Chicago is the center of a wheel spinning and spending money at extraordinary pace. The city drags the rest of Illinois down in to debt and the state is currently billions and billions in the hole. Instead of cutting spending, tax hiking progressive Governor Pat Quinn pushed through record tax hikes on everyone in the state, sending taxpayers and businesses alike running for bordering states.
That’s not the worst of it, though, in that much of what is happening is a big game of smoke and mirrors, orchestrated by the liberal powers of the Chicago machine. Take Pat Quinn’s 46% tax hike on corporations is a perfect example. He trumpeted the move as a much needed increase in revenue to plug budget gaps and balance the state’s financial situation. That’s not what really happened with the corporate income tax, though. Here’s what really happened.
If Gov. Pat Quinn is looking to moonlight during the holiday season, he ought to consider becoming a gift wrapper at Sears.
After all, the governor promised the retail giant $150 million in subsidies within the last year. He might as well have tied it with a bow on top.
Welcome to the goofy world of Illinois corporate welfare.
In 2011, the Legislature jacked up corporate income taxes by 46 percent, and before the year was out it managed to give away a portion of the revenue to – you guessed it – corporations.
A sweetheart deal with Sears Holding Corp. and CME Group Inc. managed to slice away a portion of the new revenues right off the top.
It’s a “government knows best mindset” that serves neither the taxpayer nor the economy.
Folks on the left call it corporate welfare; on the right they call it crony capitalism.
Let’s just call it shameful behavior.
Shameful behavior indeed. But this isn’t new… this is the Chicago way. Sure, the actual legislation is voted on in Springfield, but let’s be clear in that it’s the Chicago machine that drives this madness.
What about education in Chicago? Is education an area that could be used as a model for success elsewhere? Well, only if you want teachers to threaten strikes, then actually follow through with it. Over demands for a 16% pay increase. In a city where 80% of 8th graders can’t read.
We could go on, and on… and on. And for the record, I love Chicago. I love the city and I’ve actually enjoyed living in Chicago since 2007 (with brief moves elsewhere or political work). But the truth is Chicago is a pipe dream that cannot sustain itself forever. While I think it’s a beautiful city, it’s also outrageously expensive. You literally feel taxation all around you. There is corruption at every turn, unions own all local contracts and looting of wealth is happening at record levels.
Enjoy your second amendment? Not here you don’t. You can’t carry a firearm, but at the same time south side Chicago is one of the deadliest places in the nation. Guns are illegal, but people are shot every night. Imagine that.
With all of this said, it’s wildly entertaining to see Rahm Emanuel call for the Chicago model to be utilized nationally.
Chicago’s initiatives come straight out of the playbook Barack Obama put forward in his campaign four years ago and has advocated since Day One of his presidency. But there are some issues that only Washington can tackle. Democrats at the national level must execute on the president’s agenda on energy and tax reform to ensure the future of not only our party but also the middle class.
By embracing the president’s “all of the above” strategy, Democrats can own the policies that will begin to make the United States energy-independent in the next four years, a goal that has eluded the past eight presidents.
This is laughable, but also deadly serious. Barack Obama is of the Chicago machine. The same policies that sent Illinois in to record, unsustainable debt are now the policies being called for nationally. At the federal level.
I now live in Virginia. I go to the grocery store and spend half what I spent in Chicago grocery stores. I pay almost a full dollar less for a gallon of gas, and I’m about to obtain my concealed weapon permit.
Please, do not bring the Chicago mess to Virginia. We don’t want it and cannot afford it.
My niece and nephew…
The above picture (larger size here) is one of the many I took this week while in Southwest Arkansas with family for Thanksgiving. You can view the other pics I took on my Flickr account/set here.
This morning my sister sent around an idea for December that I think is a pretty nifty and fun way to share the month through pictures. See the image below (this is the image my sister sent around).
I think this is a great idea and will be sharing my list as the month progresses. If you do the same please let me know so I can share your pics as well!
This post is a little of a house-keeping note. It’s also an update for my Email readers through Feedburner Email subscriptions. There are about 700 of you reading my personal posts through email via ActivistsAndAirplanes.com and here at EricOdom.com. Most of you probably noticed a big drop in posts over at ActivistsAndAirplanes.com so I feel I owe you an explanation of the past, present and future.
