Posted by Shane Becker on
The Setup is a bunch of nerdy interviews about “What do people use to get the job done?”. They’re all fairly high profile nerd folks. I’ve read this blog since the beginning and love it. There’s next to no chance that @waferbaby would interview me, because honestly, who am I? So, I’m doing my own Setup interview.
Some of my favorites are Michael Lopp, Amy Hoy, Khoi Vinh, Violet Blue, _why The Lucky Stiff and John Gruber. But really, they’re all great. You should subscribe.
Here goes.
Who are you, and what do you do?
My name is Shane Becker. I make websites. I first saw the web in Mosaic on an SGI running some flavor of Unix when I was a freshman in high school late one night at the Eli Lilly headquarters in Indianapolis, IN. There was no looking back.
I currently work for The Man™ at a Fortune 10 company. It has its perks. I have lotsa (too many, really) side personal projects and I’m currently trying to cut down the list. I made Zine Distro (with help from Eli Duke, Bookis, Emily and Brooke), ListYourList (with Eli), The Resistance Army (with Bookis), the Rubinius site, the Seattle.rb site and co-founded LA.rb (with Evan Phoenix).
And one time I got a bit of attention for taking a photo of an ATM.
What hardware are you using?
I have a 13” Unibody MacBook Pro, probably the best laptop ever made. I expect I’ll swap out the spinny hard drive with the non-spinny kind and bump the RAM to 8gb. I type on the Apple Wireless Keyboard (which just eats through AA batteries) and scroll with the Magic Mouse. My desktop background says &ldqou;Debt is slavery. Get free.&rdqou; to keep me focused on my student loans (currently only $13,000 left).
The iPad is thing a beauty. My iPad&rsqou;s name is &ldqou;Jet Pack&rdqou;. I read a lot more than I ever did before. Books, feeds, twitter and comics. Lotsa comics. (In the picture, I was reading The Eternals by Neil Gaiman) I use the keyboard dock with it for longer globs of text. My home screen is the last image from Fighting in a New Terrain: What’s Changed Since the 20th Century.
I have an iPhone 3GS as my pocket computer that makes phone calls. Its name is &ldqou;2001&rdqou;. It’s also my only camera. I used to have a Ricoh GRD which took the best pictures I’ve seen, but decided on the camera that was with me over the better camera.
Sound plays out of Harman Kardon Sound Sticks and iSub. Pages and old negatives are scanned with a Canoscan LiDE 700f.
My desk is pink and too low. It also is an inbox for physical tasks (currently: get drivers license renewed, develop super 8 film). My chair is black, grey and adequate. My dry erase board is ceramic, within arm’s reach and still leaves hints of erased notes.
And what software?
OS X
TextMate, lots and lots of TextMate. Sure do wish version 2 would ship. PeepOpen. Safari. Mail.app (backed by gmail). Adium. VLC. Tweetie, but I wish it’d get updated to work with natives retweets, geo stuff and annotations. Terminal. Acorn. Name Mangler. Xtorrent. Adobe Illustrator. iTunes. Things. QuickSilver Quick Search Box. Dropbox. Skitch. Cinch. Fuzzy Clock. QuickCursor. iCal. Ruby. Ruby on Rails. git.
Web
GMail. Ta-da List. Wikipedia. Google. Github. Google Reader. Twitter. Heroku. Last.fm.
iPhone
Maps. Messages. Camera. Phone. Mail. Safari. iPod. Things. Tweetie Twitter for iPhone. Foursquare. Gowalla. Both via Check.in. Nezumi. Elements. Reeder.
iPad
Comixology. Marvel Comics. Graphic.ly. I wish there was a standard e-comic format and purchases could be read in any app. CloudReaders. Reeder. Kindle. Wikipanion. Instapaper. Twitter for iPad. Things. Elements. Draft.
What would be your dream setup?
Somewhere between Ewok Village and the Sherwood Forest from Prince of Thieves. Sincerely.