Over the past few weeks we’ve had our lead developer here at Imulus on vacation in Mexico. Initially there was some concern around the office that with him gone his day to day tasks would be a major time sink for the rest of us.

However, as the past few weeks have gone by I’ve come to the conclusion that missing a big piece of the puzzle every now and then is more of a positive than a negative. Not that we don’t want John to come back, or that we won’t be faster as a team once he returns. But more that the best way to force people to learn is to throw them into the water and make them swim. I.E. having John out may make us slower in the interim, but in the long run it will make us faster because each developer will be even more capable than before.

This trial by fire attitude is what makes people better all around, and consequently worth more in the long run.

So here’s my advice: if you’re used to having someone around that can help you get through tasks or problems stop asking them for help once in a while. Sacrifice some time, lose a few hours to the problem, and have faith that learning it on your own will be worth it in the long run. Both for your self value and the company’s. Having a tutor is great, and having a cohesive team is even better. But realizing the value in self growth is essential. It makes the process faster and less distracting for everyone in the end.

Today I found a site named iSerenity that offers ambient backgrounds for your work or home. Instead of offering minimal beats of ambient musicians, iSerenity offers environmental sounds. Not only things like waterfalls mind you, but the obviously relaxing sound of highways, typewriters, and vacuums. You know, things most people find relaxing. Yes, the concept makes me giggle a little.

Some of their selections are not very successful in producing a relaxed environment. The heartbeat makes me want turn into Jack Nicholson in The Shining, and the purring is as about as relaxing as a chainsaw.

Still, some of their efforts work surprisingly well. I found the dryer noise to be oddly focusing. As I listened to it I forgot it was there – yet it still helped me focus on my tasks. Turning off the sound felt strange, too – everything was suddenly different and I was back in the real world.

Give it a try at http://www.iserenity.com/.

About three months ago I was convinced by some of my fellow co-workers that the TWiT (This Week in Tech) podcast was something that I desperately needed to start following. If not for the information itself at least for my own geek street cred.

Realizing my co-works know my geek tendencies better than most, I agreed that I needed to give Podcasts a second look. I had used them here and there but never really gotten much out of it. In fact, I found that for the most part they just sat around in my iTunes taking up space. So, reinvigorated I subscribed to This Week in Tech, along with a few other Podcasts from my favorite tech websites, notably The Talk Show, and Diggnation.

Then over the course of the next month I started listening on a consistent basis. What I found was not surprising: podcasts were just what my tech diet had been missing — a dialogue by fellow geeks that could finally match my own level of interest in the field. And the best part? It didn’t take hours of reading tech sites and scanning RSS feeds. I would simply turn on a few Podcasts while coding and by the end of the day my level of geekdom was up a few mana.

Well, this was just the beginning, I soon started subscribing to all sorts of Podcasts. And like smack is to a crackhead, the NPR podcast directory was to me.

ESPN, This American Life, The Web 2.0 show, Car Talk, XM Unmasked, etc. My podcast directory started to balloon, in fact it is quite plausible that I was downloading more podcast air time than I had hours in a day. I needed to get control.

I set two rules. First, only subscribe to 10 or less podcasts. Anything more and the overall value of them goes down because I become too flustered trying to keep up. Second, stick to a routine. For me, podcasts are best digested at certain times of the day. Sticking to these general times makes it easier to stay on top of my favorite podcasts without getting behind.

Luckily these rules seem to have solved my podcasting bloat. And I feel strongly that my listening level is right where it should be. Granted certain weeks (like the MacWorld expo week) deserve more attention, but overall my current selection of podcasts seems to match perfectly my free listening time.

I can’t recommend podcasts enough, especially to those looking to be more socially well-rounded. It is a great way to keep up on the latest news in all areas of life without having to sacrifice time and productivity.

Let me get this out of the way right now: I haven’t balanced my checkbook … ever.

However, recently after entering the stage of “real life” I thought it might be beneficial to start: budgeting my finances, tracking my credit cards, and generally trying to not get myself into horrendous debt. After coming to this conclusion I started looking for realistic ways to track my finances. Particularly ways that would take as little effort as possible.

Now, there is good news for someone in my shoes. First, there are about 10,000 programs available to do finances on the computer. Some are web based and some require a software installation. However, I have yet to find an online based finance tracking system (such as Mint) that doesn’t scare the hell out of me. This is because they require you to enter in all of your online banking information, including: usernames, passwords, account numbers, and bank security questions (i.e. an identity theft’s wet dream). Okay, so online money budgeting (as of now) is out of the question.

