Clueless Wonder

So my last post was a number of months ago about setting up iTunes streaming from home for work listening. Well it turns out that hasn’t been all that necessary. It’s been much more productive for me to be at my company’s office in order to work closely with our programmers instead of at the client site.

As a result of this, I’ve been using my MacBook Pro laptop for work. It’s allowed me to be far more productive. I still use Microsoft office for viewing most files. And I do have to still use windows in VMware Fusion to connect back to my Govt. Citrix connection as a VPN. There is a Mac client and it should work, but there are issues with CAC authentication still when it’s not just a website.

For database development, I’ve been using a trial of dbVisualizer. In my mind it’s far superior to SQL Management Studio and is actually cross-platform. I will be trying to move my company over to that for some of our users.

When I started taking classes at CWU right after I got out of the army, it was as a Computer Science major. I never completed my degree for various reasons but a big one was that I never really wanted to code full time. As it turns out a huge part of my career now is SQL coding. Hindsight is always 20/20 isn’t it?

Yesterday Apple released the latest version of Mac OSX, codenamed Snow Leopard. Being the geek that I am, immediately after work I ventured to the Apple Store closest to work and purchased it. Between last night and this morning I have successfully upgraded both of our machines with very little hassle.

For Stephanies’ MacBook, I just upgraded from the disc and it looks like every one of her programs is working without a hitch. For my iMac I chose to do a wipe of the harddisk and install from scratch since I tend to mess around with my machine so much. A few of my programs didn’t want to work right away but the majority already have an update out to fix any issues.

I also was able to reinstall most of my programs and all of my settings from my Time Machine backup. What a timesaver and great backup system that is for Apple users! Overall, you don’t really see a difference visually other than your applications menu, which now has full-size icons and just adds a scrollbar to see everything.

Overall, for the price of $29 for an individual license, or $49 for up to 5 Macs in the same household, it’s a bargain and any increase in speed or reliability is worth it.

Just downloaded the beta version of the ‘next-gen’ version of Quicken for Mac. It’s been over 2 years since they last updated Quicken for Mac and this is a completely new code base. Looking forward to trying it out and will let you know my first impressions later.

I’ve gotten a program for my Mac to track my golf progress and calculate my handicap. It’s called Scorecard and one of the lead guys involved in the project is the owner of TheSandTrap, which is a very popular golf blog / review site / forum.One nice feature is that it lets you export all of your scores to a web page. Check mine out HERE.