This Setup
Aaron Pressman
Interviewed just now.
So who are you, and what do you do?
My name is Aaron Pressman and I've been a reporter and writer for 20 years, for publications like Businessweek, The Industry Standard (may she rest in peace) and Wired and companies like TheStreet.com, Reuters and Bloomberg. I've always covered business with the emphasis shifting over the years from Wall Street (when I lived in NYC) to politics and Internet policy (when I lived in DC) to more of an investing and financial services industry focus that I have today (in Boston). I also have a personal blog where I pontificate and bloviate about gadgets and gadget policy. According to Google, the most famous thing I've ever written was a piece about protesters at the 2000 Republican National Convention that was reprinted by Slate.
I'd like to take credit for calling bs on some recent investment debacles. I spent much of 2004 and 2005 getting slammed by commenters on TheStreet.com for saying that a housing bubble was brewing and I was also all over the ethanol bubble of 2006 and Starbucks back when the stock was north of $40 a share. I got myself in hot water with right-wing web sites and their fans last fall when I wrote that the Community Reinvestment Act and other government efforts to get banks to lend to poor people did not cause the collapse of the mortgage market. If you have some burning desire to read more of my stuff over the years, check this page.
What hardware are you using to get your work done?
I have too many computers (at least seven if you count the ones lying unused in the attic) but I do almost all my work on a splendiforous 24" iMac (Late 2006 version) with an Apple Bluetooth keyboard and mighty mouse and a 15" MacBook Pro (2007 "Santa Rosa" edition). Having the big screen is key 'cause it lets me see a couple of browser windows and my notes and whatever I'm writing all at the same time. The MBP has a cool decal on the top from Infectious by Erik Otto called "What Lies Ahead." I also have sitting on my desk a recent vintage 15" Dell laptop running Windows XP that my work requires me to use to access email and other corporate resources. I use it pretty much only for those required tasks. A 1TB Time Capsule backs up the data. An old Brother HL-6050DW prints those long boring documents I have to read while an HP Deskjet 6940 gets to do the fun stuff.
I'm sitting all this stuff on some pretty basic Ikea furniture -- an unadorned small table desk, a unpainted two-level book shelf, a Norden "Occasional Table" (more of a sideboard with drawers) and the radiator cover. As you can see in the picture above, I'm not exactly a neatnik.
For travels beyond the home office, I have a brand new Verizon-branded Novatel Mifi 2200, an iPod Touch, a crummy pre-MP3 Sony digital recorder and a red Blackberry 8300 Curve. There's also a Canon EOS Rebel XT for all my photog needs. And I'm a Kindle DX user.
And what software?
There's an old fake ad routine that used to be on the radio in Boston when I was growing up for "generic food bars." At one point in the ad, the announcer would say something like "I put one in my mouth, my briefcase, the trash can, whatever's open." That's kind of how I write -- with Microsoft Word, TextEdit, Google Docs, Writeroom, Wordpress, whatever's open. Most articles have to be submitted in Word format and I like the live word count in the Mac version so I usually end up there. Most personal blog entries are done directly online in Firefox/Wordpress but every time some weird save bug loses an entire post I've just written I swear I'll stop. I used to use Tom Picard's groovy Mandigo theme for my blog but it got too busy to my eyes recently and I switched to a theme called SubtleFlux by an anonymous author. I'm a big Excel user for mathy stuff. For photo management and retouching, I use and enjoy Adobe Lightroom.
For browsing, it's Firefox with the Foxmarks Xmarks extension to coordinate bookmarks across machines. I'm also using the Delicious extension to aid in saving stuff to their site and TinyURL Creator for making all the TinyURLs one needs in the course of a day. I recently switched my RSS feeds from Bloglines to Google Reader because Google updates much faster. To save some trees, I've also started sending long articles I want to read directly from the web to my Kindle using Instapaper.
My biggest problem software-wise is cataloging, saving and retrieving notes that I gather as part of researching my articles. "Notes" can be anything from a web page or clip from a web page to a company's 10-year revenue chart to an interview with a source. Currently, I use a combination of annotated bookmarks on Delicious.com, huge project-specific text files and a program called myNotes. I have tried many other possible solutions but not found a perfect answer yet.
Utility wise, Mozy does offsite backup, Wallet stores passwords on Macs and the iPod, Adium IMs, Syncopation tries to keep my iTunes libraries in sync and VMWare Fusion runs Windows virtually.
What would be your perfect, ultimate setup?
The iMac is incredible but would be even more so with a 28" or 30" screen. I also wish that the Macbook Air could be had with a humongous hard drive and another USB port or, even better, a Firewire connection. My MBP is way too heavy. I'm perpetually in search of the perfect note-stashing program which would run on multiple computers and operating systems, have fantastic yet simple search and organizing features, index every word of everything saved, also be accessible on the web and automagically sync everything behind the scenes. And would it be too much to ask for a robotic maid like Rosie from the Jetsons to tidy up?