I was poking around an Apple Store when an elderly gentleman came in and complained that his iPhone was frozen. The screen was locked to a running application, and pressing the home button did nothing. I hung nearby, curious as to the official tech support procedure for this type of issue. This wasn’t a genius bar appointment, it was simply a sales associate helping someone who walked up to them at the front of the store.

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Since high school, I’ve been dealing with the same old problem: How do I access my files when I’m not at my home computer? I started out with external storage; I used a 5.25″ floppy disk for a year, and quickly upgraded to a 3.5″ floppy. It held all of my documents and programming files, all meticulously organized. The disk itself has long since failed, but the files it contained are still with me to this day (though I’ve long since converted them to modern file formats). I moved to a laptop for some time as my primary machine, and backups were few and far between. I’ve only suffered data loss once: a RAID 0 crashed and 3 months of files were lost. I still rue that day, as I knew full well the RAID was failing, but I was too busy to run a backup and investigate further.

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I’ve only switched to a touchpad within the last few years, and only then when faced with the clear superiority of Apple’s product. I’ve grown so enamored of multitouch gestures that I even have a touchpad for the desktop, sitting alongside my mouse, which I use mostly for browsing.

There are programs out there that allow you to customize your systemwide gestures, but I’ve always been kind of a purist when it comes to input solutions. I’d rather learn to use what ‘the masses’ use, so I’m equally at home on someone’s stock install as I am on my highly customized one. Recent self discovery has made me rethink my position a bit, but I digress.

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I set up someone’s new Macbook Pro recently, and I ended up having to do a little command line work to move some files over from my desktop, and do a little vi editing. The funny thing is, I was unable to actually use the terminal on this brand new install of OSX until I had customized the terminal.

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Several years past, my morning ritual involved launching a web browser and loading a dozen or more web pages. First as separate windows, and eventually as tabs, when they became part and parcel of the browser. Sites like cnn.com, slashdog.org were my launching point for broad swathes of news. I poured over arstechnica.com and anandtech.com for more in-depth information to sate my technothirst. Enthusiast sites like nvnews.net and tomshardware.com kept me up to date on the minutia of gaming hardware.

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