Now for a little bit of my normal use of my computers, both work and home, as well as the setup of how my hardware is configured at both my home and in my office (without giving specific details of either network).

I’ll be discussing Virtual Machines a lot, so for those of you who do not know what they are, check out VMware, Wikipedia, and Virtual-Strategy Magazine.

My home world is easier to work with first, so let me start there. I have a computer at home call ‘The-Doctor’. This is the machine I use for iTunes, backups (both work and home), my simple web sites (check out Gabbs.com if you care to) that I manage with Dreamweaver, editing home video with Quicktime, doing my surfing when at home using Firefox, and running Virtual Machines to test things out for work. I also use a Virtual Machine to do all my day to day work. The reason for this is because I’ve been using Windows long enough to realize that no matter how careful you are, you WILL catch a virus, or get some spyware, or some kind of stupid problem that means you have to rebuild your system…no getting around it. My old record, prior to Virtual Machines, was about 3-6 months using Windows XP Professional.

I have a 2nd system, call ‘Tardis’, which is a NAS (or Networked Attached Storage) device where I keep backups of all my data. The exception to that is that all my video is out on ‘Tardis’ because to keep it all on ‘The-Doctor’ would be a bit too troublesome.

Since we’re on the discussion of backups, what I do with backups…I run a full backup every month to ‘Tardis’, and then incremental backups every day to ‘Tardis’. This way, at the end of the month, I copy all the ‘backups’ to ‘The-Doctor’, burn them off to DVD, and start the process over again. Once things are backed up, I can be assured that I don’t lose any data (only someone who HAS lost data will do things to this extent, let me tell you!). Oh…and being SOOOO paranoid…I make 2 copies of each DVD that I create as a backup, one to leave at home, and one to leave at my office. I do this for both my work data and my personal data. It only takes a matter of a couple of hours to do this, while I’m doing other things, so it is not much of a time commitment, just a commitment to do the work every month.

At work, I’ve got my IBM ThinkPad T-42. It’s my 4th laptop in 5.5 years at my office. I would consider myself a road warrior, as I’m off on customer sites at least one-third of the time, up to one-half of the time. I use VMware Workstation a lot, Microsoft Office, Outlook for my e-mail, Microsoft Visio, things like Acrobat Reader, Winzip, Secure FTP, Putty, Magic ISO, Firefox, Thunderbird, and a couple of work specific appliations that require Microsoft’s .NET. I have a mix of physical machine use and Virtual Machine use to get me through the day at the office. I have a small insignificant problem when I travel away from home though, and that is my data does not go with me. This is due to the fact that I don’t really need or want to mix personal data with work data on a work owned machine. Really, it’s more of a ‘I don’t have the disk space to do so’ issue rather than a ‘I don’t want to mix the data on the same machine’ issue.

Now my goal is to be off Windows ENTIRELY in 2 months, so January 11th will be the deadline. I will be cutting over my work environment to the Mac sooner than that…I’m expecting the end of this month that the only way I’ll be using Windows at the office is SPECIFICALLY for things that I can not find a replacement for in OS X, things like my office’s home grown applications, specific web sites that REQUIRE Intenet Explorer, and other things that I’ll keep track of.

Some of the resources I’ll be using to help me through my trasition to the Mac. My buddy, let’s call him Ratbert. He’s been a Mac guy for a long time. Another Engineer at my office, let’s call him Dilbert. This is the kind of guy Unix/Linux loves. He can script, embrace, and communicate how to solve problems. Dilbert has a 2 week advantage over me, in that he got his new MacBook Pro ahead of me, but I’ve got an advantage over Dilbert because I’ve been looking into this for a year.

Ahh….the next chapter….coming soon to a web page near you…

I plan to keep this up on MY MySpace page as a blog as well, so for those of you interested, click the link above, and check out my page.