Those of you with MacBook Pros, look on the left side of the laptop. What do you see? Well, probably a single USB port (thanks Steve...), a mag-charger port, and some weird flap thing. Most people have no idea what the slot behind that flap is for--and I venture a guess that it sits vacant on 99% of the MacBooks in existence. Well, it shouldn't anymore. Why? Because of this.

That little guy sits flush in the PCMCIA slot on the left hand side of your mac resulting in an instant (as in instant gratification) 48GB boost to your lappys hard disk space--and it's an SSD to boot. The PCMCIA interface is not quite as fast as a SATA 2/3 solid state disk, but still faster than a traditional 7200 RPM hard drive connected via FireWire*.

You can use this extension of space for anything really--I was using it as an onboard TimeMachine drive until inspiration struck me today. There are even reports of people installing OSX on it, which has a wicked cool factor when you pop the card into someone else's MacBook and happily boot your instance of Lion/Leopard to continue with whatever you were working on.

So how can we use this little guy to make VMWare faster? Well after googling around a bit, I found that one of the major recommendations to make VMWare faster is to boot it from an external drive (duh). It's funny that I didn't think of this immediately because I used to do this all the time with my old XP machines--I guess the utility of always having a Windows VM on-board the laptop precluded installing it on an external drive; there's less things to carry around that way. However, thanks to this tiny $128 wonder, I can now place all my virtual machines on a different drive and reap the marginal performance boost of freeing up the system drive to handle OSX functions while controller on the card handles VM read/writes. As an additional bonus my MacBook sports a smaller 128 GB SSD and placing my vm's on the card offloads the tremendous storage hit from housing a full blown Windows 7 virtual machine to the tune of around 32 GB on the system drive.

After moving the VM to the external drive I have noticed some real performance gains. Nothing super, but OSX is certainly snappier than it was before while running the VM. Also, take into account that my MacBook is almost 4 years old and it still sports a 2.2ghz barely dual-core intel CPU. I imagine newer hardware will realize even more gains. So tweakers and VMWare users looking for a snappier VM: definitely invest in one of these. After all, unless you have a 3G netcard you probably aren't using that slot anyway.

Before/After pictures:

* I realize theoretically this is not true, but empirically it is. My personal benchmarks have shown that the FileMate outruns my 1TB WDD Caviar Black in an OWC Mercury Quad interface enclosure by around 20%.

Almost every time I catch myself saying "I'm really busy" it's being used as an excuse for something or another. Maybe it's my goto: response for being late on a project--or maybe it's my reason for not calling a friend back. However I use it I feel like the "I'm really busy" concept has taken over my life--and I've decided to finally stop it.

I have been wrestling with this idea for a couple of months now. It first appeared on my radar when I realized that every time I spoke with my graduate advisor I was talking about how busy I was. It usually was my de facto reason for why I was late developing a particular application feature for my project or if I hadn't spent enough time working on a piece of independent research. Unfortunately despite all my hand-waving and hair pulling I was still late; and I always felt like there's nothing I could do about it. It eventually seeped it's way into every introduction with a new person at work or school, and when catching up with friends many conversations usually steered in that direction; sometimes it was my standard excuse for nearly everything that was  late, wrong, or unsolvable in my life. I'm sure that I didn't impress anyone with my busyness primarily because, and this is the key here, everyone is playing the same game. It's an axiom of this great American dream chasing culture that we live in: everyone's busy. Granted some folks may be busier than others (like the kid who took 18 hours in school when you only took 12), but once that topic becomes the spotlight for a conversation it almost always turns into a contest to determine who is busier. Nothing useful comes out of that except perhaps a sense of conquest to those that derive pleasure from one-upping everyone else.

So how do you fix this? It's definitely something worth thinking about, if for no other reason than avoiding the appearance of arrogance to new people you meet; and honestly I'm kind of sick of hearing myself say it. After thinking this through for a couple of weeks I have come up with a couple of ideas to address this communication problem in my own life. These ideas can be applied to any situation or conversation, and all of them require a key attitude change.