That leaves me to the software side of things, here’s my ideal goal for such a piece of software:

• Fast transaction entering. Preferalbly the ability to pull it from the web, but otherwise accept transaction importing via QIF or CSV files.
• Tagging. A must for working with purchases that belong in multiple categories (i.e. a dinner might be classified as: entertainment, drinking, a gift, and food).
• Fast searching. I don’t want to scroll through thousands of transactions to find what I did on January 10th, let me see that instantly.
• Bill tracking. I need to know what bills I have coming up and how much they are. Preferably I would like to have reminders that take me directly to an online payment site.
• Quick budgets. It’s nice to see a three month graph of my spending, but what if I want to see individual transactions and how I am stacking up for the current month’s budget? I should have this option.
• Security. I want to make sure only I can work with my finances.
• Usability! If the app is slow, the keyboard short cuts suck, or things are hard to find, I won’t ever use it. This app has to be easier to use than my iPod.

After doing a bit of research I came to the conclusion that there are no apps that do everything I want (particularly the online transaction gathering). However, there is one that comes damn close: Cha Ching. Cha Ching is a $40 app that is exactly what you would expect from a group of indie OS X developers. It is simple and intuitive. The application itself is just what I need, something that I can import transactions into and spend less than 5 minutes using per week. It does tagging that is inexplicably easy, not to mention it allows organization via smart folders. Meaning I can create dynamic (self-updated) groups of transactions based on price, tag, date, name, etc. What this means is that within seconds I can know exactly how much I have spent on gas for the month, or just how many transactions have taken place with the word “liquor” (hey! it’s just an example) in the title.

There is room for improvement with Cha Ching. For instance, it’d be awesome to be able to put a web address for online bill payment into each reoccurring bill reminder. Further, global search could work a bit better. Not to mention a find and replace function for transactions (imagine doing a find for the title “diamond shamrock” and globally applying the “gas” tag to it). Still, that said I am extremely impressed with Cha Ching and I hope it will be the answer to my finance tracking. I’ll check back in a few months and let you know how things are going.

Besides a few minor quibbles with Apple’s new OS release (transparent menu bar, wtf!) I have been extremely happy using and getting the feel for Leopard. And in fact, I am finding some of the “fluff” features to be pretty darn handy. Now, I realize there are plenty of reviews out there covering everything from Spaces, to Time Machine, to the new 64bit kernel process addressing — but I don’t feel that I should rehash what other’s have done so well. If you’re looking for a full “killer” review of Leopard from top to bottom then I strongly recommend stopping by John Siracusa’s Ars review. It’s about 30,000 words and it covers pretty much every thing you could ever want to know about Leopard, and probably a lot that you didn’t.

That said, what I haven’t yet seen is a list of the little tweaks that make OS X Leopard (and me for that matter) purr. So here’s a few things I have enjoyed so far.

1. Drag and dropping via command tab — It’s incredibly cool to see that you can now grab a file, hit cmd-tab and then drag it into an application. This is something that Tiger was missing and that I always wanted to use.
2. Item renaming — Now when you rename a document with an extention it automatically doesn’t select the extension. This is great because about 90% of the time I don’t want to change the extension of the document and unselecting it in Tiger was always a pain.
3. Warning dialog options — For the first time I feel like I finally have some control over the warning dialogs that are popping up in finder. For instance, you can now turn off the extension change warning, and you can also turn off the warn before emptying trash dialogue.
4. Grid spacing — Finally grid spacing is back. I hated the annoying default spacing that icon view had up in previous versions of OS X.
5. Exposé in spaces — For those people using spaces it’s a nice touch that exposé works within the spaces master view (F8).
6. Wallpaper folder list — If you’re like me and change your desktop a few times a week this is awesome. In the wallpaper preference pane you can now add a folder with your wallpapers and have it appear next time you come back. No more constantly locating your wallpapers every time you want a change.
7. Print preview — The print window (cmd-p) in a lot of applications now shows a small preview of your document. A nice touch, building a PDF to preview a one page document was a hassle.
8. Spotlight has dictionary and calculator built in — Now when I am curious what “superfluous” means I can type it in spotlight and quickly get the definition. Similarly I am not always invoking dashboard to use the calculator, now I can just do quick math in spotlight.
9. Scroll in inactive windows — If you have a website in the background and need to scroll down to see some content but are in the middle of a big report you don’t have to switch apps to scroll. Now you can just move the mouse over there and do it even if the window isn’t active.

I think that covers most of what I am really excited about. Granted there are probably thousands of small enhancements that have taken place in 10.5 but I have to admit it’s nice to see Apple continuing to care about the little things. That said, I do have some serious qualms with Apple as of late, particularly regarding usability decisions, but I suppose that blog post is for another day.

Cheers, Bruce.