So here it is…
Over the past six months I’ve done something that is somewhat of a life changing move. In the past I’ve had a difficult time focusing on building fewer projects and combining multiple efforts into one umbrella effort. I’m a big idea guy. I love to dream up possible projects and set them in forward motion. Unfortunately, a downside of this is having some projects only see half the attention they need, and there for they fall short. The upside of being a big idea guy is, of course, the big ideas.
That said, I need to streamline the ideas and funnel the energy into a fewer number of paths they can take. My creation over at LibertyNews.com is beginning to take shape in a massive way. Our new news design unfolds around January 1st, and we just combined CampaignTrailReport.com, TheUnionLabelBlog.com and LibertyNews.com to create one big news hub. Right now we’re in a temporary blog format, but the site is now home to almost 4,000 posts/stories and continues to grow considerably. The consolidation happening at LibertyNews.com is also happening acros a broad range of projects I am at the helm of on behalf of Grassfire Nation, the parent entity of the entire “e-family.”
So… while doing this over at LibertyNews.com, I’m also doing it with my personal sites. I had initially wanted to try and keep my personal life thoughts separate from my political thoughts. I found, though, that a vast majority of my friends and family want both, not just one part. Sure, there are a few that would probably rather I keep my mouth shut on politics, but they’ll just have to deal with it. This is who I am, it’s what I believe and I am not going to hide that to provide a little comfort to some who may disagree.
This change means I’m moving my previously written political stuff in to LibertyNews.com (it’s already moved, actually) and moving forward I’ll be posting my personal political views here at EricOdom.com, mixing in random thoughts on life while I’m at it. EricOdom.com is now also a part of the Liberty News Network and the content here can and often will find its way over to LibertyNews.com as well.
This move also means you’ll see an ad in the upper right. I’ve tried to keep this blog ad free, but truth is I want to be a part of a bigger network, have access to more readers and I want to be on those shiny new cloud servers we moved Liberty News Network to last week. So, the ad is here to stay and I hope you won’t mind too much.
Additionally, if you are a blogger/content creator and you might be interested in being a part of the network, drop me a comment here. In a world of much pessimism, we at Liberty News are optimistic and growing in everything we do. America is a great nation, but she’s currently slightly wounded economically and needs patriots like us to step up and build.
This country needs free-market entrepreneurship to fight like never before. This is our time. I’m ready, willing, able, excited and moving ahead.
Those of you who subscribe here will continue to see these updates and you’ll now get them more frequently. They’ll include a mixture of political and personal thoughts, and I hope you’ll leave comments to tell me what you think.
Until then… keep up the fight!
-Eric Odom
For anyone who cares, and there probably isn’t anyone who does, I skipped ride 10 and will likely skip others as well. Ride 10 was brief, maybe 6-7 miles and non-eventful. I’m only going to write about the more significant rides moving forward.
Before I get to this ride, let me talk a little about my weight loss. As I mentioned in a previous post, I weighed in at an unacceptable 249 pounds a few months back. I began watching what I eat and working on much better meal scheduling and portion control. This worked for the first 10 pounds lost, but then the loss stalled out because I wasn’t doing any exercise. About three weeks back we bought bikes and the rides are proving very effective.
Top weight = 249 Pounds.
Today’s Weight = 232 Pounds
It all appears to be working. 
Ride #11 – 30 Miles (29.6, actually, but saying 30 makes me feel better)
I had initially intended on aiming for 26 miles today. The Centennial Trail is allegedly 13 miles long, so my plan was to head from one end to other and back.
By the way, and as I found out the hard way today, the Centennial Trail is a part of the I&M Canal Trail Network, which, as I calculate, is actually probably more than 25 miles of trails. More on that in the next post, but today I discovered there isn’t a simple single trail you can follow straight out and back in. There are actually quite a few trails and you need to know what you’re doing or you’ll end up pedaling further than you expected.
This happened to me today. Well, I could have turned back when my bike computer said 13 miles, but I pressed on, so I guess my 30 mile ride was half accident, half intentional.