• Resist the urge to talk about how busy you are. Just don't say it. If you must talk about what projects, research, or jobs you are working on then only talk about the facts of what you are doing. Don't ever take the focus of the conversation to how busy you are. If you list off 15 projects you are working on simultaneously then the listener will likely pick up that you have a lot on your plate--but by shifting the focus off yourself and onto what you are doing you avoid looking like an attention-seeker. A byproduct of this is that you will appear more humble to the folks you meet.
• Don't think about how busy you are. If you are dwelling on how busy you are then you are wasting precious time that could be used to actually get something done. The more you dwell on it the more stressed out you are going to get while simultaneously digging yourself a deeper hole. People tend to blame too many problems on stress. Here's a breakthrough concept for you: you are stressed because you allowed yourself to be stressed. When people dish their problems off on the "stress monster" they are projecting a controllable issue onto something else--which makes them feel better because they can claim victimization as a justification for how bad they feel. Unfortunately this doesn't really move towards fixing the problem; it's a senseless infinite loop that simply compounds into a melt down. Resist this, else it will manifest itself as a terrible attitude and tends to turn otherwise hard working folks into complainers. If you find yourself always complaining about your busyness then you should either cut something out or batten down the hatches, come up with a plan, and weather the storm.
• Be humble, be stable. This was the attitude change I was talking about earlier, and it drives rules 1 and 2. Being humble is the opposite of being prideful and it's an extremely hard thing to grasp. The trickiest thing about it is that once you think that you are humble you have invalidated your humbleness and have to start over. So to avoid a long theological or philosophical discussion on the concept of humbleness let's instead distill it into this: resist the urge to victimize, make excuses, complain about, or otherwise blame your situation on how busy you are. People immediately know how busy a prideful person is--it's likely been screamed from the mountaintops--but they shouldn't immediately recognize how busy a humble person is.

So in closing the question that I have been asking myself is this: what defines you? When I coughed up the obligatory "I'm busy" when speaking with people I wasn't doing it to make myself appear grandiose but instead because it was the foremost thing on my mind (a violation of rule 2), and I like to talk about that kind of stuff (I'm auditory and not too shy). A lot of times we like to talk about what is immediately in front of us--humans are silly temporal creatures--and based on that tendency I consider this very sound advice: "Do not be quick with your mouth, do not be hasty in your heart to utter anything before God."

I'm specifically excited about the Rails book--I have heard quite a bit of buzz around it for a while now and it doesn't look like it's going away anytime soon. There's a couple of other books that are on my list to pick up, but I think these four should be enough for now. I'm starting with the WPF book, then likely moving to Silverlight 4 since it's basically just a subset of WPF. After that I'll likely hit the Unit Testing book and finally the dirty pleasure of the Rails book. I've never been much of a reader when it comes to technical books, but I'm finding that there's so much that I still don't know about some of the technologies that I work with. Given enough time I'm decent at hacking my way to proficiency in a framework, but because of the scarcity of time as a resource in my life lately I think I need a little help.

Integration of two lives is much more interesting and lots harder than any software integration I have performed. I am obviously not going to approach it like that--the concepts are vastly different--but I have observed in my professional career that the hardest work usually centers around integration; I believe the same is true of marriage. As a matter of fact I currently think that marriage is nothing but a "continuous integration" of two people's lives until, as my wife says, "one of us goes out in a pine box."

Being married has also fanned the flame of my love of cooking. I usually tweet what my beautiful wife and I are planning on cooking for dinner, and recipes are available upon request if any of my twitter follows are curious. Unfortunately this has also fanned the flame of cookware lust--but I sincerely believe from experience that there's no better food than that cooked with quality cookware. Wal*mart make's a mean budget teflon pan, but it doesn't hold a candle to my stainless in a "caramelized onions" fight or any other for that matter.

It's September again--and that means riding . I love this month, as I have clearly stated that every September since the beginning of this blog. Check the archives if you don't believe me . I can't wait to get out on the road and explore the area which we live in. It's a little more populated than the areas I usually ride, but I'll figure something out. Look for runkeeper tweets if you're interested in any of that. I'm totally out of shape and haven't ridden at all in two plus months, so I may do a little time on the trainer before I get out on the road.

