On The Fragility of Life

Events happen in our lives that make us do a full stop and give a long, hard look at how things are. This was one of those events that slapped me in the face so hard I’m still having a hard time grasping it.

About a week ago, I had a heart related event that sent me to the emergency room. It was serious enough that the doctor point blank told me it could have been deadly had I not paid attention to it.

My 2023 Mac Apps of the Year

I planned on publishing a post like this myself, but @canion beat me to the punch, getting his out first… I’m going to use the same criteria he uses for making the cut:

For my purposes, to be considered an App of the Year, the software needs to be something I used extensively, value and enjoy. I also must feel I would miss them if they suddenly went away. Of course, it also needs to be a Mac App.

My App Defaults

I wasn’t going to do a post like this… But what the heck, all the popular kids are doing it this week, so why shouldn’t I? I’m not really much of a defaults guy. I’ve always preferred to support indie developers, so will usually go that route if their app is as good or better than the Apple default.

Some extra utility apps in my toolbox I can’t live without…

The Beatles Song That Isn't a Beatles Song

There’s a lot of hubbub in the news and online about the “new Beatles song” that dropped yesterday. As a life-long semi-pro musician, this headline hits a sour note with me.

Hah! See what I did there? Anyway, my thoughts…

This song was one of many demos Lennon did after the band broke up. This is key. While we don’t know for sure, it’s unlikely he said to himself “This would be a great Beatles song. I should ring up the lads.” when composing the tune.

A Better AppleScript to Compress Files or Folders

A while ago, I created an AppleScript that allows you to compress files and folders by simply dropping them onto the applet. One of the readers left a comment asking for a way to achieve the following tasks:

1. Select a folder from Finder.
2. Store the folder name as “x”.
3. Compress all files and sub-folders within the folder “x”, including their paths.
4. Rename the resulting zip file as “x.zip”.
5. Delete all the files that were used to create the zip file.

With the help of ChatGPT – and because I wanted to be lazy about it – I was able to come up with a solution to this challenge, which can be a great way to manage archives if that’s important to you.

Seeing the Forest for the Trees

No matter how well-intentioned we are, sometimes we allow things to sneak into our lives under the guise of it being something important.

We ask “Who else can do this?” Or maybe we tell ourselves “No one else is qualified enough, so I’m the one who has to do it.”

When we start thinking like this, it’s our ego calling the shots. Maybe we want to be the hero, or we worry those who needed us in the past no longer will and that we won’t be their go-to person anymore.

It's Your First Dreamforce. What Should You Expect?

Yay! It’s your first Dreamforce!

You’re pumped to finally be part of the magic. I bet you’ve already looked at a lot of other blogs to learn how to be ready before you landed here.

These are a few of my recommendations to make it a more memorable experience.

The Ant Mound

One of my earliest childhood memories is traumatic. At least it would seem traumatic to a three-and-a-half-year-old little boy. Though it didn’t turn out to be the end of the world, it seemed like hell when it happened. I still carry the memory with me more than a half-century later, so it damaged me on some level.

My family – mother, wicked step-father, newborn baby sister and me – were living in an old two-story house in Lancaster, California, which in the late 1960s was still mostly desert scrub and Joshua trees. We were located far enough away from everything else that it could be called the middle of nowhere. Today, a strip mall stands where the house once did.

Start Somewhere

Eventually you use up every excuse in your book for not doing the thing you keep saying you’re going to do. You’ve procrastinated yourself into a corner and realize it’s either time to just do it, or finally forget about it and move on.

That’s me, sometimes…

I’ve had this blog for nearly 14 years. In all that time, I only have 11 posts to show for it. That’s less than one post per year, with the newest one being more than a year old. At one point, I had written dozens of posts. But like any good artist is prone to doing, I trashed most of them because I felt like they were fodder. I regret making that choice.

Memorable Cigarettes

After nearly fifty years, I can still remember the first time I smoked a cigarette. It was early spring and my family lived on a farm in a semi-rural part of Colorado, a little north of Denver, at the foot of the Rocky Mountains.

I lived there with my mother, wicked step-father (I’m not even sure they were married, to be honest) and little half-sister. The closest kid my age lived more than five miles away, so I had no one to play with. This meant I had to find ways to keep myself entertained. Most of them ended up being things little boys are not supposed to do. Left to my own devices, it’s a wonder I lived through all of my escapades.

Eliminating Digital Distractions

Life is so full of distractions. It seems everything is vying for our attention in one way or another these days, with most of it coming from our electronic gadgets.

If you take time to look up from your phone for a few minutes, you’ll find a sea of humanity with faces buried in their own device. It’s painful to watch.

Personally, I’ve come to a point where I’ve had it with the digital distractions in my life, so this is what I’ve done about it.

Saying No

Saying no can be one of the hardest things to do.

No to an exciting new project. No to a volunteer opportunity in the community or at church; no to the extra helping of food at a meal; no to bad habits we’ve carried around with us all our lives.

There’s tremendous power in saying no. When we have the courage to do it, we stop stretching ourselves too thin. We make more time for our families. We become healthier by defeating the temptation to eat the extra cookie. We break bad habits that have held us captive all our lives.

Spin Cycle

I’ve been around long enough to know life moves in cycles.

Things that were new and exciting one day eventually become dull and boring the next. The pursuit of shiny objects and interesting paths quickly fall by the wayside before you realize it. We move from one thing to the next and then another in search of a quick thrill, because we’ve become instant gratification junkies.

What if, instead, we intentionally slowed our lives down? What if we deliberately chose to look at the world in wonder like we did when we were young? What if we took time out to play like we did when we were children? What if we stopped to listen to what’s going on inside instead of burying our faces in smart devices that make us dumb?

Passing Your Salesforce ADM201 Certification Exam

I passed the Salesforce ADM201 certification exam today. It’s been a five-year road to get here. From the first week I began working with Salesforce, I decided attaining certification was something I wanted to pursue.

Now that I’ve done it, I thought it might be good to share the things that helped me be successful with those looking to do the same.

Know Your Stuff

Your success or failure pretty much boils down to this… You’ve got to know your stuff or it’s never going to happen.

AppleScript to Compress Files and Folders

I had the need to select several folders at once in the Mac OS Finder and zip them up as individual archives. This AppleScript to compress files and folders was the solution I came up with.

The script compresses each item selected into its own archive, and works with both folders and files.

tell application "Finder"
	set theList to selection
	repeat with i from 1 to (count of theList)
		set theItem to (item i of theList) as alias
		set itemPath to quoted form of POSIX path of theItem
		set fileName to name of theItem
		set theFolder to POSIX path of (container of theItem as alias)
		set zipFile to quoted form of (theFolder & fileName & ".zip")
		do shell script "zip -jr " & zipFile & " " & itemPath
	end repeat
end tell

As always, you’ll get the best results when used with FastScripts by Red Sweater Software.