Time for a “Switching” Challenge

There are moments in my life where things just aren’t challenging enough. In those moments, I tend to make life altering decisions. Here is the latest…

I’m going all Mac.

Yes, Ian… if you are tuned in, you heard correctly.

I’ve had a Mac on my desk for a while – a Mac Mini that has been the partner of my “real” computer – the PC notebook that I carry around with me. The PC is with me at all times – (almost) always reliably fetching my mail, organizing my photos and helping file my expense reports. However, when in London and sitting at my desk, its powerful 2.8GHz CPUs are cooling their heals while I happily use the three year old, G4 PPC Mac.

However, lately – my PC has been troublesome. It freezes once a week, runs very slowly, and frankly… is ugly. Windows XP is way dated… Vista is a disaster and frankly I’m ready for the change.

I just ordered a new MacBook Pro, which cost me more money than all the computers I have bought for myself this decade put together! But, I’m excited to make it the center of my digital life. I’m definitely nervous. Electric Cloud’s product doesn’t run on a Mac – will VMWare be up to the challenge?, will Entourage be a good replacement for Outlook?, will my Logitech IO2 still work? How will I file my expense reports using NeatReceipts? Will I find a better offline blogging tool than BlogDesk?

My first experience with MacOS was back in the late 80s when in junior high school. I loved it (it was pretty back then too) and hated it (ever try to move a graphic from Windows to the Mac in that era?) I know what I’m getting in to. Funny enough, had you asked me 15 years ago, which operating system do I expect to be using in 2008, I’d have assumed that MacOS went the way of AmigaOS, OS/2 and BeOS by now… (For the record, I probably would have said OS/3 … but I claim I was brainwashed at the time.)

Now I need your help… I need a good name. My Windows server is bigbee, the Mac mini is minibee (creative, huh?) and the linux server is buzzybee (it has a LOOUUDD fan) … Ideas?

Lots more on this soon…