6ix Passions

My Setup - What I use to get the job done

Inspired by the interviews at The Setup, what do people use to get the job done? I decided to replicate it for myself for the Show N’ Tell Friday. Not sure it fits in what you had in mind Jason. Sorry!

Who are you, and what do you do?
I’m Jean-Philippe Cyr. I’m a freelance user experience strategist in Montreal. I work with marketing agencies and private companies at transposing their business and communications needs into interactive solutions. I edit a blog since 2004 called 6ix Passions.

What hardware are you using?
I use a MacBook Pro 2.16 Mhz with 3 Gigs of RAM and a small hard drive of 100 GB. I use a PC Goldtouch ergonomic keyboard that makes everyone say: “Wow, your keyboard is broken!”. I listen to my music with a pair of Sennheiser HD 280 Pro. My sensitive data, including my music and photos are daily backup on remote server using iDrive. I use a small My Passport portable external drive of 500 GB to backup my all computers and any other medias every month. I carry my laptop with me between my home and office. I always cary my iPhone 3G in my left pant pocket.

And what software?
I’ve been on Windows for many years before switching for OS X three years ago. I had the fear not to find the appropriate software for my needs, to loose productivity and to go from a power user to a user. I could not be more wrong and today I cannot think for a minute to go back.

I use Google App intensively for my mail, calendar, text documents and spreed-sheets. I synchronize everything with my iPhone using Google Caldav for my agenda and Google Mobile Synch for my mail and contacts.

I surf with Firefox. I tried Safari and Chrome, but both of them, even being quicker at rendering HMTL and parsing JavaScript cannot compensate for the increase in productivity I get from my customized Firefox. I use a single address and search bar with plenty of quicksearch shortcuts and “I cannot live without” the extensions: Tab Mix Plus, FireGestures and Easy DragToGo.

On a daily basis I use TextEdit and Notepad (on the iPhone) to take notes. I didn’t find anything more simple and easy to use.

I keep my workspace clean and to the bare minimum. My menu bar is clean and only the applications I use on a frequent basis are in my dock: Finder, Firefox, Adium, Transmission, Offline access to Google Gmail, Calendar, Docs, iTunes and Parallels Desktop.

I’m a shortcuts addict and always look to increase my productivity with little tools and apps. I use Spark to customize all the keyboard shortcuts to control system functions, iTunes and launch apps from my PC keyboard. I use TextExpander to speed repetitive writing and signatures and Google Desktop as a replacement for Spotlight to access files and apps easily.

I use Parallele Desktop to use Microsoft Visio in Windows XP. The only software I use with a custom build plug-in: WorkFlow, that I co-inspired to develop, to do information architecture and wireframes when I really need them into a digital format.

I use Dropbox to share files, but also as a hosting platform for the media on my blog. I have a custom script, that I called ImageReeSizr that resize any screenshot to 400 pixels wide, put it into the appropriate Dropbox folder and copy the public Dropbox link, so I can simply paste the link when I’m ready into my post.

On the personal side, I’m a big fan of Lightroom and iMovie. I think that iMovie is a revolution in way to edit movie inspired from the old days, when film strips where stick together manually. I enjoy doing personal storytelling in videos from the raw data I acquire.

If I had to choose a single app on my iPhone, it would be Instapaper to read the Web while I’m commuting. I would even buy an iPhone for that application alone (yes even before the possibility of making calls - yes I know, I should buy a iPod Touch then). Because of it, I read more (or should I simply say: I take the time to read). It is the most valuable application I ever used. Period. And I mean it.

What would be your dream setup?
I’m pretty close to my dream setup in term of software, I would just like to have Visio native for OS X or to find something better to do digital wireframes. I have tried them all and nothing is quite productive enough to my taste.

Regarding the hardware, I cannot live with a resolution lower than 1440 x 900, but I would dream to have a MacBook Air 15 inches with the CPU clock, graphic horse power, and battery longevity of the new unibody MacBook Pro 15 inches with SDD.

Outdoor and Me

You may also read this post with a different title, like “Sport and Me” or “Outdoor gears and Me”, but let’s start by the beginning. When I was young, in time where teachers where still asking their students to stand in line from the taller in the back to the shorter in the front, I always been the closest one to the teacher. I only got to my full extension after high school, so all the harm to my self-esteem has been perpetrated during my junior years.

While my teachers was treating me like I was an angel - I always succeed to avoid detention after school even after having committed the worst of childhood crimes - to the other classmates, I was a continuous annoying pain. It was my way to defend myself against judgment and persecution for my lack of vertical inches. No way they will get it easy on me!

It was a pretty good all around technique except in the sport classes. Here’s the teacher didn’t really care about me. The line was mostly the other way around, the taller ones where favored for their athletic superiority while the short ones were the last considered when it was the time to choose the best assets by the team leaders.

I never succeeded to excel in team sports and my parents where not big fans either of our national sports (hockey and baseball). I didn’t grow liking sports in group and the competition around it. When I was a kid, I even asked my mother to stop going to a sport center every Saturday because I was missing all my cartoons! In fact, the reason was that the only sport I performed in was swimming. My mother was also a great cross country skier, so I learned to like it very young. 30 years later, I still practice cross county skiing almost every weekends in winter. During summer I switch my skis for my road bike going, two or three times week, at 30 km/h along side the Lachine canal here on Montreal. Both of those sports are outdoor, near the nature, and they are the perfect exit scenarios to my working life.

I got hook to outdoor, hiking in the woods in the good as the worst conditions, by getting an interest, more like a compulsive fanatic passion, for outdoor gears. I like tech gadgets, but I like even more outdoor equipments. I find the science of it fascinating. The ultimate goal being to feel naked while being protected from the outdoor elements. Meaning that your equipments should be as less heavy as possible for not slowing you down and the fabric of your clothing needs to protect you from the wind, rain, snow, sun, heat, cold while letting your skin breathes as much as possible, pushing the moisture from perspiration out. The equilibrium needs to be perfect and the quest for acquiring the best set of gears can become an obsession.

As for many things in life, like cooking, everything rests in the implementation and use of quality ingredients. To understand outdoor equipments, you need to know how it is done, but more importantly from what. For outdoor clothing, it means to know everything about the fabrics and how, in the field, the overall construction reacts and holds-on to its promise. For this reason I begun to read everything I could find about outdoor fabrics and gear reviews. I bought equipments, tested it in the field under various conditions, sold them, and bought ones I thought better, always in the ultimate goal of finding the perfect match. Once, I knew so much about each pieces of outdoor equipment, memorizing their little names, fabrics, weights, construction details, retail prices, performance on the field and how they compare to each other, that a manager, in a large outdoor retail store, has offered me a job on the spot, telling me that the only thing I didn’t knew was probably the SKU of the items. You learn with time that nothing can be a do-it-all, but certain pieces of gear have been so versatile that I can count on them in mostly any circumstances.

In short this is why I practice solitary sports and I got addicted to outdoor, in the most perverse way, by its outfits.