I’ve had my 13” MacBook Air (mid-2011 model) for a few weeks now and thought it’d be a good idea to share my impressions. I originally moved to Apple on a black MacBook, then switched to a top end 17” MacBook Pro, and now I’m on an Air.

What’s Good?

Weight

It’s fantastically light. My MacBook Pro feels like a brick after using the MBA for a while.

Size

Not only is it light, it’s thin. Like, really thin. It’s not really that much thicker than my iPad and that’s impressive when you consider it’s a full featured computer.

Battery Life

I haven’t used it for photo/video editing nor have I used it for games, so my usage is pretty moderate, but still, the battery life is excellent. My MacBook Pro has a good battery life for its size, but the Air has been really impressive. I haven’t timed the battery life, but I can say that I frequently use it for extended periods of time without even thinking about the power cable. That hasn’t been my experience with other laptops (Apple or otherwise).

Solid State Drive

It’s amazing how much of a difference a solid state drive makes. Startup is extremely fast, launching apps is even faster, and even development in a virtual machine is faster.

What’s Bad?

Screen Size

It’s totally usable for most of my everyday tasks, but for things like development, it’s a bit small. The good news is that it powers an external monitor just fine. If you’re on the go and need to do certain kinds of tasks, it’ll feel a bit cramped. I can’t imagine the MacBook Airs line won’t merge with the MacBook Pro line to provide the larger screen sizes in the future.

Other Thoughts

That’s actually the only negative thing I’ve noticed. I happen to have the 4GB RAM/256GB SSD model, so it’s maxed out on the basic specs. It’d be nice if the RAM went up to 8GB, but honestly, 4GB has been plenty (even with large-ish databases loaded) due to the SSD. The storage space may end up being a problem for me down the road if I started storing my main photo library, but I’m undecided how I want to handle that. Overall, the MacBook Air is the best laptop I’ve used for my everyday tasks. I’m sure I’ll find a few things where I miss the power of my PC workstation or my MacBook Pro, but so far, I’ve really impressed.

It’s that time of year again. These goals will change over the course of the year, but today, my goals for 2012 are to:

• Pay off cat medical debt
• Sell (or rent) house
• Launch at least one new iOS game or app
• Get involved with open source

Of course, the standard goals of lose weight, eat better, save more, and the like are all things I plan to work on as well. The goals above are specific to 2012. It should be a fun & exciting year.

I’ve been looking into Octopress for a month or so now and I finally decided to take the plunge. As of now, this blog is now powered by Octopress (more or less out of the box) instead of WordPress. I’d like to change the theme a bit, but it’s good enough that I’ll leave it for now.

WordPress -> Octopress

Nothing was wrong with WordPress itself, but I just didn’t use any of the features it offered. I’d rather just type the blog posts in a regular editor instead of a textbox on a webpage. There are some great tools out there that help with that of course, but I just don’t need the features there either. In addition, maintaining WordPress means logging in pretty often to check for updates, apply them, make sure the database is backed up, etc. All of that would be just fine if I received enough benefit to offset the time there, but I just didn’t.

Enter Heroku

In addition to switching the blogging engine, I moved the physical blog from Linode over to Heroku + Amazon S3. My blog is very low traffic, so I don’t need a high powered VPS host that I have to maintain & patch. Heroku offers a free account if you don’t need much power and can live without a database (well, effectively without a DB - a 5MB one is included). I decided to go ahead and put any post specific images/files onto S3 since Heroku offers a limited amount of local storage and I can also redeploy back to Linode if something doesn’t work out at Heroku. For the record though, I love Linode for a Linux VPS host. I highly recommend them as long as you’re comfortable dealing with Linux via the command line.

Simplicity

As I get older, the technology side of things appeals to me less and less. I still love technology in general, but the nitty gritty details of what platform/framework/OS/whatever is the best is less and less interesting to me. I’m more interested in the best way to deliver a solution in a way that is as simple as possible. That doesn’t mean I’m adverse to complexity under the hood though. It means I value the experience, productivity, and the ability to simply get things done over the technical aspects of a solution.

2011 was a crazy year for me. It was a year full of change. This year I:

• Started dating my beautiful girlfriend

• Watched the last launch of Space Shuttle Discovery from the NASA press site thanks to the STS-133 NASATweetup

• Took a great vacation to Charleston, SC

• Turned 30

• Moved 2200 miles from the East Coast to the West Coast for a new job

• Began working a dream job in the space industry

There were some low points in 2011, but overall, it’s been a good year. In a lot of ways, I feel like 2011 was a transitional year. All of the change is mostly finished at this point, so it feels like it’s time for the good stuff to begin. I’m really excited about 2012 - I think like it’s going to be an amazing year.

I really thought I’d have a lot to blog about since this whole week was a pretty crazy cross country adventure…but I can’t seem to focus on blogging at the moment.  I don’t know if it’s just a writer’s block thing or what. Whenever I sit down to write, I keep thinking I’m writing out some formal document and that ends up causing me to keep thinking about it and then I just stop.  My goal is to blog more now that I’m out in LA and I have lots of friends around the country that will probably be interested in updates.  At this point, I’m not sure what I’m going to do.  I thought about just using Tumblr instead of my own custom WordPress install or I may simply start fresh with this domain.  I’ll definitely find a way to send out updates on my LA adventure, but it looks like it’ll be a little bit longer.