Anyway, the weather could not have been better. There was a slight cross wind from time to time, but nothing that actually slowed me down. The temperature hovered around 80 the entire ride, which is a VACATION compared to the 95 I’ve gotten used to riding in. It’s amazing how much water you consume riding in 95 degrees vs 80. Usually I carry two 24 ounce bottles and have them wiped out within 15 miles. Today I took three 24 ounce bottles and only got half way through the second one by the end of the 30 miles.
The first two miles of the ride my legs were experiencing extraordinary soreness. So much so that I was concerned about the ride. I didn’t ride any yesterday so thought it might be a result of that, but in any case I felt every inch of my thighs on every crank of the pedal. After the first two miles, however, my legs started adjusting and I was fine. At about ten miles I started getting a crampy (is that a word?) feeling in muscles around my knees. It wasn’t “in” my knees, but in various areas having to do some work around them.
I think this is due to the fact that I’m now using clipless pedals. Why they call them clipless is beyond me, since you’re feet are actually locked (clipped?) to your bike once you get going, but I digress. Clipless pedals require quite an adjustment in how you pedal. Traditionally I’m accustomed to only using muscle when pushing down (or forward) on the pedal. This wastes a lot of energy because only the leg doing the pushing is working. The other foot/leg are kind of chilling out until it’s their turn to push. With clipless pedals, on the other hand, a lot of different muscles are working in unison as you are dispersing energy throughout the full rotation of the pedals.
That all may not make sense to anyone putting themselves through the pain of reading this, but it makes perfect sense in my head.
So, yeah, I think there are muscles in that part of my legs that don’t normally get used, and I just shoved them into boot camp with no advance warning.
To get over these cramp feelings I started adjusting gears more liberally. I basically found a groove in the kind of resistance that lessoned the pain and just shifted gears to keep that groove level. It seemed to work.
The first 20 miles weren’t so bad. Actually, it was all good until that hellish final mile. I’ve written about this before and I think I can now confirm that last mile is a total mental typhoon. It doesn’t matter if I ride 5 miles, or 30, that last mile hurts all over. It drags on and seems to take for ever. I slow down to about 10-11 MPH and start shifting my butt or standing up to crank the pedals. There is nothing I can do to make that last mile enjoyable or somewhat comfortable.
It is what it is.
Got back to the Jeep, loaded the bike on the rack and turned the A/C on. Figured I would feel worse, but I actually felt just fine.
So there it is… 30 miles on my 11th bike ride. Took me 2 hours and 51 minutes to complete. Yes, I did take a few breaks. I also packed a banana and some granola, which was a good idea and helped.
I’ll probably do 20 tomorrow, then shorter 15 mile rides each day next week. Next weekend it will be a 40 mile ride.
-Eric
Image via CrunchBase
It pains me to admit this… but I’m over Twitter. At least for the time being. Not that I’m quitting it all together, but I just don’t have the time for it anymore. And let’s be honest, to be very effective socially on Twitter, you have to give it significant time and attention.
I’m currently at just under 18,000 tweets and 9,000 followers. I enjoy Twitter and I very much enjoy 300 or so of those who I somewhat follow closely. I’ve had some great moments with Twitter. I’ve very much enjoyed breaking news through Twitter or being part of something that moved narratives across wide ranges of users.
I’m also proud of the fact that my follower to following ratio is pretty good. I always giggle when I see someone brag about their followers, only to find out they actually followed the same number and convinced them all to follow back. I’ve got twice as many followers as I follow, and I’m humbled this many care to see what I have to say.
But when push comes to shove, I just don’t have the time it takes to do it any more. I watch some of my friends tweet 50-100+ times a day, and as part of serious discussions, and I can’t figure out where they find time to do it.
Additionally, I’ve been finding lately the amount of information flowing across Twitter is completely overwhelming. I’ve tried to organize people into targeted, niche lists, but it doesn’t help. I still get a lot of news from twitter, but I don’t have time to respond or engage in it.
Interestingly, I’ve kind of done an about face with my usage of social media. I used to dislike Facebook and crave Twitter at every turn. Now I find myself spending far more time on Facebook vs Twitter. I don’t know if it’s something Facebook changed, but it seems more streamlined and simple now. I’m not so overwhelmed with everything in the homepage, there isn’t too much conversation for me to handle, and I get to be a part of very few, select dialog scenarios in doses I can handle.
