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I came to my office this morning after two weeks of traveling, and I found a nice surprise in front of my desk: An Embody chair by Herman Miller.

Not so many companies understand that if they provide the best tools, they get the best of their employees. Base22 certainly thinks in that way: We have top of the line MacBook Pros (I have the 17″, mate screen with 8 GB of RAM), an iPad, access to the best software and a book policy that allows us to buy any book we want.

Base22 is a great place to work, not only because we have the best tools, but mainly because there’s a lot of brilliant people here, so every day is full of pleasant learning experiences (by the way, we’re hiring).

This is a brilliant essay about how introverts think:

Caring for your introvert
Published in The Atlantic on March 2003.

To those of you who have called me “taciturn”, or even “antisocial”: I politely invite you to read this 1,385-words article by Jonathan Rauch. We can discuss it one day, if you like.

Inconceivable what Google is doing to their users; this whole Google Apps transition to “full” Google Accounts is a real mess.

I have never been a fan of Google, but when they launched Google Apps I thought it was a great idea: Leveraging Gmail (the king of web-based email at the time) for your own domain. So I opened a Google Apps account for my main personal domain, and later opened several Google Apps accounts for my current job, friends, etc. I even considered Android as an alternative for it’s great integration with “cloud” email and calendaring services (that was, of course, before the release of iOS 4).

But now that they’re “granting” incomplete Google Accounts features to every Google Apps domain, they have this Conflicting Accounts concept, and using a Google Apps user with the same email address as your personal Google Account it’s becoming a headache.

I noticed it because I use Google Reader, but I’ve read that YouTube, Blogger, Picassa and Checkout users have worst problems than mine. What can you do when the landlord of half-internet sends you a new contract and you don’t agree?

I found this thread some months ago, and I was particularly impressed with this post:

I’ve been a Google fangirl since Google debuted. I’m a loyal Android user, plus use Google Apps for two domains’ email. This move to the new infrastructure is not just painful, it’s excruciating. Why on earth would you make things so difficult for apps users? We’re your most loyal crowd, aren’t we? YouTube’s new incompatibility with my apps account causes my Android phone not to work right unless I constantly log out and back in under different accounts. I depend on my phone to work well, and it can’t now.
…
-Gardenwife

So I decided it was time to move on. My personal email and calendaring solution has been Google free for a while now, and I’m looking for alternatives to Reader.

As Mac OS X Lion slowly finds its way onto my Mac Book Pro, I gave a read to Ars Technica’s very comprehensive review by John Syracusa and thought it would be a good idea to share the links to the specific sections I believe will be of most interest for Mac-geeks, a read of 30 to 40 minutes.

A good mood-setter for the reading is this line from Syracusa’s conclusion:

…the content of the operating system itself clearly marks the start of a new journey. Seemingly emboldened by the success of iOS, Apple has taken a hatchet to decades of conventional wisdom about desktop operating systems.

File system: Bad things, nice improvements and hopes

• What’s wrong with HFS+
• File system changes in Lion
• File system future

Files / documents recovery

• Document revisions
• Mobile Time Machine

System configuration

• System Preferences
• About This Mac (I love the iTunes-esque Storage tab).

User interface

• Here’s to the crazy ones

Every 27th of June I have an important thing to do: Phone my good friend Horacio to wish him happy birthday. In the last years it’s difficult to contact him, but not on his birthday; he always answers.

Sometimes we even agree to have lunch together to celebrate in a place he enjoys (Horacio likes good food and wine), but his real birthday celebration is usually by night at some bar. I don’t usually attend that celebration, as I don’t like bars and clubs, and Horacio has always understood that. But the next time I see him he always tells me how it was and why I should have joined them, and for a short lapse he convinces me.

I met Horacio back in 1999. We used to work together at what was the best web design shop of Mexico at the time. We shared the passion of making great websites (He was a designer, I was more on the software side, though), but in almost all other areas we had opposite interests, or at least that was what I believed.

Perhaps being so different was the key to have such a good friendship, as later we embarked together with other 2 good friends and founded our very own web-consulting, digital art and software firm: Artexia.

I learned a lot of stuff from Horacio along those years at Artexia. Discipline at work and in business, web design, house maintenance (we cleaned, painted, and made plumbing and electrical works in our new office), religious and political views, and I know he learned many things from me too. That was because we enjoyed to talk and listen, and we used to had long conversations on several topics about work and life.

After Artexia closed we made some short projects together and still had some occasional meetings to talk. That’s what I’m mostly missing from him: Great conversation, and his point of view.

Horacio passed away two weeks ago, so I decided to write this post in the time I would have used to phone him for his birthday. I miss him so much.