Changes

I’ve been meaning to write this post for over four months. It started in my head as separate posts, but they never were completed. So now there’s one big post.

There is plenty of change to talk about. Some minor, some life altering. The biggest change occurred at the end of October.

Employment

At that time I left IBM for a position with Scorecard Systems. I spent 11 years with IBM. I started as an OS/2 administrator and moved my way to Backup and Recovery Architect, Tivoli Systems Management Specialist, UNIX Administrator and Web Developer. With numerous and various stops in between.

I had a great time, learned a lot and made some great friends. But towards the end the environment and direction were no longer agreeable to me.

The move to Scorecard Systems has been a great one. I’m now doing SQL development and UNIX consulting. I’m really enjoying the change of attitude, business size and philosophy. I’m no longer a number lost in a sea.

While this move was going on, my wife was also changing jobs. After 4.5 years as a server at Montana’s, she’s now serving at a new Baton Rouge that opened near us.

These are two big, life altering changes that just happened to occur at the same time, making them even bigger.

Source code management

After some “encouragement” from rjbs, I have switched my chosen SCM from subversion to git. I had been using a combination of subversion and SVK for home and work, but experienced a number of issues with SVK and merging at work that I moved to straight subversion.

After talking with rjbs, I converted my home repositories to git and my work repository to a combination of subversion server and git client. Something I’ve carried over into my new position. It works remarkably well, and amazingly fast. Much better than SVK.

Editor

With the change in jobs came a change in platforms. I can now do my work entirely from a Mac. This has allowed me to change my default editor from Vim to TextMate.

I have been a long time vi/Vim user. Keybindings on all my systems are set -o vi and they still are. With all my editing being done locally and with large amounts of files, the flexibilty, tools and environment of TextMate are a great help to my productivity. Although I still find myself dropping to a terminal and opening a file with vim for quick edits.

OS X Utilities

I have been a strong proponent and user of Quicksilver for years. So much so that I am constantly teased by my friends with the answer for everything being “Quicksilver will do that”. Recently my view has changed.

About a year and a half ago CromeDome started complaining about copy/paste and drag/drop issues. After a couple reinstalls and much problem determination he discerned that Quicksilver was the cause. I dismissed this as an Intel versus PowerPC issue as I’d never experienced this problem. That is until a couple of weeks ago.

I lost the ability to reorganize tracks in iTunes, drag files between finder windows, and copy and paste between some applications. After searching the forums I discovered that this is a long known, recurring problem that has yet to be addressed. Such a major problem, that usually results in a wipe reinstalls, without a migration as this would cause a reoccurence, still remaining unfixed, this was unacceptable to me. I immediately uninstalled it.

Quicksilver has been replaced by LaunchBar and PTHPasteboard. After using this combination for a couple of months now, I have to say I’m not missing Quicksilver.