Most things in life are a journey and the destination of this particular journey was to try and create a custom map style that represented the unique features and challenges of Tandale.

Which meant I needed to download and install TileMill, an interactive map design tool.

Which meant I needed to learn Carto, the CSS-like language for map styling.

Which meant I looked for a template project so I didn't have to start from scratch.

Which meant I found OSM Bright.

Which meant I needed to start small and find a map extract of Tanzania to work with.

Which meant I needed to install and configure PostgreSQL and PostGIS on my Mac.

Which brings me to the starting point of the journey and the reason for this post in the first place.

There must be a truism somewhere out on the interwebs that goes something like this ...

if a computer geek finds himself or herself doing a task repeatedly, he or she will invariably find a way to automate this task

... and if there isn't a truism to this effect, then I've just written it for the first time.

In this particular case, the repetitive task was converting text written using John Gruber's Markdown syntax into HTML. Those of you who know Markdown will be asking the question "but Markdown is already a text-to-HTML conversion tool, why would you want to do this?". They'd be right too, so an explanation is due.

I've recently been guilty of using the term map wallpaper as a mild form of pejorative; meaning maps that are great for showing geographical context but which don't really show anything else. I'm also guilty of overusing the phrase eye candy; something which is eye catching but ultimately superficial.

Then along comes an eye candy map wallpaper app for my MacBook Pro and all pejoratives are instantly replaced with superlatives. Yes, this is eye candy. Yes, this is map wallpaper. But in this case the geographical context is spot on and it's definitely eye catching without being superficial in any way.

"Quis backup ipsos backups?", as the Roman poet Juvenal didn't say but might have if they had had computers in the first century AD.

Like most geeks I pride myself on being able to maintain the computers I use on a daily basis. Just like real men don't eat quiche and real programmers don't use Pascal, real geeks don't call for professional help or technical support.

But then the day comes when one of your hard drives goes crunk, you go through all the tricks of the trade you know, you exhaust searching for possible solutions on the web and you realise that maybe, just maybe, while it's not time to eat quiche or starting coding in pascal, it's probably time to call for some professional help.

Like a lot of people, I've amassed a not inconsiderable amount of digital media over the years, in the form of apps, songs, movies and photos. Most of these live on my laptop and are religiously backed up with SuperDuper! and with Time Machine to external drives, with one of these drives holding the overspill. This aforementioned external drive had given solid, reliable service over the years but had started to act ... quirkily. Fearing a critical mass of bad sectors I decided now was a good time to backup my backups.

I find myself travelling a lot for work these days and that means a roaming service for wifi hotspots and hotel internet connections really makes life simpler. I could maintain subscriptions to The Cloud, T-Mobile Hotspots, BT OpenZone and so on and so on, but fortunately Yahoo! provides me with an iPass subscription.

iPass is great; it allows me to connect to pretty much every hotspot and hotel internet service there is. I've been using it for over 4 years now and can only think of a single time when I haven't been able to get a connection. I'm using it right now, sitting in the departures lounge at Berlin's Tegel airport waiting for my flight back to London.

So far, so great, but the current, Snow Leopard supporting, version of the iPassConnect app, v3.1, seems to have been designed by someone with scant regard for anything approaching consistency and usability. Let me count the ways in which this app frustrates.

Last weekend I upgraded my MacBook Pro from Leopard, Mac OS X 10.5.8, to Snow Leopard, Mac OS X 10.6. This kind of classes as early adopter behaviour as there's no bug fix release for Snow Leopard out in the wild yet to iron out any kinks or rough edges but I wasn't particularly bothered by this. I've used OS X since version Cheetah, version 10.0 and have gone through the intervening releases, Puma, Jaguar and Panther. With Tiger I stopped using a desktop machine and took a decision to make my Yahoo! supplied MacBook Pro my sole day-to-day machine, an experiment I didn't regret and which has become the norm for me. When Leopard arrived I took the early adopter plunge and upgraded and, apart from a few teething troubles, which I can't even recall now, all was well. Then Snow Leopard arrived and I waited a week, not quite early adoption but early enough. I heard no shouts and screams and even my one blocker, the lack of suitable Cisco VPN support for the version required to connect to Yahoo!, was resolved so I made sure my backup was up-to-date and upgraded. The backup gives me more foresight than I really deserve.

At first all was good. The Exchange server my corporate mail is hosted on is Exchange 2007 and at the right service pack level to work with Snow Leopard's rather stringent requirements. Mail took my authentication credentials and set up my Exchange account, iCal did the same and so did Address Book. Granted they took a while to sync up but that was over a VPN connection, over a wifi link, over my home broadband connection so some slack was cut.