Uses This

Who are you, and what do you do?

My name is Chad Whitacre, and I like to mess with stuff. I'm currently trying to change the economy with a project called Gittip. It's Kickstarter for people. I'm drinking my own kool-aid by trying to make a living on the site itself.

What hardware do you use?

For years I've been waiting to show off this totally sweet IKEA standing desk (discontinued) with a Kango 930 perching stool and three Dell monitors (the middle 23" one in portrait, and the left one mounted on a Tyke monitor mount) connected to a Radeon HD 5450 inside an OptiPlex GX620 (Dell's business line, much better long-term support) running Windows, plus FreeBSD under VMWare ("poor man's mac"), with a spot under the Tyke-mounted monitor for a laptop connected via Synergy to a refurbished Kinesis Essential with custom brass legs and a Kensington Expert Mouse mounted in the middle, and with all the cables stored in an old metal milk box. But then my day job bought me a 15-inch MacBook Pro and now I just use that by itself, even if I'm standing at the desk. Kinda sad, I rarely turn on the Dell anymore. I guess I don't need the real estate after all. I still use my HP 1320tn, though.

Speaking of which, I like paper. I use unlined 8.5" by 11" in landscape orientation for note-taking and paper prototyping, ideally on a clipboard.

I used to use an iPhone 3G but I dropped it and broke the glass. I fixed it myself (yay!) but then the home button stopped working (boo!). So I bought a two dollar red button at Radio Shack and scabbed it on with Gorilla Glue and electric tape. That was fun while it lasted, which was five months. I took it into the Apple Store in Palo Alto to ask if they would be willing to push the button for me. Then later I dropped it again. Now I roll with a $20 Verizon pre-paid Samsung clamshell from Dollar General.

I inherited this really nice leather brief case from my wife's grandfather that fits the MacBook perfectly. He worked for IBM. I inherited another nice leather bag from my dad, which I use for cords and books (I like books). I work in coffee shops a lot and it's really impractical to carry around two bags without straps but they're so classy I can't help it. One time I got stuck in a thunderstorm walking across Washington, D.C. with these bags and a box of Tufte's books and I ended up taking my belt off and strapping it all together like some school boy from 1876. Man, was I soaked!

Can I also tell you about our waffle iron? It's a Wagner double twin, patented in 1910, probably used in a hotel. It's 35 pounds of cast iron and has nice wooden handles on the four paddles. You heat it over a gas range. I believe that the waffles I make on it are really, really good.

And what software?

I spend most of my time between Vim and Chrome. I run Vim under screen and bash. My favorite bash aliases are l="clear && pwd && ls -FGl" and u="cd .. && l". I just use Terminal. I tried iTerm2 but it didn't stick. PyFlakes definitely did stick. I get a lot of mileage out of Python, and I wrote a web framework called Aspen, which I love. I use the Google search engine to search the World Wide Web. I have an old VPS with John Companies, with newer projects going up on Heroku. I love Postgres almost as much as Python and greatly appreciate Heroku's Postgres service. I'm also a fan of Git, GitHub, Gmail, Google Real-time Analytics, Pandora, IWantMyName, Stripe, and Tumblr. There are some ridiculously good tools out there these days.

I have a rather old version (7) of Photoshop on the Dell along with a newer version (X) of Acrobat. I've done some print book publishing with PrinceXML and I use Acrobat for final production. I have a cheaper image editor called Acorn on the MacBook. I've used MovieMaker or iMovie when I've wanted to put together videos.

I use a stripped down file format to track my time, and Joe's Goals to track some other things.

Okay, so I discovered that pâte à choux makes really killer waffles. It's the same batter you use for éclairs, cream puffs, and french cruller doughnuts. It was given to me in a dream to use it for waffles. The way the paddles are on our waffle iron you end up with twelve little four-bite poppers. Sometimes I'll fry an egg in the waffle iron and make an egg sandwich with a waffle cut in half. For classic sweet waffles my favorite is fresh berries and whipped cream from fresh raw milk. Mmm.

What would be your dream setup?

My family and I would be Amish (we used to subscribe to the national edition of The Budget, which is basically the Amish blogosphere).

Uses This is supported by ZSA, makers of the Moonlander, ErgoDox EZ and Planck EZ keyboards. They also publish an awesome newsletter.