Snowed In

So Fort Wayne and the surrounding county is under a “Level 2 Snow Emergency” until further notice. This basically means that if you park on the street, you will be towed. If you drive, you better have a damn good reason. So I’m doing neither. I’m sitting at home coding, of course.

I gave up the two-machine (desktop and laptop) dichotomy last year, selling my iMac on eBay when I found it just wasn’t getting the use I thought it needed to. In the interim I’ve had moments where I thought that was exactly the right decision and moments where I just wasn’t sure. Usually I came down on the “it’d probably be nice to have a desktop” side: sure, there are all sorts of problems with keeping things in sync, but the (relatively) cheap storage for things like audio and video means I don’t have to pay a premium for a big ass laptop drive.

Over the weekend I received a check for some consulting work I did, so yesterday I went to “my local Apple dealer”:http://sweetwater.com and bought a new “iMac”:http://apple.com/imac. I have admittedly mixed feelings about Mac OS X (see “Mark’s thoughts”:http://diveintomark.org/archives/2006/06/02/when-the-bough-breaks, which mirror mine to a certain extent), but I figured I either have to pay the Microsoft Tax or the Apple Tax, so I may as well have a machine I find aesthetically pleasing that will make a great “Ubuntu”:http://www.ubuntu.com/ box[1].

Anyway, I haven’t installed Ubuntu yet, but I was playing with Dashcode a bit this afternoon. So if you like “ccMixter”:http://ccmixter.org (and I think you should), check out the “ccMixter Editors’ Picks”:http://wiki.creativecommons.org/CcMixterWidget widget.

When you install it in the Dashboard it lets you easily play the latest Editors’ Picks from ccMixter. And if you want more information, just click the “>” button and it’ll open the selected track at ccMixter.org.

fn1. And it’s not an HP.