I am fortunate enough to have great friends … and many of them are mac users.

Upon my decision to “embrace mac” for work, I put out a feeler to everyone seeing if they had a mac I could borrow for a week or so. Dan Ahern was nice enough to send me his 13 inch mac book pro to borrow for a week so I could get my feet wet.

So first impressions, it is a little hard for me to make a physical comparison as I am used to my 18 inch laptop and this being a small laptop makes it hard to situate myself correctly, but I expected that. We aren’t comparing apples to apples here (tee hee).

So here are my initial pros and cons list of my very first days interaction with the machine:

Pros

• Beautiful screen, both visually looking good and great resolution for 13 inches
• Light .. I can carry it around with one hand and it is completely stable… granted I am probably comparing it in my mind to my big desktop replacement pc laptop which packs a real punch with a whole lot more hardware.
• Long battery life… while I don’t have any numbers it seems to go for hours and hour and hours

Cons

• No number pad? WTF. Now I don’t expect a num pad on a 13 inch model, but looking at the 17 there isn’t one either. I am a huge number pad user for calculations in size with CSS and even basic stuff like invoicing… just feels more natural. This is a disappointment since on the 17 there is definitely room for one.
• While pretty, the form factor has me wresting my wrist on the edge of the case so I can reach back past the giant track pad… and the edge, even though smooth, has really irritated my skin. The constant movement while typing when it is on my lap has forced me to have to wear long sleeves or use a wrist band… I shouldn’t need to have a “use my computer” uniform.
• There is no obvious (and please correct me if I am wrong) page up and page down key. I am a pager, this is how I quickly review code….. I may get used to using the track pad more but I liked the finite steps that page down and page up moved my screen. I could easily remember “4 pages down is the other example of this” when comparing something.
• Its gets warm. Not crazy hot or anything but I can definitely feel the heat coming off the bottom. Thank god it is January (this currently doubles as a pro but I am sure in July I will feel completely different).

Nothing yet has been such a turn off that I would say it is going to be hard converting, and I am hoping it is just the size of the 13 inch relative to my arms that makes the wrist cut in…. hopefully this won’t be as bad when I get my 17 inch for work.

So as many of you know I am a PC user… Linux for work/servery stuff and Windows for desktop (Adobe) and games. LivingSocial development/ops is a mac shop. Now they have been more then accommodating in offering setting me up with a virtual configuration and/or running linux, but the one thing I have learned (and a lot due to my experience with rails) is “when in Rome…”

SO… I am going to be embracing mac/OSX as my work platform (still keeping my home configuration the same) and am going to use this blog tag “going-mac” to sort of document my findings… both good and bad … hopefully it helps out someone who may be in a similar position in the future. I am going to stay away from the community/politics of the debate and just discuss the things I like, the things I had to change in my thought process and the things I could see done better.

God save us all.

I am happy to announce that as of January 23rd I will be a full time LivingSocial team member. After almost 6 years of freelancing consulting I am going to switch it up and head back into the workforce working on the UX/UI/Design team for internal tools and merchant hardware. As many of you know I have up been living it up doing the freelance thing over the last few years and it was a tough decision deciding to go back to working for someone else, however the team over and LivingSocial made it so easy while working with them over the last year as a contractor that it seemed like a natural fit. It is going to be a great learning experience for me working with so  many talented people as well as give me more time to work on my personal and open source projects as I will the added stability that comes with employment over the freelance “take everything you can get cause you never know what is coming over the hill!” methodology.

I am planning on blogging as much of the experience as I can as sort of a learning journal so keep on the lookout for some new content.

Also… another big surprise is coming in the next couple months as well… and no mom, I am not pregnant.

Just a quick post here to sort of get in the habbit of posting, one of my 3 New Years Eve resolutions. The sad part is I actually have so many unposted blog posts that just need completion… anyways just wanted to say hope everyone had a happy holidays and wishing everyone a great 2012.

Got a bunch of new peripherals this week and just wanted to put a quick “I would buy this” endorsement for my geek friends.

Logitech Performance MX Mouse (with Darkfield….ooOOooOOooo Spooky)

Loving this mouse for a couple reasons… it is pretty similar to the form factor of a standard logitech mouse so no surprises there. It is weighted nicely, have a nice “significant” feel to it without being heavy. No dock, it charges by basically plugging in a USB cable to it, making it a wired mouse while charging (still usable!) or the actual battery inside is just an eneloop double A (<3 Eneloop!) so you can always just swap them out. Uses the unified receiver so that you only need one very small USB dongle for like 10 devices.