I’m not walking away from Twitter. I’ll still check in every day and I’ll likely still Tweet on an almost daily basis. But I’m definitely no longer going to strive to force it in to my daily routine.
Then again. Maybe this post will be irrelevant in a week and I’ll have plunged back into it. Ya never know with this stuff.
-Eric
October is going to be nuts for me in terms of work. I’m currently writing up a plan for a 20 hour a day news room situation for the final three weeks leading up to election night, so it’s going to be crazy on all fronts. Some of my friends tell me I can take some time in November to chill out, but I’m not so sure this will be the case. Obama may win re-election, or Romney may defeat him. Either way, those of us in the news business know for a fact this is all going to just get quiet the day after the election, regardless of the outcome.
Then there is December, and I can’t do much bike riding in December/January. Plus, there are the complexities of trying to figure out how to see the entire family for Christmas, who are spread out across multiple states.
Fact is, if I want to try and get a good ride in before the end of the year, it’s going to have to be the end of September. Now I may be moving to Virginia Beach, VA, but even if that happens I still have to be back in Illinois towards the last week of September because there is a big family event that involves a Cubs game. This game will likely end with the Cubs losing, but that’s a whole different story all together.
So at this point I’m tentatively planning to ride across Illinois the final week/weekend of September. This is still very much in the planning stage and I’m not even yet sure if I’ll be able to take a few days off around that time, but tentatively this is something I want to go for.
Below is the route I would like to take.
Key towns visited would include Muscatine, Iowa, Orion (IL), Cambridge (IL), Osceola (IL), Henry (IL), Wenona (IL), Odell (IL), Ashkum (IL) and Iroquois (IL).
The total mileage is 224 from city to city (or town to town…), and I think it will be about another 5 miles beyond Iroquois, Illinois, to the Indiana border. So let’s just call it 230 miles.
This route is a part of the “Northern Tier” cross country route of ACA. You can see the entire Northern Tier route here. It’s too early to look deeper into the route and figure out how this will go down. Ideally it will require a mixture of camping and hotels, although northern Illinois weather is incredibly unpredictable at that time of year. I’ve been through Septembers with temps in the 70-80′s, and I’ve been through Septembers with nightly lows that you wouldn’t want to be sleeping outside in. Will have to tackle those details once plans begin to become more real.
I think a five day bike tour across Illinois would be challenging and rewarding. And as busy as life is about to get, this sort of ride might come at just the right time.
-Eric Odom
P.S. The bike pictured above is not mine. Random pic added for dramatic effect.
Last night’s ride was, to put it mildly, brutal. I’ve re-learned a very important lesson that I’ve forgotten since the long rides of 2005-2006. Never underestimate the wind.
We made a couple painful mistakes last night. First, we went too late. This was not really by choice, as yesterday was just a busy day and we couldn’t get out the door until about 7:00 PM. Sundown was forecasted for 8:23 PM, so I figured we could get in a quick 10 miles before it got dark. The first half of the ride went great! Of course, I didn’t really credit or pay attention to the fact that much of the smoothness of the first half of the ride was due to a pretty decent tail wind. Second, we didn’t look at the wind forecast.
Because of the great tail wind we decided to push 7 and a half miles into the trail, making the total ride 15 miles. If we had been able to maintain the same speed we rode the first 7 and a half on the second, we would have been fine. But for the first 7 and a half the sun was up and we hadn’t yet encountered our enemies for this ride. The headwind and the bugs.
At about 10 miles and on our way back we ran into what felt like a slowly moving brick wall of wind. It’s amazing how hard it is to ride into a good strong head wind. It slowed us down by at least 4 MPH, often times even more. Not only did it slow us down, it made us work VERY hard for ever foot of distance gained. I would rather pedal uphill with no wind than to steer into it the way we were forced to last night.
Then, once we got into the woods part of the trail we encountered the second hell of the evening. Bugs. Tiny, seemingly invisible clouds containing millions of them. I first felt them hitting my legs and initially thought it was wind catching my leg hair. They didn’t hurt or anything, because they were so small, but it was enough that you could feel each of them. And about 5% of them would make a landing which added to the frustration.
