New Mac Command Line Shell, introducing Fish

Macstories has a little article on a new command line shell called Fish, which has color syntax highlighting, web based configuration and auto suggestion. I have been giving it a try and have been very impressed.

I Survived Open Heart Surgery

Many of you will know this, but I was born with the genetic heart condition, hyper tropic cardio myopathy. I have a thickened wall in the outflow of my heart where it was creating a serious pressure gradient, and making my heart beat faster. And both of those served to allow less oxygen to get out of my heart. I was on medicine to slow my heart rate so that the oxygen problem would not get too bad, but it hit the point of having to have surgery.My cardiologist sent me to one good surgeon, but my family wanted me to go to the excellent UCLA Cardiac Unit. We ended up going to a couple of doctor’s because of some issues, but after a couple of months surgery was scheduled.I immediately got a stress headache that lasted the month, and was not helped by a lot of stress at work, and having to work right up to surgery.On the Tuesday before surgery we got a call and they moved my surgery up a day to make sure it fit into the schedule. We had to call the day before, and they kept making it earlier in the day until we had to be there at 5:30 am. Met family there and checked in and they called us in shortly and took me to pre-op on the second floor with my wife. I got changed into my dressing gown, peed a few times, and saw a bunch of nurses, and a couple of anesthesiologists. And at 8:30 they came in and gave me the anesthetic, and wheeled me out. That is the last I remember for a while.Here is me in pre-op and with my first IV put in.Waking up in the ICU is a complete blur. Just some images and feelings. I saw my wife and the nurses and then my family, but it was all a blur.This is me with Kelly, still unconscious, and with the breathing tube still in.After I am initially awake with my mom.And here I am with Kelly after the surgery.And here with with Kelly where you can see the horrible things that inflated on my legs to keep me from getting blood clots.And here I am retaining some serious water.The nurses were amazing. And so helpful, but that first night was hell. I was told it was from being stretched out on the table for so long, but I have never felt muscle pain like I felt that night. I just couldn't get ahead of the pain until they gave something via IV that knocked out the pain.That first day my favorite thing in the world was ice chips. Water, I would immediately throw up immediately, but a spoonful of ice chips was like heaven.Then I developed a severe atrial fibrillation, a weird heart rhythm that was all over the place. They tried everything to get it back, from drug cocktails to playing with the inserted pacing wires and trying to re-pace my heart.…

iCloud and the dumbing of Apple Products

For years I have lamented the dumbing down of Apple products for the masses, especially when OS X is build on the so powerful UNIX operating system, but it has certainly gotten much worse of late. Just look at Lion. It now hides you Library folder where all preferences and other user system files are stored, and it even password protects your Utilities folder. This may be fine for an average user, but for a power user they are just frustrations that add steps to the normal things we do every day, but that is not the worst of it. The worst part is when they dumb something down too much and it doesn't function right. It is not like Apple has good customer support, unless you want to go into an Apple store, and I am not brining in my tower, ipad and iPhone to get iCloud to work right!A little explanation is necessary here, but I use both Firefox and Google Chrome as my primary browsers, not Safari, but I do have an iPhone and iPad, and like them to have the same bookmarks as my main browsers, so I use X-Marks to sync my bookmarks between all browsers, but recently it stopped syncing my bookmarks correctly to my iPhone and iPad. I looked on Apple's forums, and tried all sorts of methods to clear my bookmarks off of iCloud, which seam to have become corrupt, but nothing seems to work. With iSync you could always set to overwrite the bookmarks in the cloud, because these things happen (and you can do it in X-Marks), but they have dumbed down iCloud to the point where it has basically zero controls, so when something like this happens you are just SOL!And I already had to give up cloud syncing for my iPad and iPhone as when I moved from my trusty iPad 1 to my the New iPad, I tried syncing my iPad from the cloud and it basically hung every time, and I had to revert to my last backup from iTunes, which was 4 months old, but at least that worked. Now I don't trust iCloud at all, and use iTunes to backup and sync bookmarks as that actually seems to work with some consistency (though don't even get me started on how old and out of date iTunes is).Now unfortunately iCloud is completely useless to me as it is broken on two fronts, and I have no way to reset things in the cloud to make them better. No way to see those files, or delete them and start over. Maybe if I went into an Apple store I could get them to do it, but honestly I don't have time. And for files i have moved away from the now defunct Mobile me to services from SugarSync, DropBox and Box.net as they work and won't have features pulled as I continue to use them, only get better.I have been an Apple man for years and…

Larry Jordan on Adobe Prelude

Larry Jordan has an excellent article on the new Adobe Prelude CS6 for ingesting and logging footage.I knew it was for logging and even cutting a rough assembly, but didn't realize it could export to either Premiere Pro or Final Cut Pro 7. Very cool.And it sounds like the biggest issue is the lack of ProRES presets for Media Encorder, which I always found odd, but not hard to create for oneself.Larry also offers a complete 2 hour tutorial on how to use Prelude at his site.