In a drive to improve my time management, and general management skills, I started reading Getting Things Done. It’s full of common sense ideas and stuff that can make you think twice about the way your are/were doing things. I’m no further towards world domination, but I do already start to feel a little comforted by the fact that it’s forced me to collect and organise my thoughts from time to time. I feel my brain is starting to become less cluttered and I can feelsome more productive hacking sessions coming up in the next few weeks.

In other news, Mee and I are back in the UK. We’ve been back a week, and have started to settle in. I also arrived to a new laptop, a Macbook Pro 15inch (512Mb model). It’s taken me the best part of the week to get to grips with MacOSX, get everything configured and all the necessary tools installed for my work. That’s the real subject of this blog.

Firstly, I replaced Safari and Mail with Firefox and Thunderbird. I started to feel more ‘at home’ - that’s mail and news sorted out. Safari and Mail are okay, but not a patch on the real tools.

Next, my contact list. I was able to export my contacts from Evolution easily enough into a vCard file, which I was able to import into Address Book. Unfortunately, I cannot import it into Mozilla Thunderbird as I would like, as it doesn’t do importing of vCards (strangely enough). However, I was able to use iSync out-of-the-box to synchronise all the contacts in Address Book with all the contacts I’ve accumulated in my Nokia 3230. Some merging of duplicate records and throwing out of old records and another resync later and my mobile phone now functions as a portable address book, as well as have more data available to name caller by caller ID.

As I never kept a calendor or on-line todo list before, I decided now was the time to start. I created a WebDAV area on the secure part of my website, and protected it via LDAP password authentication. Here, I have a folder for todo lists and a folder for calendars. I exported my calendars from Evolution as ‘.ics’ files and put them in the WebDAV area, and subscribed to them from Mozilla Sunbird. I tried to subscribe from iCal, but it complains about not understanding ‘https://’ protocol (ah, bless!). I now have togglable ‘Birthdays’, ‘General’ and ‘Social’ calendars, and ‘Next Action’, ‘Reference’ and ‘Waiting’ todo/task lists. I’m finding it instantly more comfortable to keep track of and manage my priorities and time, although I can’t delete a couple of calendars I accidentally created. I suppose I shouldn’t expect too much from SunBird for a 0.3 beta release.

Skype works for Skype, iChat works for Jabber (and now AIM, courtesy of a trial ‘.mac’ subscription allowing pretty smooth video-conferencing with my clients). As yet, I’m still missing a suitably unobtrusive IRC and MSN client.

So, armed with all the tools I need, I am able to continue work under MacOSX in order to learn more about it, and to buy me some time to sort out the Linux partition into a comfortable, workable state. I’ve managed to make MacOSX crash a few times (ugh - no Alt-Ctrl-Backspace!), but on the whole it’s really quite stable and usable.