What’s on your desk

Following on from John Nunemakers post. I’ve been wanting to share this for quite sometime. I should preface this with, I’m one of *those* guys that loves to tweak, tinker, prod and play with things. It drives my fiance nuts.. So here goes. I recently just put the finishing coats of paint on my home office.

Software for profit:
Textmate - what can I say
NetBeans - @adamw523 is convincing me slowly that maybe this is the way of the future. Haml plugin needs some work though. I sincerely hope there’s a Textmate2 in the works.
Rescuetime - I’m competitive as hell. Apparently for this week I’m in the Top 1% of users for efficency.
Jungledisk - no nasty catastrophic disk failures here
1password - what, you put your passwords in a text file ?
Expandrive - mounting your server to your local filesystem over SSH …
Mailplane - saved my life
iTerm - put your production servers on a red background, white foreground profile, never again will you forget you’re on a production server…
Skype - one of these days I’m going to give the “laptop handheld video tour” and it will end in tragedy… I just know it. Plus everyone seems to talk to the cats over skype video.. it’s amazing.

Online services:
“rails ourapp” - Tend to build what we need, not a big fan of paying out for something invariably you have to change your processes to suit.
Photos - Flickr Pro Account. Please never let Flickr die
Devguard - kinda rocks for subversion hosting, if you’re not into this whole git hotness yet.

Now, for the fun part..

The brains:
MBP - for profit
Tower - Watercooled (both GPU and CPU), overclocked, beast. C2D E8500 @ 3.59ghz, 4GB DDR2-1000MHZ, EVGA 8800GT, 15′000RPM Velocripator drive. *always* put your money into fast drives, money well spent.
Backup - Lacie BigTriple in Raid 1 config.
Routers - Hacked (DD-WRT rocks)
Mouse - A logitech thing that has outlived currently 3 or 4 Mightymice I’ve used at various co’s …

Video:
BenQ 24″ - 1920 x 1200, anything less is a crime against multitasking, as good as you can get without spending stupid money.

Audio:
NuForce Icon - I like detail (USB, outputs clean audio)
Sophia Electric Baby tube amp - I like detail and warmth, plus, VALVES ROCK.
Energy RC Mini’s - kick ass
Mirage Omni 8″ Sub - when it’s not downstairs

The brawn:
Maple desk - all hand made. Had immense amounts of fun turning stock maple lumber and ply into this. Took approximately two months. Cost a lot more than what any rikety piece of Ikea cardboard would cost (don’t ever think you can build furniture to save money). Amazingly when moving house, I didn’t trust the movers, so I managed to get it all into a VW Golf in one go (albeit I was driving with the top of my head underneath the top of the desk - visualise that!). Comes apart in 3 pieces, only way to lift it.

The last word:

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Rowan is a Director of Technology for a large marketing services company, specialising in architecting, developing and putting web applications into production - in particular Ruby on Rails based apps. He lives in Toronto, Canada but speaks in a funny accent as he's originally from New Zealand. He's been working in the software and web business for over a decade. This blog covers Web Application development and deployment in the real world, dealing with topics from business fundamentals to Ruby on Rails, Merb, PHP, Flex, MySQL, Apache and more.

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