Coffee. Like there was any doubt.

Tim Hortons Coffee

Mornings require coffee. Mornings in Canada require Tim Hortons.

As If.

No, that would never happen. The only thing worse than high school for me was… actually I was going to say Basic Training but in Basic I learned how to shoot. I have no interest in ever seeing or talking to any of those people and do not want to step foot into the hallowed grounds of William Howard Taft High School ever again, thank you very much.

The spring to-do list is startlingly similar to the winter to-do list, which had a lot in common with the fall to-do list. It mostly involves cleaning things and other outdoor-ish chores.

Nose cleaning, tiger style

– take apart and clean the garden fountain

- rewire the back patio lights

- strip and reseal sealant around the sunporch

- finish rebuilding the balcony floor and railing



And that's just a tiny sample!

I'd head to the Palo Alto Apple Store to buy a shiny new MacBook Pro.

Apple Mini Retail Store – Stanford Shopping Center

What's that you say? Don't I already have a shiny new MacBook Pro? Sort of. It's still a little bit shiny and it's almost three years old, which in laptop terms is pretty far from new. That $1000 would pay for a little less than half of the new model I have specced out.

I’ve had the need to set up three new Windows installations in the past couple of weeks (all XP, natch) and figured I would finally document my minimum set of essential tools for Windows.

• 7-Zip – a free, open-source (GNU LGPL) Zip utility.
• Windows PowerToys – specifically CmdHere and TweakUI. The former adds a context-menu item to folders and drives in Windows Explorer that opens a Command Prompt window (cmd.exe) to that folder or drive. The latter is a general purpose UI (user interface) tweaker that lets you adjust many aspects of Windows, from trivial (style of arrow on shortcut icon) to significant (X-Mouse style mouse tracking).
• GnuWin32 utilities – specifically Core, Wget and Which. These are command-line tools adapted from Unix which are very useful when, well, working on the command line.
• Notepad2 – a text editor, much much better than the stock Notepad that ships with Windows. Free. The “RC6″ version showed now includes an installer which replaces the stock Notepad.
• Sysinternals – a suite of tools useful for programmers and others who need to hack into the internals of Windows. My favorites are PSExec, PSFTP and Handle.
• Winkey – Add additional functionality to the Windows key (and it works with the Command key on Macs).

I’m sure there are more but those are the ones I have installed on the three Windows installations this week.