Paul Mayne blogs here since 2003.

Here are a few of my favorites from the past year.

Best New Band: Passion Pit
Not the typical Indie Folk stuff I’m really into, more electronic sounding, but something about it soothes my soul. I had quite an adventure getting into their sold out show in Salt Lake last Oct. but persistence paid off and it was an incredible set.

Best Album: M. Ward – Hold Time
M. Ward has his own style and continues to put out amazing music that I can listen to any time. Was lucky enough to see him play a live set this Summer Gallivan Center, Twilight Concert Series.

Best Live Show: Avett Brothers – Red Butte Gardens
Can’t beat seeing an amazing band with good friends on the grass at Red Butte. These guys jam and sing and wax poetic. Glad my buddy Brian insisted we sit up close.

Best Movie: Fantastic Mr. Fox
I’m a huge fan of Director Wes Anderson, so I will admit, anything he creates I will mostly likely rave about. But this one was especially sweet as I enjoy nothing more than sharing a good time with my sweet kidos. Jackson, Eli and I enjoyed watching all the promos and teasers and trailers that were released on Apple Trailers in the weeks before the theater release. They were often heard quoting many lines of the film before we even saw it. “Don’t cuss and point at me!”

Best Moment: Seeing Dylan Mayne Born
We will always remember spending all morning glued to CNN watching a hot air balloon fly over Colorado. Then our cute little fella arrived.

Best Video Game: Beatles Rock Band
A great way to re-live all these amazing tracks with my little ones. Supported with some incredible and colorful motion graphics and illustrations that make it such a pleasure to play.

Best Desktop App: Things
Keeps me in focus when I let it. Great lifehack tool.

Best iPhone App: Tweetie 2
Best way to digest my Twitter addiction.

Overall it’s been a great year. We went on a couple awesome family vacations, Disneyland / Seaworld and my fav place Sun Valley Idaho. I’m blessed with beautiful children and a sweet wife and I get to spend a lot of time with them doing the things we love. And I get to golf a lot. I can’t really ask for anything more than that.

— January 3rd, 2010

On Thursday, October 15th we welcomed Dylan Eddie Mayne, a healthy and beautiful baby into the world and into our family. He’s very happy and content and seems to only cry when he’s hungry or getting his poopy changed. And he smells so good I could eat him. We named him after my father Eddie (Ed) Mayne.

More photos of Dylan on Flickr.

— October 28th, 2009

I seem to have unintentionally taken the Summer off from my blog. I hope to get more consistent with posts written about interesting topics I think are worth sharing. I have a long list, just need to jam them out on my keyboard. I continue to be very active on Twitter, Flickr, and Delicious but often don’t compile my thoughts into a formal post.

It’s been a great Summer, I golfed at least once a week (and sunk a hole-in-one*), played in a fast-pitch adult baseball league (hit a home run), attended a ton of fantastic live shows with good friends and went on a couple family trips. The boys seemed to have become obsessed with Legos, so we’re often building and designing new ships and castles, it’s a lot of fun to see how creative their little minds are. We’re all very excited to welcome another little dude into the mix next month. Jana especially, she’s a bit tired of waddling when she walks.

brb.

— September 7th, 2009

I designed some new cards for networking and personal work and had them letterpress printed. I’m currently gainfully employed, but I wanted a separate card for non-work related use. I didn’t want to spend a lot, but loved the look *and feel* of letterpress printing. My friend Ben Webster runs the amazing Mandate Press in Salt Lake, (see a sample of their beautiful work on flickr) and informed me of a killer deal they currently offer: 250 letterpressed cards for only $95.

And yes, I put my Twitter handle on my business cards.

Fonts used: Garage Gothic and Archer

— June 1st, 2009

I’ve been running a Macbook Pro machine for one year now, and first of all I’ve got to say, my switch to Mac (from Windows) has made my computing experience fantastic. I have a 15″ MacBook Pro, the final revision before the current black-bordered unibody design. It’s got a 2.5 GHz Core 2 Duo processor and 4 GB of memory.

Over the past few months I’ve noticed many slowdowns in opening and closing apps and doing simple tasks. Enough that it was becoming a huge annoyance, at times I even had to close large apps for iTunes to play music without skipping.

Being new to Mac, of course I’ve installed nearly every app I hear about to evaluate and decide if it has any use in my personal work flow. All these apps and my semi-massive iTunes library (which I can’t bring myself to store on an external drive), I was constantly battling to keep at least 10 GB of hard drive space free.

Coming from the Windows world, where it’s common practice to perform a clean install at least once a year to rid all the gunk and junk and spyware that get’s stored in unknown places and runs in the background to eat up valuable processor and RAM. When I brought up the idea of clean install to my Mac friends, I was told, it’s not necessary, that on Mac you can manually remove apps and control everything that is running. That may be true, but the fact is, I had 50+ apps installed that I had no interest in running again, and to manually remove all those (ideally using AppZapper) would take some effort.

So for the past few weeks I’ve been weighing my options and time trying to decide if it’s worth the time and effort to backup and clean install. This Friday was slow, so (in addition to my Time Machine backup) I manually backed up all my User directory files to an external drive. I performed a clean install of OS X 10.5.6, downloaded and installed my favorite apps, manually copied over preference (Application Support) files and I was up and running at 100% in less than 5 hours.

As I expected, my machine is running at lightning speeds. Apps open and close fast and everything is snappy like it should be. Clean install For The Win.

— April 25th, 2009