A photo I took when I was living in Cusco Peru, It’s probably not the best photo I could choose to check my facial symmetry, but it made me laugh. My score from Ana Faces Facial Beauty Analysis was a 3.13.

If you had previously asked me how to tell the attractiveness of an individual, I would not have guessed that facial symmetry would be a good way to identify attractiveness. I decided that I needed to have a more objective way of measuring both my and Mateo’s attractiveness. For Mateo, he scored a 7.37 (although I would say he should be higher and I just didn’t put the points accurately). It is still a good score, especially for somebody who still has a lot of growth to happen. I used, Ana face’s Facial Beauty Analysis. I ended up uploading one of my pictures, but it did not turn out that I was nearly as cute as Mateo. I will say, that the photo I uploaded was a bit more joking and probably one that doesn’t quite do me justice. I’m ok with my score of 3.13. I can rest assured that at least Mateo will not be discriminated against based on his looks.