Getting Rolling

It is awfully strange to be sitting in San Francisco but not in the Linden offices. I’ll get to my 2008 predictions later today, but thought it worth noting what technology I’ve started using to craft my new, post-Linden identity and workflow. The most obvious piece is this blog, which a few people seem to be reading already. I’m used to writing longer form works — and regularly blogged internally at Linden — but I expect it will take a while to find the right voice, frequency, and topics for this. There are enough other places to read virtual world and technology news, so I’ll try not to just echo what you are already RSS-ing elsewhere.

The next pieces are communication. My Yahoo Mail account gathered dust during my time at Linden, so rather than resurrecting it, I moved to Gmail. So far, I’ve been quite happy with it, especially with its new support for IMAP and helpful advice on how to properly configure it. The new Google Apps for iPhone also work well for me, so I am also using Google Calendar and Reader on both my desktop and phone.

For a computer, I grabbed a MacBook — although the rumored thinner versions appear next week I will upgrade — since the lighter weight and incredible battery life was more important to me than the horsepower of the Pro. Great little machine so far, plus I think a pretty good development platform for various experiments — if something runs nicely on a MacBook today, it should run on most computers a year from now. I let iCal pull from Google Calendar so my phone is mostly up-to-date, but have not bothered with more complicated solutions to try and sync between iCal and Google Calendar yet.

I’m currently bouncing between Google Docs, iWork, and soon plan to experiment with Scrivener as writing and brainstorming tools. The Google Docs to Blogger posting almost works, but I haven’t found how to have it automagically set the title, which is a shame, since the Docs editor handles Mac shortcuts far better than the Blogger one.

So that’s it for initial technology. Having built Ubuntu laptops for testing SL, I considered going that route, but being a Mac household — more on my cloud of Mac Minis for television viewing in a later post — I decided it was easier to stay with Mac.