I purchased a new MacBook Pro last week.  My 3 1/2 year old PowerBook has served admirably but it simply can’t keep up with me anymore.  The faint and occasional clicking from the hard disk was the final push over the Intel edge for me and I couldn’t be happier.  I decided to go with the 2.4 GHz model because $750 is a lot to pay for 200 MHz.  I haven’t upgraded the memory to all 4 GB yet but that’ll come as soon as I spend some serious time with Aperture and Photoshop (CS3, finally).

I present this post as a warning to anyone holding off to see what Apple does next.  Because I’ve made this purchase, I’m relatively certain that the WWDC will bring glorious new MacBook Pros, probably even radically redone AirBook-style.  Maybe I’ll pawn this one off on my parents when the new ones come out (almost, but not quite not kidding).

A parting thought: holy crap the LED-backlit displays are bright.

There are so many things to love about Flickr and especially about working at Flickr that I initially thought myself crazy for even considering leaving. But with time came sanity and I saw the pros for leaving start to outweigh the cons.

The folks at Flickr are without a doubt the most talented group I’ve ever had the honor of working with and I will miss them all. Flickr as a whole is a dream, a place with passionate staff matching passionate members and no shortage of new ground to break into, but my piece of this puzzle was not exactly right for me. I developed the new Flickr Uploadr desktop client as an open-source, extendable app for getting your photos and metadata onto Flickr. The project had everything I wanted — new technology, technical difficulty, performance concerns, design quirks and the goal of open-source extendability. But for all of that it had a fatal flaw — I am not a desktop software developer.

Thinking more forwardly, “I am not a desktop software developer” started to say what I really meant: “I do not want to be a desktop software developer.” Selfish personal preference.

This job at OpenDNS has all the ingredients of a good time in my book — C++, maybe some map/reduce, I/O bottlenecks, oh-my-god-databases-are-slow and a whole lot of networking (the TCP/IP kind). The people there are awesome just like Flickr’s and I have no doubt I’ll become just as attached to them.

(Housekeeping: it looks like the XULRunner saga on rcrowley.org has come to an end for the time being. I almost guarantee I’ll be back to dabbling with it sometime, though, since it’d be a shame for all that practice to go to waste. Don’t count on Windows XPCOM, though.)