Things I would advise • 1 October 2009 • The SnowBlog
Things I would advise
Things I would advise do not include: switching from a PC to a Mac without thinking it all through VERY carefully. You know me, all ooh, here's an idea, let's do it now. Not so much with the planning - to a degree, at least, as I do like my lists and my schedules and whatnot. Anyway, even if I was a planner, no amount of planning would have made the PC/Mac switch a walk in the park.
I'm glad I'm now on a Mac, and I'm enjoying it, now my fingers have been retrained. I love the backlit keyboard of my macbook pro. I love the weight of the thing. I love the weird light that glows like a pulse which I find only a tiny bit disturbing. I love the speed, the simplicity, the colours, the screen, the spotlight thing which actually properly works as a way of finding things, the draggability, the everything. But it has been a trial getting to this place.
The first day I started to use it, I forgot to bring a mouse with me to the office. So it was all keyboardy / mousepad. Fine, except I had to spend the day in Photoshop, and CS4 has this anti-feature which makes the workspace spin, just spin like crazy, if you accidentally do something with two fingers on the mousepad. And at the same time I had to learn that ctrl is cmd and alt is some weird icon and f5 isn't f5 anymore, and what about all the keyboard shortcuts I've programmed and got used to over the years (ctrl+; for New Guide, for instance) and so on. But, I thought, a couple of days reprogramming my fingers isn't too bad.
Then a few days later I sat down to do some excel work. I opened my newly installed Excel for Mac 2008 and opened a file. What's this? You can't run macros? You can't use the developer tab? You can't export XML? Turns out Excel for Mac is a huge, pointless con. It's almost as if Microsoft don't want you to use a Mac. Weird, huh.
Then a few days after that I wanted to do my bookkeeping. Hahaha, you try running Sage on a Mac. Or trying to export a backup from Sage 12 and import it on MS Office Accounting. That's a day of my life I won't get back.
Oh, and, ha, there was the time I set up my mail on Mail on the mac, but forgot that I have several accounts including info@snowbooks.com which I forgot to set up, and didn't set up junk mail properly, then wondered where all the emails had gone.
Anyway, all is now perfect. My glorious buddy Rob has set up Virtual Machine which means I basically have a PC running secretly inside my Mac, like a little PC gnome tucked away in the corner there for when I need to do PC-ish things. Not only that, but I have an automagic connection to my old PC which sits in a cupboard somewhere but I can get it running remotely on my mac. I have no idea how that works. It is very clever. AND I can do the same with the server. And I have retired my old 80gb external hard drive and have a jazzy new orange 500gb one. And I have a backup procedure in place, no less. And I am happy - and productive - once more. Sorry for the quietness on the blog as a result of all this - but at least now I'm not on the dark PC side any longer. Rejoice!
Emma
Things I would advise do not include: switching from a PC to a Mac without thinking it all through VERY carefully. You know me, all ooh, here's an idea, let's do it now. Not so much with the planning - to a degree, at least, as I do like my lists and my schedules and whatnot. Anyway, even if I was a planner, no amount of planning would have made the PC/Mac switch a walk in the park.
I'm glad I'm now on a Mac, and I'm enjoying it, now my fingers have been retrained. I love the backlit keyboard of my macbook pro. I love the weight of the thing. I love the weird light that glows like a pulse which I find only a tiny bit disturbing. I love the speed, the simplicity, the colours, the screen, the spotlight thing which actually properly works as a way of finding things, the draggability, the everything. But it has been a trial getting to this place.
The first day I started to use it, I forgot to bring a mouse with me to the office. So it was all keyboardy / mousepad. Fine, except I had to spend the day in Photoshop, and CS4 has this anti-feature which makes the workspace spin, just spin like crazy, if you accidentally do something with two fingers on the mousepad. And at the same time I had to learn that ctrl is cmd and alt is some weird icon and f5 isn't f5 anymore, and what about all the keyboard shortcuts I've programmed and got used to over the years (ctrl+; for New Guide, for instance) and so on. But, I thought, a couple of days reprogramming my fingers isn't too bad.
Then a few days later I sat down to do some excel work. I opened my newly installed Excel for Mac 2008 and opened a file. What's this? You can't run macros? You can't use the developer tab? You can't export XML? Turns out Excel for Mac is a huge, pointless con. It's almost as if Microsoft don't want you to use a Mac. Weird, huh.
Then a few days after that I wanted to do my bookkeeping. Hahaha, you try running Sage on a Mac. Or trying to export a backup from Sage 12 and import it on MS Office Accounting. That's a day of my life I won't get back.
Oh, and, ha, there was the time I set up my mail on Mail on the mac, but forgot that I have several accounts including info@snowbooks.com which I forgot to set up, and didn't set up junk mail properly, then wondered where all the emails had gone.
Anyway, all is now perfect. My glorious buddy Rob has set up Virtual Machine which means I basically have a PC running secretly inside my Mac, like a little PC gnome tucked away in the corner there for when I need to do PC-ish things. Not only that, but I have an automagic connection to my old PC which sits in a cupboard somewhere but I can get it running remotely on my mac. I have no idea how that works. It is very clever. AND I can do the same with the server. And I have retired my old 80gb external hard drive and have a jazzy new orange 500gb one. And I have a backup procedure in place, no less. And I am happy - and productive - once more. Sorry for the quietness on the blog as a result of all this - but at least now I'm not on the dark PC side any longer. Rejoice!