I’m an easy-going guy named Daniel. I’m a musician first and foremost, but I love gadgets and techy things. What I love the most is having those devices do things for me. I’m obsessed with FileMaker; I have an on-going love affair with Keyboard Maestro; my BFFs are Hazel, Automator, AppleScript, and iOS’s Shortcuts (formerly Workflow). This is not to say that I’m an expert, much less highly competent in any of these programs … but I do use them all and love to learn more and more how to incorporate them into my life.

How did this all start? High school got me going on computers, but WordPerfect macros (yes, for DOS) were my first real encounter with trying to automate things. The two secretaries where I worked in the early 90s had two different laser printers. Invoking italic type on each was not the same, so I wrote one macro to get italics properly on either printer. They had told me that it couldn’t be done, but I knew better. The WordPerfect “expert” who was occasionally gracing the office (looking for a continuing stream of revenue) told them it couldn’t be done. But I did it, and in just a few minutes. (We never saw the expert again.) Succeeding in something like this was really wonderful for my self-esteem, and it made me look like a veritable miracle-worker—a can-do sorta guy. Plus, I was a new employee who just solved a problem—a real annoyance—for two other employees. That was a good position to be in, and it started a craving that’s been hard to satisfy over the years.

Most of the macros I wrote did little jobs like automating repetitious text and symbols, but there were some calendar macros I wrote which were far grander in scope. I spent a solid day on those one summer (my boss was away on vacation, so it was the perfect time). It made a 12-month calendar from September to August using tables. Then, if you moved the cursor to the day block September 1st fell, it would automatically fill in all the dates for all 12 months. The thrill of sitting back and watching it draw all the tables and fill in all the dates was a most satisfying experience. It was also great show-and-tell as people watched in utter astonishment.

Is it any wonder then, that almost 25 years later I’m (finally) starting a blog about automation? I’m not trying to show off as much as I’m trying to document my many shortcuts. Part of this is that I’m forgetting how I’ve done things—indeed, how I’m doing things—and I want to track it all better so that I’m not reinventing wheels needlessly. Though I doubt the specific things I’ve done will help someone else directly, elements of my automations may inspire others. Now let’s get automating. ◼︎