Logitech Wireless Illuminated Keyboard

Yep, another logitech product. Had the wave before and liked it but it always felt clunky and cheap. While this isn’t made of metal or anything, it is extremely thin (for a pc keyboard) so it feels more dense/solid. Extremely low profile (my wrist wrest is actually taller then it). Keys illuminate when your hands get even near it which is nice for finding that “mute” button in the dark.Full keyboard, all the fancy bells and whistles. One thing I love is that each key is contoured for your finger so it actually has this like soft pillow feel to it. Same with the mouse, you plug it in to charge, again being able to use it as it charges. Uses unified receiver as well.

Logitech Wireless Headset … Last Logitech Product I Promise.

I wanted a headset I could be on skype (which is basically where all my calls come into when at my desk) and walk around to get coffee etc. To be honest this headset is overkill for my needs as it has like player controls to be able to listen to music and everything on ear. The sound isn’t bad, granted I won’t be using them to listen to music or anything (<3 Etymotics). Swivel the mic up for mute, which is super nice as I don’t have to keep checking the button (Oh crap was I on mute?!?!). The crap thing about these are 1) doesn’t use the unified receiver and the one it does it the big fatty looking USB key ones 2) FROM WHAT I CAN TELL, once you plugin in the receiver it becomes THE audio device, no way to be like “just use this for skype”, which I could with my other Logitech cabled headphones. Not horrible as I can plug it in quick enough to pick up a call, but will be a bitch if I ever lose the receiver

Gimmiebar

Just check it out. Thank me later.

BagCheck

Cool site for making collections of stuff, like “photography equipment I have” or “photography equipment I want” or even more like “song I play when I am sad”. Check it out and friend me up. 

“I try so hard to tell people there are two ways to get on the top of search engines

1.  be relevant, useful, important, and interesting
2. ruin the internet with cheap spam that drags humanity down so you can increase sales by 3% in your worthless product

people ALWAYS choose #2. Doing #1 requires brains and good ideas … something they have none of. #2 just takes money and a lack of ethics and everyone has that.”

– William Harris

I am, come circle me up

After looking over my list of 100 domains from GoDaddy, I have decided to start consolidating my domains and web properties. Having lynnwallenstein.com, maverickconceptions.com, mindshadow.net and a couple of others all just for myself personally it was getting out of control. Between the countless software updates and everything was getting ignored it became an unruley mess where nothing got new content…. so time for some spring summer cleaning!

So if you are looking for me here is the breakdown:

• www.lynn.io – Everything Lynn, this will link to my blog (blog.lynn.io) which will mostly be technical/design/web related and to my tumblr (tumblr.lynn.io) which will be funny and completely random stuff I want to share.
• www.poweredbygeek.com – My company, no blog, just a simple straight forward portfolio, listing of services etc.

Obviously there will be redirects for the near future, but if you are looking for me, lynn.io is the best place to start… plus it gives me a reason to update all my designs

I have migrated all my content from maverickconceptions.com to over here and will be redirected MC over here as well. New theme coming soon!

Missed my first panel… as I usually do (don’t think I have ever made it to a 9:30)… but was nice to have a leisurely morning getting ready and headed down to the conference.

First I headed to Ordering Disorder: Grid Design for the New World by Khoi Vinh. Very cool presentation on the power of grids and when to use them and how not to get caught up in the “grid is god”.

Sitting in the same room the keynote came on of Scvngr’s Seth Priebatsch. I hadn’t planned to attend this, but VERY glad I did. The presentation was on how we can use games in everyday life to work on life’s larger problems such as global warming or the economy. For someone so young, Seth is 21, he has a really great vision and a lot of interesting insights. This is defiantly worth watching and once the keynote is shared on video I will be linking to it for all my friends to watch.

Next I went to lunch. I had planned to go back to one more presentation on HTML5/JS/CSS but the great food and margaritas at the Iron Cactus kept me busy for a 3 hour lunch with friends. It’s all about being social anyway.

After that we headed to the Razorfish party which was “interesting”. Personally I like to actually have conversations with people in social situations. I would rather connect to 3 people in a meaningful way and not just do drive bys of hello/goodbyes/here is my business card… but hey, to each their own.

After swinging by Nathan’s and some sort of street meat pizza cart, we headed to Betsy’s Bar for the Adaptive Path/Typekit party, which when we arrived was dead, but we were “forced” to cut out when it got crazy and there were people grinding on each other everywhere.

Next was off to the Driskill… which was sort of dead. More drive by hello/goodbyes.

We ended the night at Buffalo Billards and headed back to the hotel around 1. A relatively early night but still very tired and a bit tipsy.