Greg Reinacker’s Weblog

I enjoyed reading Shawn Blanc’s interview with Daniel Jalkut. I had the pleasure of working personally with Daniel when he acquired MarsEdit from us, and got to know him a little bit through that process (although never met in person).

One question that caught my eye - Shawn asked him what an average day looks like, and this was Daniel’s response:

That said, I’m still pretty disorganized in this regard, so in all honesty, a typical day for me is to wake up and immediately start working. The hours then surrender to tackling bug fixes, implementing features, responding to customer support inquiries, and trying to squeeze in some socializing via chat and Twitter.

Left to my own devices I will work all day and into the night, so I’ve developed some tricks to get myself away from the computer. Forcing myself to take a shower, make lunch, go to the gym, etc., are good ways of punctuating the work with other activities. This is something I hope to write more about in my blog, because as I said, it fascinates me.

It’s funny to read this…when NewsGator was just me, and I was still running it all in my house, this was exactly my situation. I found I had to have a “routine” - I would shower in the morning by 11am at the latest, and I would nearly always go have lunch with friends (or at very least get out of the house and eat). Otherwise, I would find myself getting hungry about 3pm, have a quick snack, and the next thing I would know it would be midnight and I’d be hungry again, wondering where the day went.

And there’s an advantage to all those lunches - many of the folks I ate with gave me some free consulting over burritos, and now work at NewsGator. :-)

This last week, I was working on getting Back to My Mac working on my computers. This requires everything in your router (specifically UPnP or NAT-PMP) to be working just so…and it wasn’t. :-) I had a Linksys BEFSR41, which is on Apple’s supported list, but no love. UPnP was enabled, but nothing.

So then I get the crazy idea to just unplug the router’s power, and then plug it back in. I mean, if all else fails, power cycle, right? Well lo and behold, it started working…who would have thunk? So then I’m playing with Back to my Mac, and it’s all looking good. For a while.

Then my router started getting flaky. Like, every few minutes it would stop responding in the admin interface, and connections to the internet would be stopped. The only way to fix it was to either wait a few minutes for it to come back, or power cycle it. Clearly this was not going to be ok.

So I went down to the Apple store (about 5 minutes away), and bought the last 500GB Time Capsule they had in stock. I was thinking about doing this anyway, since I wanted 802.11n in the house, but a dead router was a great excuse to do it sooner rather than later. Got the Time Capsule home, plugged it in, everything worked as expected. Actually, not everything worked right away - I had to power cycle my cable modem to get things talking to each other - but after that everything was great. And Back to My Mac is working fine.

On the storage side of things, I switched my Time Machine backups to use the drive in the Time Capsule; again, everything worked as expected. I’m seeing about 10MB/sec doing backups over a gigabit ethernet network - not stellar, but it’s fast enough for what I’m using it for. And it’s working about 5x faster than Glenn Fleishman is seeing in his Macworld first look, for some reason. I won’t complain about mine. :-)