Kieran HealyInterview
Sociologist
Adapted from Kieran Healy's interview on Uses This, published 17 October 2010. The kit is drawn from their answers and each reason is an excerpt, lightly edited. Shared under CC BY-SA 4.0. Read the full interview ↗
Is this you? Claim this kit →Hardware
The first computer I owned was a PowerBook 145B that I bought in 1994.
My office computer is a 2009-vintage 24" iMac - a 3GHz Core 2 Duo with 4GB of RAM and a 1TB hard drive.
It's attached to a 24" Apple LED Cinema Display so I'm pretty spoiled for screen real estate.
I use the Mighty Mouse, which I don't particularly care for, and Apple's USB keyboard (the flat one, with the numeric keypad), which is tolerable but not great.
A Western Digital MyBook works as a bootable clone.
I also have a late 2008 15" 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro.
I have a 16GB iPhone 3GS that I use all the time, as well.
Communication
If a document is going to be simple (a review, a lecture, a letter, etc), I usually write it in Markdown.
Productivity
Because so many of the people I work with or teach use it all the time, Microsoft Office is also a necessity.
Excel is the only one of its components I spend any time working in, usually when collating or cleaning data.
LaunchBar has a lot more functionality than I actually make use of.
This can be converted to pretty much any useful format by way of Pandoc.
Other Things: I use Keynote for lectures and presentations.
Browser
Notes
The right-hand monitor is for looking at output, either PDFs displayed using Skim or graphs and figures produced during data analysis.
More recently I've experimented with org-mode, as it also exports documents nicely.
In those cases, I find myself falling back to writing in LaTeX.
Security
1Password is the add-on I would miss most if it went away.
Coding & Development
I track most of my writing and all data projects with git.
If I'm not using Emacs to write I am probably using TextMate.
It works with several statistics packages, but I do all my data work using it together with R.
Design
Media
Storage
DropBox is terrific and I use it more and more.
(Their customer support is terrific, by the way.) After a few failed attempts at finding a good automatic offsite backup solution I recently began using Crashplan to mirror [my wife's](http://lapaul.org/ "L.A.
Other
MacFUSE makes it easy to have my office machine or various servers conveniently available.
I do most of my writing and all of my data analysis in Emacs 23, which I run full-screen on the left-hand monitor (usually split into a couple of windows).
I tried using BibDesk to manage that stuff in the GUI (and store PDFs alongside the references) but it didn't take.
ESS is an add-on to Emacs that allows you to do your data analysis inside the editor.