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The Setup: William Gibson

william.gibson.usesthis.com

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Re: The Setup: William Gibson

#2

Post by lylejohnson »

"I haven’t bought an app for about a year. Neither hardware nor software excite me very much, after whatever brief (and usually painful) novelty has worn off."

It's probably because I'm so immersed in tech stuff at work, but it's hard for me to understand how such an imaginative science fiction author can be so... indifferent about the technology he uses.

Re: The Setup: William Gibson

#3

Post by joebadmo »

lylejohnson wrote: post #2

"I haven’t bought an app for about a year. Neither hardware nor software excite me very much, after whatever brief (and usually painful) novelty has worn off." It's probably because I'm so immersed in tech stuff at work, but it's hard for me to understand how such an imaginative science fiction author can be so... indifferent about the technology he uses.

The sense I get is that he lives one rung up the ladder of abstraction.

Re: The Setup: William Gibson

#4

Post by softbuilder »

lylejohnson wrote: post #2

"I haven’t bought an app for about a year. Neither hardware nor software excite me very much, after whatever brief (and usually painful) novelty has worn off." It's probably because I'm so immersed in tech stuff at work, but it's hard for me to understand how such an imaginative science fiction author can be so... indifferent about the technology he uses.

Perhaps he's become jaded.

Re: The Setup: William Gibson

#5

Post by cstross »

lylejohnson wrote: post #2

"I haven’t bought an app for about a year. Neither hardware nor software excite me very much, after whatever brief (and usually painful) novelty has worn off." It's probably because I'm so immersed in tech stuff at work, but it's hard for me to understand how such an imaginative science fiction author can be so... indifferent about the technology he uses.

If you're a novelist your career doesn't usually start rolling until you're in your mid-thirties. (You need life experience before you can depict characters folks want to read about.) Neophilia for its own sake usually wears off some time in the forties, even among many geeks. Moreover, if your job involves spinning text, just about any computer built in the past two decades will do the job.

(I know one award-winning SF novelist who uses an obscure British word processor, originally for CP/M and MS-DOS, now supported as a hobby project by one of the former developers -- the company is long since bust. Their SO has a hell of a job keeping them supplied with either 20 year old Compaq 386 lunchboxen or Linux boxes tailored to run DOSBox full-screen on the console without pestering them to do annoying GUI things every few days. This novelist is younger than I am.)

Gibson has repeatedly displayed a fascination with style and fashion and design language, rather than with random agglomerative collections of features bolted together into a Frankensteinian morass by a bored marketing committee. Given how Apple is oriented around design and the humanities, I find it very unsurprising that he'd be working on a Macbook Pro ...

Re: The Setup: William Gibson

#6

Post by dy »

cstross wrote: post #5
lylejohnson wrote: post #2

"I haven’t bought an app for about a year. Neither hardware nor software excite me very much, after whatever brief (and usually painful) novelty has worn off." It's probably because I'm so immersed in tech stuff at work, but it's hard for me to understand how such an imaginative science fiction author can be so... indifferent about the technology he uses.

If you're a novelist your career doesn't usually start rolling until you're in your mid-thirties. (You need life experience before you can depict characters folks want to read about.) Neophilia for its own sake usually wears off some time in the forties, even among many geeks. Moreover, if your job involves spinning text, just about any computer built in the past two decades will do the job. (I know one award-winning…

Would love to have you do a usesthis as well - the more obscure stuff is especially fascinating as it usually carries a much better story than just "I'm using the newest Macbook Pro and I got 8GB of RAM."

Re: The Setup: William Gibson

#10

Post by cstross »

dy wrote: post #6
cstross wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're a novelist your career doesn't usually start rolling until you're in your mid-thirties. (You need life experience before you can depict characters folks want to read about.) Neophilia for its own sake usually wears off some time in the forties, even among many geeks. Moreover, if your job involves spinning text, just about any computer built in the past two decades will do the job. (I know one award-winning…

Would love to have you do a usesthis as well - the more obscure stuff is especially fascinating as it usually carries a much better story than just "I'm using the newest Macbook Pro and I got 8GB of RAM."

Well, I am a gadgetoholic-in-recovery.

Let's skip lightly past the colo server running Debian that I keep the blog on. I'm mostly a Mac shop. On my desk right now is an older 23" Apple Cinema display, being driven by an October 2010 13" Macbook Air (4Gb/250Gb SSD, OS: 10.7.2). Next to me is an iPad 2/64Gb and a 3 mifi, with a ZaggMate cover/keyboard. And there's an iPhone 4 that ain't going to be upgraded until it's at least 24 months old (next summer).

Pretty dull, huh?

(There are also hordes of eccentric items around here, such as the Viliv N5 palmtop -- currently running Win7 as I don't have the energy to battle a GMA500 chipset into cooperating with Linux right now -- but let's not get into lesser-used territory.)

Core software:

- Firefox 7.blah (with noscript, adblock pro, ghostery, beef taco, instaright, https-everywhere, and tab mix plus)

- Thunderbird (mostly using gmail as an IMAP/SMTP/SSL server)

- BBedit (what can I say -- it's prettier to stare at than MacVim, and seems to support MultiMarkDown better)

- Apple Pages (I loath MS Office 2010's ribbon with a cold and fiery passion because it eats vertical screen real estate; Pages is "good enough" for layout and final markup)

- Scrivener (because when I write myself into a corner and need to refactor the deep structure of a book, Scrivener makes life a lot easier)

- NeoOffice/OpenOffice/LibreOffice (because sometimes I need something that can handle MS Office documents better than Pages)

- Calibre (ebook management software)

- NetNewsWire (this may change soon)

- SplashID (because we all need unique passwords for each website, right?)

- MacPorts

- iTerm (and Go2Shell)

...

I think that about covers it. I really don't game much, if at all (it interferes with work to have attractive nuisances on my computers).

Dream rig:

(This is going to strike you as deeply sad)

Start with a build-to-order Macbook Air 11", 4Gb RAM/128Gb SSD. Add the 1.8GHz i7 CPU bump. Don't bother with the 256Gb SSD from Apple because we are going to replace the stock SSD with a 3G OWC Mercury Aura Pro Express sized in 480Gb. Finally add a 27" Apple Thunderbolt Display for when it's sitting on my desk.

Underpowered? Sure. But it's tremendously portable, and I'm on the road for 8-12 weeks of the year. Two wires to connect, and I have a decent desktop system. Unconnect, and I have a nice 1Kg notebook.

The reason I don't have this dream rig right now is that I have the last generation, and I'm not quite enough of a sucker to upgrade every time Apple crack the whip, thanks. Maybe next year.

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