About the time I figured out what it was they began to appear at all elevations, not just 3 feet off the ground. I couldn’t wear my sunglasses because it was starting to get dark and I couldn’t see the path with them on. You could feel these things from the top of the head all the way to the ankle. You couldn’t breath through your mouth unless you wanted instant bug soup, and you had to keep your head tilted down to keep them out of the nose.
This happened the entire final 3 miles of the ride. While Monday’s ride was 5 miles longer, it wasn’t anywhere near as challenging as these 15 miles. Wind, lack of light and gangs of bugs make for an interesting ride. Especially when you’re pedalling as hard as you can to get back to the jeep in time to have enough light to properly strap the bikes on the rack.
Even with the difficulties of the ride, the first half was enjoyable enough to make it all worth it. After riding across Oregon in 2006 I’ve learned you can’t judge the entire experience by a ride like this. I’m certain this will not be the last of such experiences, and also certain this kind will be outweighed by the rides with nothing but hours of clear skies and little wind.
This weekend I’m going to ride 26 miles Saturday and 26 Sunday for a 52 mile weekend (weather permitting). I plan on doing shorter 10 miles rides tonight and tomorrow to try and give my legs some time to rest up a little.
By the way, my longest ride ever was 62 miles in a day. Hoping to look at toppling that personal record soon.
-Eric Odom
Monday evening (July 23) I decided to go hard. The Centennial Trail (pictured above with my bike) is 13 miles from end to end. I parked at the south end with the thought that I might actually go all the way (26 miles round trip). I didn’t set this as a goal, but wanted to pedal hard and see if it was something I might be able to do.
It was 92 degrees out, but most of the trail is shaded in the evening so my compter registered at 89-90 for the majority of the ride. Still, after just three miles I was soaked from head to toe. Even with the heat, however, I felt great. I was feeling pretty good, actually for the first 9 miles. My average for the first 9 miles was 13.5 MPH. I know this isn’t really as fast as I used to ride without any weight on the bike (I used to ride at 17-18 on flat surfaces with no additional weight on bike), but considering that I do not yet have clipless pedals and am only on my 8th ride since 2006, I’m feeling pretty good about it.
On the 10th mile I started feeling like there was a lot of resistance against me. I think there was a slight uphill grade that you couldn’t quite see, but I could definitely feel it. At the same time, I was starting to tire a bit. Which leads me to one of the things I find attractive about riding.
The commitment once you leave the car.
You see, on a ride like this once I leave the car I have to ride my bike to get back to the car. In other words, I can’t just ride 9 miles and then decide I want to call it quits and jump back in the car. If I ride 9 miles in, I have to ride the same 9 miles back out. There is no taxi, no one else to pedal, and no way to cut corners. The only way back is to ride, or walk alongside the bike.
After 10 miles I stopped for a few minutes, stretched and tried to rest. I suppose I could have pressed on (the end of the trail was only 3 miles away, but at this point 3 miles was a LONG way to go) but I kept reminding myself that I had to ride 10 miles to get back to the car. It was 6:15 PM, cloudy, and I was starting to feel the results of the ride. I turned back and figured I would settle for 20 miles.
Surprisingly, I was fine until the very last mile. I think some of this is mental, because the last mile on this trail has been equally frustrating, regardless of how long the ride is, on every ride to date. It seems to take forever and all of the soreness, sweat and butt pains kind of rally to let me know what’s going on behind the scenes. This time it was the 20th mile of the ride and I fought for it. I suppose I could have dropped to an easy gear and just let it take a lot longer to finish, but I just wanted it over with. So I left it in a low gear and just cranked with everything I had to finish out at 14 MPH on the final mile.
When I got off the bike at the car I felt a rush of both exhilaration and exhaustion. After just a week and a half, and being some 34 pounds over weight, I rode my bike 20 miles. I feel it deep in my legs every time I need to go up or down the stairs, now. So I’m going to keep the rides at 10-15 miles the next few days. But Saturday I plan on riding the full 26. I’m going to load up some protein bars and lots of water, and take a good half hour to hour break at the end of the 13 mile trail. Then crank the 13 needed to get back.
