During Leeloo’s knee surgery last week, I asked the doctor to remove a lump from her side, just in case. I had a biopsy done and it turns out it was a cancerous tumor; some sort of -noma. The doctor said he had removed an extra large area and that the results showed the procedure was curative. A little good news is nice.

I’m still figuring out the differences between the types of content that I post and where I should post them. Here’s what I’m thinking today: Snippet. A quick and dirty thought. One paragraph or less, but longer than a Tweet. No images. Tweet. A short (obviously) throwaway comment. Link. A link to something interesting, with a few (optional) words describing the link. Post. A longer item, story, or article. Photo.

A couple months ago Leeloo came in from outdoors and was limping. She would put almost no weight on her right rear leg. I gave it a couple of days but things didn’t improve so I took her in to have the leg looked at. The vet took X-rays and determined that her hips were fine so she suspected a torn ACL (technically the cranial cruciate ligament). My bank account was still recovering from having my other dog Katie’s eye removed so I decided to hold off on any surgery for Leeloo.

A Voyage to 2009: The ideal Kindle would have hardware page-turn, Home, and Menu buttons and a touch screen for UI navigation, selection, and text entry. The hidden, error-prone touch zones would be optional and off by default, since the hardware buttons would remove the need. (Via Marco.org) These are exactly what I’d like to see. On the other hand, I don’t mind the pseudo buttons. I like the Voyage more than Marco does, and I’m not as ready to write Amazon off, but a better device would be welcome.

I just replaced my 5-year old 27″ iMac with a beautiful new 27″ Retina iMac. Normally it would be best to restore from a Time Machine backup but I decided that with 5 years of crud built up I would start from scratch. I'm sure I'll hate myself later. It's fun to rethink what software I need every now and then. Here's the list of things I've installed so far. 1Password Dropbox PopClip TextExpander Bittorrent Sync Hazel Xcode Homebrew zsh (and oh-my-zsh) Mutt tmux Skitch iTerm2 Vim Better Rename 9 Acorn Tinderbox DEVONthink Pro Office TheBrain (and so also Java) Day One Vuescan Clarify Evernote Interarchy Reeder Slack Vuescan Lightroom Photoshop CC Capture One Pro Photo Mechanic BBEdit Taskwarrior Sonos YNAB Final Cut Pro It’s all mostly the usual suspects.

A beautiful new 27″ Retina iMac is arriving tomorrow for use in my home office. This affords an opportunity to start fresh. I’m not starting completely over and will restore from a Time Machine backup, so I’ve spent much of today cleaning files and removing unused applications. A lot of unused applications. It’s amazing how much crap I’ve collected in the 5 years since first booting the iMac it’s replacing.

I have a built-in aversion to using Evernote. I’m not a fan of how it looks and I dislike how difficult it is to get things out in the same format I added them. I can’t fathom why the currently-selected notebook is not indicated in the sidebar. And so on. But, Evernote makes keeping and finding stuff really easy. It’s everywhere, all the time. Most other software I use integrates with it in some way.

It’s been a week since Zim died and I still miss him terribly. It’s hit me harder than I expected. I find myself briefly forgetting he’s gone, then being struck by the realization that he’s really not here. This is happening less frequently every day but still thows me. I thought I’d gather up a few of his favorite things and photograph them, as a way of remembering. Food Bowl Zim's bowl of food Pretty much every dog’s favorite thing — a bowl of food.

In case I never get an account on the actual tilde.club server, I thought I’d make my own “tilde” server. It’s running at an unused domain, rudimentarylathe.org, which seems totally appropriate. Remember tildes? I love Paul Ford (~ford) for starting tilde.club and inspiring a bunch of people to open a shell and edit primordial HTML files directly. Just write, hit :w and it’s live! My account is rudimentarylathe.org/~jack. The server also has mutt, pine, irc, nntp, etc.

Zim vom Shafer See (2003-2014) A few days ago my 11-year-old German Shepherd, Zim, died suddenly and unexpectedly. Up until that moment he was happy and healthy with no signs of slowing down. Earlier that day I arrived home from work and fed the dogs and we then went outside to play with a stick. Zim’s favorite thing in the world was chasing stuff. I’d throw a stick and he’d chase after it and and proudly bring it back to me.

Elezea.com The real heroes are the people who spend their days understanding user needs, and fighting with all their might to get people to make things that solve real needs, not things that floor us with their beauty and radiance and lack of utility.

I’ve been revisiting Fargo for generating a feed of shorter posts and links and finally have something workable. It might be better to start with that, since it’s got even more stuff. It’s here: Jack Baty – Snippets