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The new member of the family...

So here it is.  I bought a MacBook.  After literally 10+ years of being a “Dell Guy”, well Dell finally ran out of laptops that I found interesting, and my one experience with HP laptops has convinced me to never buy another one.

My last notebook, the Adamo13 was one of my favorites.  Ultra slim, solid state just about everything.  Could do a 5 hour plane-ride almost without issue.

But I needed something else.  After flipping back and forth between Linux and Windows I realized I needed something that could go both ways.  The more I thought about it, Apple seemed like the way to go.  Apple runs on a BSD Linux kernel after all, has a linux command-line (if you know where to get to it) and pretty good compatibility.

So when I finally got it in my head to upgrade, well I went ahead and dropped the hammer on a 15″ macbook pro.  (so to speak, no actual hammers were involved.)

So far I’m pretty happy with my choice.  But when the first person at work saw me on it and asked me the idiot question I got pissy.

“Are you a Mac now?”

Under breath: “No idiot, I’m a person.  I’m *USING* a Mac.”

Let me break it down.  I have in my arsenal the following systems.

In my household and business I have:

3 Desktop PC’s running windows 7
3 Laptops running Windows 7
1 Dell 1850 running Windows 2003 Server . (That despite all my kajoling, refuses to survive a P2V)

4 VMWare ESXi hosts containing the following:

11 Windows 2008 Servers
2 Windows 2003 Servers
10 CentOS 5 Servers
5 CentOS 6 Servers
2 SUSE Enterprise 11 Linux

and now

1 15″ MacBook Pro

This is the thing.  I’m a technology pragmatist.  I use what works best and does what I need it to.  In the limited scope of a transportable computer, a Mac seems to do what I need nicely, and yes, it comes in an attractive and (so far) fairly durable package.

But I’m not a Mac.  Nor am I a PC.  I’m a *PERSON* who uses a computer.  (Several actually)

Religion has no place in technology.  Leave it in the church.

Oh, and I’m still not buying a #$!@!? iPhone.

You’ll get a kick out of this one.

I had to get up this morning at 5am to get to Boston to catch my flight.  So at around midnight (my normal time, I suffer from chronic insomnia) I’m starting to drift off to sleep.  Up and down until about 12:45.

At about 12:50 the alarm goes off.  I hit the clock about 4 times before I realize that’s not what is beeping at me.  Takes me about a minute of wandering around looking for the source of the beeping before I realize the truth.

It’s a fire alarm.  Some moron set fire to the damned hotel.

So I break every rule.  I slowly pull on my clothes, taking deep breaths smelling for the first hints of smoke.  I throw my laptop in my bag and walk out with everything.  Then, still breathing deeply I  head for the elevator…

You see, for the last several months I’ve been walking with a cane and a distinct limp.  A fall in Atlanta airport trying to get off the stupid moving walkway between concourse C and D at a run.

So sprinting down four flights of stairs with a suitcase was distinctly not an option.

I walk out of the front door yelling my room-number over the din to the girl at the front desk telling her I’m leaving because I’ve got a plane to catch.

The good news is that AirTran was able to get me on an earlier flight home, and I finally got to watch “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix”. 

Cloud, silver lining and all.

The biggest problem with consulting is that unless you live *IN* a major metro area, you have to travel *TO* a major metro area.

To complicate matters, when you’re in a specialty like storage, the jobs, even in the major metro areas, can be few and far between, so that leaves travel.

So you book the trip, make the drive to the airport, go through security, wait for the flight, if you’re lucky your flight is on time and you cram yourself into the center seat (because no-one allows you to pre-book seats these days) get to the rental car counter, find out what kind of peice of junk Rent-A-Wreck will provide you, and drive to a hotel where they will put you in the room right next to the elevator, (or, in my case on my last trip, right next to the 24 hour exercize room)

All because most companies don’t trust consultants to remote in to do their work. 

So if you’re going to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for, say, a data migration, don’t you think you might try something so novel as trusting the people you’ve hired to do the job?

Probably not.  But then again, it keeps us employed, and in demand.

/jg