I’ll let you know if it works out.
-Eric Odom
I’m going to start doing regular journals of my bike rides. I won’t do them daily, but will try and track the progress.
As I’ve said in the previous posts, bike rides are now a regular part of life and will hopefully become an even bigger part of life going forward. Being so deeply integrated in to the world of politics, and being badly out of shape, bike riding helps “clear the mechanism” and it’s also helping lose weight.
About two weeks ago we bought bikes. We didn’t get anything serious, yet. We went with a pair of basic hybrid bikes to help adjust us back in to riding before going with something more extreme. I haven’t been on a bike since 2006 so I had no idea what to expect. Obviously I didn’t think riding would be a problem, but how hard could I ride? How far could I go and at what average speed? And how bad is it going to hurt?
Well, ride #1 was brief. Maybe a mile. It was a late evening and we wanted to just get a feel for the bikes. Ride #2 took us through the neighborhood and I would guess it was about 3 miles. It was short, but enough to know my butt and legs clearly did not retain their tolerance for riding. Ride #3 was a little lengthier, maybe 5 miles down to the Plainfield bike paths surrounding a lake/wildlife reserve. Ride #4 was on a new 13 mile bike path we found in Bolingbrook, Illinois called the Centennial Trail. We didn’t yet have bike computers, but based on the occasional map we estimated this ride to be at about 8 miles round trip. (4 miles in and back).
The Centennial Trail is BEAUTIFUL and perfect for bike riding. It’s not a circle, so the farther you ride from the end you park at, the more you’re committed to riding back. It’s 13 miles from end to end and runs along the river. You’re constantly curving through changes in scenery, from river side rides, to forests arching over the path, to open paths along barge/tug-boat stations, bridges and dams. The path is probably 70% flat, with the other 30% being enough incline to give you a slight change up and make you work for some of it.
Ride #5 took us to St Charles, Illinois to jump on the Fox River Trail. The Fox River Trail is far more challenging compared to the Centennial Trail. The trail is 43.5 miles long and goes from Aurora, Illinois all the way up to Elgin, Illinois. We had a family event in St Charles so loaded the bikes and planned on hitting the trail after the event. We wanted to hit 10 miles on this ride, but the portion of the path we took had us doing some pretty hard climbs just north of St Charles. We ended up turning back after 4 miles for a total of just over 8.
I say there were harsh climbs, but anyone who rides regularly probably wouldn’t flinch of the hills we traversed. Keep in mind, this was my 5th bike ride since 2006, so it’s a learning experience all over again. I’m not sure how big the hills were, but coming back I was doing 35 MPH down two of them, so they had to have been a decent size.
Ride #6 is the ride where we stepped up our game. We had bike computers so we could now start watching our time, distance, speed, average speed, etc. We had initially intended on doing 10 miles. 5 in towards the middle of the trail, and 5 back to the car. When we hit 5 miles we felt we could go further in, so we pressed on to 7. At the end of the ride we cleared 14 miles total. It took about an hour and 20 minutes.
My legs held up well on this ride, but my butt was killing me. I have cycling shorts and a good saddle, which helps. But I’m just not yet accustomed to being on a seat like that for that amount of time. I felt fine at the end of the ride, but when I got home I was wobbly and went through an evening of pretty brutal soreness.
This is definitely going to be a work in progress…
Today I admitted to myself that I’m becoming a bit of an Apple fanboy. I hate admitting it because the phrase seems a little childish and lame, but the truth is I’ve completely shifted my entire office into a 100% Apple environment.
My current set-up.
Note that I even have a keyboard dedicated to my phone…
Here’s the thing. I consider myself a geek, but not on the hardware/software front. My geekiness is more on the information side of the webosphere (is that a word?). I like to follow tech companies and trends. I find advancements in the way information is digested via the internet fascinating. I’m a history geek, too, so I’m the kind who will go to a historic site and read every single sign designed for tourists. I’ll also download and read a book about a tourist/historic site before visiting.
I’m that kind of geek.
