hexstatik

quicksilver is a cool application for the mac like no other. it’s an application launcher… and so much more. it’s philosophy is “wei wu wei”, or act without doing, and allows you to use your keyboard to do… well, just about anything.

for the longest time, i’d been only using it for the most basic of things, usually launching apps. recently however, i started using twitter, and then also heard from rjtaylor that you can tweet right from quicksilver. my beef with twitter before was that i always needed to open up twitterific to send my tweets, which was kind of tiresome. now, with the new quicksilver action, hooked up to a trigger, a tweet is just a ctrl-opt-cmd-t away!

having this new trigger has opened a whole a new world, and i’ve now created two more:

1. search google (i’m using ctrl-opt-cmd-G)
2. shortened URLs using qurl (ctrl-opt-cmd-L)

you can learn more at the quicksilver tutorial page.

if you use a mac, and you don’t use quicksilver, you are seriously missing out.

i recently started listening to another podcast from merlin mann. merlin is hilarious and has always been one of my favourite guests on TWIT and MacBreak Weekly, two other podcasts i listen to regularly. now, he has teamed up with two of his buddies and has his own new podcast called “You Look Nice Today - a Journal of Emotional Hygiene“. This one isn’t G rated like TWIT and MBW, so it’s hilarious to listen to Merlin go on about more “mature” subject matters. Give it a listen, I’m sure you’ll like it.

after 7 weeks of training at the deep cove rowing club, my corporate rowing team participated in the 11th annual vancouver community corporate rowing challenge at the UBC john lecky boathouse.

after finishing 1st in our first heat, we were ranked 6th overall after the first race, which put us in the worst lane for our next race in the semi finals. in our semi final race, we got off to a good start, but not as clean as the boat next to us in the faster lane 2. in order to win, we would need to work hard and have a clean race. we managed to fight hard and were making a come back, but ran out of room and finished just shy of first. luckily for us, close competition allowed us to clock the 4th fastest time for the semis, and was good enough to make it into the 4 boat final.

again, we ended up in the dreaded lane 1, right next to the team that had just edged out. our start was better this time and we managed to get in front of our competition, who ended up having to make a small course correction. again, we were in a very close race and both teams were rowing as hard as they could. as we got close to the finish, our cox was yelling hard, both teams were digging down to give it one final push, but as i looked over, i could see that we had the edge and were keeping it. we ended up crossing the finish line in 3rd, just barely out of second place.

still, it was a great day of racing, and placing 3rd out of 10 in the ‘defenders’ category was definitely rewarding.

today was our 4th delivery from green earth organics since signing up for their service at the end of last month.

so far, everything has been great. the quality of the produce is fantastic and there definitely isn’t a shortage of fruits and veggies around our place. in fact, it seems that crystal and i aren’t keeping up at all, mostly i supposed because neither crystal nor i were really around very much last weekend. we’re drowning! i have a feeling we’re going to be eating a lot of salads and stir-frys for the next week.

I’ve also met “steve” our delivery guy, twice now. last week, steve went to great lengths to contact me after i missed a few of his calls because i was riding my bike home and didn’t feel or hear my phone in my pocket. he was standing at the gate of our building on the phone with crystal when i arrived to finally let him upstairs, and today, we arrived at the building at the very same moment, exchanging smiles over the coincidental timing of our arrivals. he even remembered my name.

i can’t say enough good things about the service, and highly recommend it if you live in either vancouver or toronto.