One quick update though - I did make it to LA just fine and both kitties made it smoothly.  My furniture isn’t here yet, so my apartment is basically empty at the moment, but at least I’m here.  I’ll post more in the near future, but so far, so good.

Today is my last day of work on the East Coast. It’s a sad day since I’m leaving a stable company full of good people and interesting opportunities. At the same time, it’s an exciting day since I’m leaving so I can prepare myself for the 2200 mile move to Los Angeles before I start my dream job of building spaceships. I never thought I’d be trading my reasonably large house in Tennessee and basically all of my stuff for a tiny one bedroom apartment in LA, but I never thought I’d be able to work on spaceships either.

I got a great send off from my coworkers. A few of them decided to do a little decorating to my cube…

…and my car…

…but the best part was the cupcake. :)

A few guys I know decided to start a photo group on Flickr called Alter Oculos. It’s a group for sharing photowalk images and trying out some photo projects as a group. This week, we decided to all use the same set of shots, but then we’ll all process them and compare our take on the post processing. These are my two finished images. I think the first turned out ok, but I really like the second image quite a lot.

The photos were taken by Matthew Osborne - you can see more of his images here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/matthewosbornephotography/

This year, I’m setting 5 major goals for myself. I have several other behaviors to change/actions to take this year, but I’m only considering these five items my goals since they are realistic, actionable, and measurable.

Release a new app or website

I’ve been working on several ideas over the last year or so and I’m going to really push to get at least one new project released publicly. I’m not going to be more specific other than the new “thing” will must be something anyone can sign up for or download. Open source, closed source, free, or paid - doesn’t matter - I just want to complete v1.0 of a new project.

Max out 401K & Roth IRA

Pretty simple - $16,500 pre-tax dollars into the 401K and $5,000 of after-tax dollars into a Roth IRA.

Lose weight

Nothing special about this goal. I’m targeting 35 pounds lost by the end of the year. I’ve had this one on my goal list for a while, so it’s time to finally knock this one off.

Write a journal entry a day

This is a new one for me. I wanted to do a 365 photo project, but I’d really like to do more writing…so a 365 writing project it is. I won’t be publishing these, but I’m really enjoying it so far (even though I’m only 3 days in).

2011 feels different from years past, so I have pretty high hopes for accomplishing these goals (as well as several other things).

Back in January, I posted my [top three goals for 2010.](http://www.adambyram.com/2010/01/10/my-goals-the-2010-edition/

)

So how did I do? Well…

Goal: Get Healthy
Result: Failed - I totally bombed this one. A lot of changes happened in 2010 that distracted me from this goal. This WILL be happening in 2011.

Goal: Side Income to Livable Levels
Result: Success / Not Applicable - This originally came about because I wanted to leave me previous job and work for myself. I did end up working for myself anyway, but I didn’t get my side income to livable levels. Having said that, I did start a new job which negated this goal (and resulted in an even better outcome in a lot of ways). I still love the idea of running my own business and maybe it’ll happen when it’s time. I tried to force it this time and that wasn’t the right way to do it. In the meantime, everything is working out pretty awesomely.

Goal: See a Space Shuttle Launch (in person)
Result: Success - I hit a home run on this one. I watched the next to last launch of Atlantis in May (from Titusville) and then I won the lottery by being selected for the NASA Tweetup for Discovery’s final flight. While I didn’t see Discovery launch (yet - 2011 goal now), I did get an amazing experience at NASA including standing just a few hundred yards from Discovery on the launchpad.

Overall, I’m OK with my progress (all things considered). I’m disappointed in myself for not making progress on my “Get Healthy” goal, but it was a bit of a crazy year. I’m happy with my direction heading into 2011 so 2010 was definitely not a waste. While I may not have accomplished all of the goals I wanted, 2011 is looking to be the best year yet.

Most of you probably know I just spent a week down at NASA for the STS-133 Tweetup. 150 of us were down there to watch Discovery lift off for her final flight. It was an amazing trip even though we didn’t get to see Discovery launch (we may get a chance later). I’m going to post lots of info about the trip and my thoughts about it, but I need a bit of time to catch up on things, process my photos, and generally relax a bit. I’ll try to have some info up late this week, but in the meantime, here are some things to check out:

We have a group setup on Flickr where lots of people are sending Tweetup photos. If you’re curious about the things we saw, take a look here:

http://www.flickr.com/groups/sts133tweetup/pool/

If you want to see exactly what we saw, you get watch the Justin.tv stream of pretty much the whole tweetup right here (note - lots of videos here…not official NASA videos and lots of them are from the parties. I know the actual tweetup content is in here somewhere though):

http://www.justin.tv/nasatweetup/videos

That’s all for now. More to come in a couple of days.