But in terms of hardware and software, I’ve in the past been a late adaptor. Last October was the first time in my life that I got out of bed to stand in line at 3:00 AM in hopes of grabbing an iPhone before everyone else. Now, in my defense I was still rocking a 3Gs that was on its death bed, but still…
Anyway my transition to Apple was a lengthy path. In 2006 I was on a Palm Treo. I had a Dell laptop and a Gateway desktop. My complaints with these products were typical. The Treo not so much, but the Dell and Gateway, coupled with Microsoft OS were a constant nightmare. The software got bogged down so badly that for the past ten years I’ve had to replace every PC and/or MS powered laptop every other year.
In 2007 I switched to Blackberry and began running Linux Ubuntu on my computers. Blackberry was great at the time and my only complaints revolved around lack of ability to stream media (audio/video). Outside of that I actually loved Blackberry. My Curve was a work horse when it came to email and basic web usage. Linux was far more reliable and stable than Microsoft, but it was a royal pain in the ass to force to do the most basic things, such as play music and run media editing apps.
With Linux I was decreasing my reliability on Microsoft, but wasn’t free of to pursue my work without constantly having to deal with hang-ups, virus problems or an inability to process actions.
This all changed when I reluctantly switched to iPhone in 2008. At the time I viewed Apple products as a high priced gouge based on brand marketing and carefully crafted PR schemes. I didn’t want to make the switch, but figured I might as well give it a go to see what all the buzz was about. Couldn’t hurt, I thought.
The iPhone can only really be explained with a simple set of words in a single sentence. It just worked the way I needed it to. I’ve been an iPhone user every day after.
In 2009 I finally got over my resentment of Apple computer prices and switched to Macbook. It took me a few days to accept that I had saved and spent that kind of money for a laptop, and then a few more to adjust to the minor differences of using a Mac vs PC. I still use that Macbook today and I have never had any issues with it.
I’ve since migrated to iMac for desktop and my productivity has skyrocketed. The apps I use, combined with multiple desktops and two external monitors, make for a workflow that is simply unmatched. I currently have the real estate of 12 monitors using four different desktops that I can flip back and forth using dashboard in Mountain Lion OSX.
Here are the apps I use.
- Email – Sparrow (And I’m heart broken that Google just bought Sparrow, but hopefuly that Gmail will become more like Sparrow)
- Chat – Trillian (I don’t like iChat, for some reason). I’m actually on the hunt for a new chat app so if anyone has suggestions please let me know!
- RSS – Reeder… simply the most amazing RSS app for Mac desktop… EVER!
- Twitter – Tweetdeck. Also excited to see Tweetbot for Mac come out of Beta. I use Tweetbot for iPhone and love it!
- Image Manipulation – I use both Gimp and Photoshop. I find Photoshop really complex and Gimp is great for quick, simple tasks whereas Photoshop works better for the more serious stuff.
- FTP – CyberDuck
- Docs – I admit it, I still have one Microsoft product that I use daily… Office for Mac. I’ve tried Pages and just don’t like it. I do admire the simplicity of Pages, but I often feel like I need more functionality. On the flipside, when I use Office I feel like I need less. Go figure… I will say this, though, I find Office for Mac is MUCH cleaner and user friendly than Office for PC.
- Browsing – Chrome as the main work horse, Opera/Safari as a back-up and Firefox for testing websites.
- Code – Editrocket. Love it. I wish it had a little cleaner ftp system built into it, but I just use Cyberduck instead and it all flows fine.
In my first desktop I have email, chat, Reeder and Chrome. In the second desktop I have finder, Tweetdeck and a second Chrome browser for Facebook. In the third I have Photoshop and Gimp (and a finder window). In the fourth I have Office open with a finder window. Scrolling between these four desktops with a 27 inch main monitor and two 23.5 inch monitors is pure bliss.
Perhaps it’s possible to replicate this bliss in a Microsoft environment. But when I think of that I think of constantly replacing things, constantly having to hard-boot in scenarios of freezing OS, and a generally rough experience in my work-flow.
Is Apple more expensive? In short terms, yes. In the long run, though, I’ve actually saved money because I haven’t had to replace a single Apple product out of pocket due to the product breaking down on my. So consider me a big fan.
I’m sold.
-Eric Odom
