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As I’ve mentioned before, my basement gets water when it rains. Two weeks before anybody even suspected hurricane Irene, we were getting estimates for waterproofers. Due to our procrastination and indecision, we didn’t choose a company until the week of the hurricane and unfortunately they weren’t able to get to us until the following week. So I had plenty to keep me occupied down there in the days after the storm. But they came as scheduled and fixed everything. We’ve had a bit of rain since then and not a drop of water in the basement.

Here are a few poorly lit iPhone photos of the process.

Before:

During:

After:

If you follow me on Twitter, you may have seen that I had some water troubles due to hurricane Irene. My basement basically takes on water like the Titanic after it hit the iceberg, so in preparation for the storm’s onslaught, I went down and did some strategic rearranging. Amongst the things I decided to take out of the basement permanently are the boxes from every new laptop I’ve bought from Apple since I switched in 2003/2004 (yes, I’ve kept them all now stop looking at me like that):

• 12” PowerBook G4 (9/04)
• 15” MacBook Pro (5/06)
• 13” Black MacBook (5/08)
• 13” MacBook Pro (8/09)
• 13” MacBook Air (8/11)

Based on my purely unscientific measurements, you can fit three 13” MacBook Air boxes in one 12” PowerBook box. The width difference between the 13” MacBook in 2008 and the 13” MacBook Pro just a little over a year later is also noticeable; the MacBook is closer in size to the 15” MacBook Pro.

I don’t have any earth shattering or novel conclusions to draw from this. In fact I’m sure other more capable writers have pointed this out. And we all know Apple has been on a quest to make everything smaller and thinner. They don’t include any of the fancy adapters or other accessories that they used to, for example. I just thought it was neat to see the changes up close and personal in my living room.

I’ve had two days to digest both the news that Steve Jobs was resigning as CEO of Apple and the torrent of news articles and blog posts that followed. Two days to contemplate what the post-Jobsian landscape might look like for the company and the world. Two days to hone a fitting tribute to a monumental man.

But I’ve got nothing.

Maybe it’s because I don’t think anything is really going to change. Don’t get me wrong, we’re probably not going to see another leader like Steve Jobs in a very long time. I’m going to miss his genuine enthusiastic wonder at the “awesome” and “magical” products he unveiled at every keynote. We’ll have no more apocryphal stories about anonymous Apple employees getting on an elevator with him, only to be fired for the sin of working in a department he happened to hate that day. But those are small concerns, ancillary to the real reasons I love Apple and its products: they’re beautiful and they work. That’s why I left Linux for the Mac.

Sure Steve probably had a lot to do with why Apple’s products were so attractive to me, but this is not going to be in any way similar to the last time he left the company. The culture at Apple has undergone a complete transformation over the past fourteen years and they are not going to shit the bed just because the letters CEO are on Tim Cook’s business cards instead of Steve Jobs’. The company is significantly more profitable than it was in 1985 and has a gazillion dollars just sitting in the bank. Steve is not a vice-president being forced out of the company because Mac sales are slumping, he’s stepping aside willingly as a CEO at the top of his game. The man is not dead, and also, he’s not really leaving. He’s just moving upstairs.

The Voice of Jobs will still be heard in the hallways at Infinite Loop and his vision will shine through in every product that Apple releases in the foreseeable future.

While I was writing the previous post, Gabe at Macdrifter posted a link to this AppleScript for Python Programmers guide. I immediately Evernoted it.

I also found this nifty little command line utility to convert an AppleScript to HTML. Adding the CSS to Tumblr was easy, but I’m still working on an automated solution for creating the HTML and then getting it into MarsEdit. For now I have two shell script services set up in the Finder to make it a little more efficient. Of course I’m probably expending more effort trying to find a solution than the amount of AppleScript code I post justifies.

I love me some Markdown. If I’m writing it on my iPhone/iPad, it’s in Elements. But on the Mac, I like Byword. It’s simple, effective and visually striking. And while it does have a nicely done preview mode, you can’t view it concurrently with the marked up document. That’s mildly annoying.

Enter Marked by the always awesome Brett Terpstra. Marked is an application that lets you preview what a Markdown file will look like when it’s all prettified (amongst other things like exporting the html or making a PDF). So problem solved, right? Just open the document for writing in Byword and previewing in Marked and I’m done. Yes, well, mostly. It’s not quite as streamlined as I’d like it be.

The standard way to view a document in Marked is to either

1. drag the document’s icon (from the Finder or, if it’s open in an editor, the title bar) to Marked’s icon in the Dock or

2. launch Marked and do a File → Open.

This is probably fine if I’m going to be working on an existing document and set everything up before getting to work. But if I’m in the middle of a furious writing spree on a new document, I don’t want to take my hands off the keyboard. And thanks to the magic of a stupidly simple AppleScript and Red Sweater’s FastScripts I don’t have to.

So without further ado, here’s the script:

tell application “Byword”

set theDocument to file of document of window 1

end tell

tell application “Marked”

open theDocument

end tell

Stupidly simple. I just saved the script as ~/Library/Scripts/Applications/Byword/Open in Marked.scpt and set a keyboard shortcut in FastScripts. Now when I’m in the middle of writing, I just hit ⌘S to save the document (otherwise Marked has no file to open) then ⌘⇧M to activate the script and I’m all set.

Update: The folks behind Byword released a css style sheet specifically for Marked at almost the exact time I posted this. Nifty.

Update 19 Sept 2011: Brett has released the Marked Bonus Pack. It probably does a lot better of a job than my silly little script.

via Dr. Drang:

1. Navigating in the Finder to the folder that contained them.
2. Selecting them all via ⌘A.
3. Opening them in Preview via ⌘↓.

Mind: blown.