Mac Power Users 470: From Computing to Sheep Farming, with Oogie McGuire

Great episode! What happened in the edit, though? There were a couple spots where the mic of who was talking wasn’t included which made for some awkward silences! :slight_smile:

I’m on the official David Allen Co GTD Connect forums. It’s a subscription service but in addition to the forums, also gets you access to the webinars, seminars, interviews and all the downloadable set-up guides and other printed materials. You can try it out free for 14 days I think. No connection just a happy user. It’s a subscription that I get value from every year.

GTD Forums

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I really like this week’s topic. It’s the MPU-done-right and I absolutely want to hear more episodes like this. Although I also enjoy discussions about utilities and hardware, it’s users’ adoptions of them in various professional contexts that make them meaningful and relatable.

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Tempting, but my current projects have me up to my eyeballs in MatLab :slight_smile:, but picking up Java skills for a project does sound interesting. Do you have a recommended source for learning it?

Thanks for the kind words.

If you, or anyone has any questions about how I use my tools just holler. We didn’t get to talk as much about my Omnifocus implementation and how it’s different compared to most folks I hear about.

I just went on-line to the Android development area and started downloading tutorials. I’d look at the code and trace it out or create a flowchart and then go from there. That’s also probably a big reason my coding is, shall we say, imperfect. I never really learned the language from a proper perspective, only learned how to do the tasks I wanted to do. If you know any programming language at all I think learning a new one is fairly simple.

For me the hardest part is/was the object oriented nature of Java. My main programming was done in FORTRAN 77 decades ago, or Director Lingo more recently or some other similar multimedia tools.

FWIW I had working code that survived the sheep within a year. I started the database design 17 September 2012. By November 2012 we were starting to use it for sheep evaluations but the code didn’t survive contact with the sheep. I was doing the evals. both on paper and in LambTracker. I had my first real successful uses in mid August 2013.

To paraphrase Ed Post, “You can write FORTRAN in any language.” :smile:

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Loved the description, and yep, fairly accurate esp. if you correct for gender biases.

And the source I’m working with to implement BLUP has some FORTRAN IV code in it too :wink:

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Really enjoyed this show!

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Wonderful episode. This is a great example of how MPU has worked for me: you get a guest in a field I know nothing about and has very little relation to my work, but I come away with helpful information anyway. I would also love more of these episodes about the nature of work on MacOS and iOS. After episodes about Microsoft and Google, this restores my hope.

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You’re going to love Sunday’s episode then. All about Mac utilities and apps. However, many people use Apple products, intermixed with Google and Microsoft services, so we think it’s important to check in there sometimes, too.

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YES, please. Love the variety. I know everyone has their own opinions about this show and what it should be. I think you guys are doing well (and have in the past era, too) spreading out the topics to cover the wide variety of interests for your listeners.

Thanks for the hard work you both are putting in – it’s very obvious to me!

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Wow. I learned to program using FORTRAN IV. That was so long ago that it’s a bit scary to read that there’s still code out there written in it. Even scarier: I can still find copies of the book that I learned from for sale online. I’d have thought that they all would have decomposed by now.

Thanks for the fascinating show. I really enjoyed hearing about this in the field use. It was also good to hear that I’m not the only person left using POP3 and that we’re not the only cloud-averse household out there.

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That took me way back. My first professional programming job was writing FORTRAN. At Los Alamos. Using TECO. And, yeah, I could toggle in the bootloader from memory.

I don’t really miss those days.

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Well it still works, more than I can say for some of my newer code.

You know, maybe us old farts should get together sometime and reminisce about paper tape, punch cards (and the inevitable floor sort if you dropped the box :shudder: ) BTW Hubby says he learned programming on FORTRAN 2 He also says that’s why he went to the hardware side. :smile:

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I finally listened to this great episode, and I’m glad I listened. Oogie sounds really cool. A nerd’s nerd.

I also learned on FORTRAN with punch cards. Ah, the diagonal marker stripe – a time saver, fur shur. But the first programming I did that was useful – and was used for many years after I left that job – was written in BASIC on a Trash-80. My FORTRAN experience definitely made learning BASIC very easy.Indeed, you can “write FORTRAN in any language”.

Never got my hands on a TRS-80. Also missed FORTRAN, my first code was written in BASIC on an Sinclair ZX81 (1KB RAM).

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I was late to listening to this episode, but I’m sure glad I got to it! I agree with all the effusive praise for this episode. I especially agree with @platyhsu’s comment on having more episodes like this. It’s wonderful—and very helpful—to learn how people in different domains solve the same categories of problems that I have to solve in my life and work. Thanks @OogieM for sharing your systems, processes, and set-ups with us. Your technological sophistication is surpassed only by your charm and your superb communication skills.

My favorite line from the episode that sums-up the whole thing was an observation that @MacSparky offered: “I continue to be impressed with the way you bring technology to bear to solve your problems.” Couldn’t agree more.

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Listening to this episode and almost done. I’ve really appreciated @OogieM on the forum and have found her insights both valuable and detailed. Also find her voice really easy to listen to. What is your synology device? Not sure if you mentioned which one you have.

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um, that’s hardware :sunglasses: not my job. All I know is it’s a Synology NAS RAID server and we buy new drives and/or upgrade the server hardware every couple of years. (I pay the bills.) I’ll ask hubby and see what he says it is.

later: he says it’s a DS 415+ running the latest DSM software version 6.2.1-23824 Update 6

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