I was pretty happy with my performance. It took me 1:12:22 to go 19.11 miles with an average speed of 15.85 mph. I had to stop and fix a dropped chain twice, so my bike has a date with the bike shop for a tune up. The funny thing about rides like these--at least in my very limited experience--is that there are always opportunities for friendly competition. I spent 4 miles catching a dude twice my age riding an older all metal shifters-on-the-frame Cannondale. I finally caught him with 3 miles to go and managed to stay out in front for the remainder of the ride to finish first--not that we were racing. It was super fun and a pretty hardcore confidence boost for me.

I'm considering Tour de Pink or BikeMS for my next ride. I'm also considering organizing a benefit ride in my home town--so if anyone is interested in that please slip me an email. If I get enough interest in that then I'll see about what I need to do to make it work.

Before I crown the winner, of which I'm sure most of you can guess if you have read the other posts, I wanted to build some context. There are hundreds of delay pedals on the market--analog units, tape based units, digital units, bucket brigade units, units with analog chips controlled by digital microprocessors, digital modelers, and everything in between. I don't think anyone can perceivably argue that digital delay units sound as warm or magical as their analog counterparts--just as analog units are incapable of getting an exact sonic clone of the note you just played. Despite the advances in modeling technology, a keen ear can tell the difference between a DD-7 and a MXR Carbon Copy relatively easily, but how much this matters to the aurally blind masses is summed up as, well, not very much. Most of the American Idol corrupted population probably think autotune is a Good Thing. Guitar pundits like myself, however, may notice the slight nuances in each delay type and drool over a warm decaying analog repeat or a pristinely clear digital copy of a blazing riff.

Chasing the perfect delay tone is much like chasing an electron. Right when you think you know where it is Heisenburg throws you a curve ball and suddenly it's disappeared. For me and thousands of other guitarists with some extra cash to burn, the thrill is in the chase. I have discovered that it's not the end result, but the journey that's the fun part. As anyone can see while reading the three other posts in this series reviewing each of the delay pedals posed a unique problem to a musically analytical mind. Although I approached this scientifically, there really is no science here. It's all opinion. Sure I like the large chicken head knobs of the Replica better than the teensy knobs on the EchoPark--but if you are a set it and forget it guitarist you'll never change them anyway.

This post is a manifestation of experimentation and driven solely by opinion and what I believe to be the best delay unit for my buck by my own musical applications. The winner, as can be determined from reading the original three Echo Quest posts, is obviously the T-Rex Replica. These little guys sell for over $499 a piece new, so it's not for the weak of pocketbook, but my picky ear has never been unhappy with them since they were shipped back to me from Denmark with the input-gain mod. It sounds warm and natural even though it's a digital delay, it's very easy to use, and has an acceptably small form factor. I have a pair of them on my gigging board, which opens up plenty of options for my simple tone. Although presets are great for dialing in quick tone settings and BPM meters are great for the studio, in my gigging experience it's not really justified to have all these bells and whistles. Drummers drift and bassists lose the pocket, just as lead singers change the song and Axel Rose trashes microphone stands.

I have loads of respect for the guys over in Denmark. They build a wonderful product that I am very excited to endorse and record with. The feature set is solid, the construction bulletproof, and the tone matchless. The Replica is definitely the best delay unit out there as of 2008-2010.

Well, it's both.

I love each of these stopboxes so much they are both making it on my board, each in a different position and with different settings. The versatility of the Bi-Chorus is unmatched while I like the vintage tone of the Retro-Sonic chorus slightly better for some applications. Every guitarist likes options, and these two units will cover every possible chorus tone you will ever want and need.

Given the price of the Bi-Chorus, I recommend that budget guitarists stick with the Retro-Sonic unit unless you need the large feature set that the Analogman unit brings to the table. You won't be disappointed with the tones you can evoke--from subtle crawl to leslie warble. However if you have some extra cash and you perform a diverse selection of music that requires chorus the Analogman unit is worth it's weight in gold sonically.

So, there you have it. We have a tie .