Freeway Witness

It was about 12 years ago or so when my faith journey took a turn that left a profound impact on me. I was living in Olathe but had been in the KC area for only a couple years and was six months into a new job. One day as I was driving home from a job site my car decided to stall at a very precarious spot on the freeway, near downtown, and during rush hour. I managed to get over onto the narrow shoulder but with all the cars whizzing by so closely I was a little nervous. As I attempted to diagnose what was wrong with my car I noticed a truck slowing down and then pulling over in front of me. I was amazed that someone was even able to spot me in time to do this. A man who appeared to be in his mid 30’s got out and asked me what he could do to help. Well, my car appeared to be a lost cause and would have to be towed so the man offered to give me a ride home since he also happened to live in Olathe.

My switch to a Mac (part 3 - the Bad)

I apologize for the hiatus I took on this blog series.  Life at home is much different than life on the road.  At the end of the day I find there is very little time or energy for things such as this.  So anyway, here's the bad..........

1. Keyboard Shortcuts
I didn't realize just how big of a hurdle this would be for me.  I've been working with Windows for a long time now and have gotten used to using a lot of keyboard shortcuts.  In fact, if a Windows box I'm working on loses all mouse function I can still navigate Windows pretty easily just with the keyboard; I prefer it actually.  The Mac keyboard, though, is missing some essential keys that I used regularly for navigation (Home, End, PageUp, PageDown, Windows key).  No problem, I thought, I can setup keyboard mappings in Fusion to address this.  I may have to re-train myself on some shortcuts but I can live with that.  Easier said than done.  I was tweaking the keyboard mappings in Fusion for a few weeks and I've finally just given in to the fact that I'll have to use the mouse, or trackpad, more in my Windows VMs.  I've been trying to learn keyboard shortcuts for the Mac too and it is sometimes hard to keep track of what shortcuts work where.  To compound the problem some of the mappings don't work all of the time like using the Ctrl key to do a Ctrl+select for instance.  So if anyone has any suggestions I'm all ears.  Here are my current keyboard mappings that I'm using in Fusion:

My switch to a Mac (part 2 - the Good)

This post and my next will detail the good and bad experiences of my switch.  So here's the good.....

1. Mac OS X just works.

The Unix foundation of Mac OS X makes it stable, secure, and super fast. There really is no comparison of a PC and a Mac (apples and oranges). I'm not running any ant-virus software to slow me down and I don't need to! It has only crashed once on me but I caused that trying to do some funky things with Fusion. I find myself using it most of the time (75%?) and only resort to my Windows 7 VM for Office applications, VMware stuff, and a few other .Net based apps. Now that Snow Leopard is finally here I'll have even less dependence on Windows with the new Exchange support. But more on that later.....

My switch to a Mac (part 1 - Why?)

I did it .... I switched to a Mac. Me, a PC guy since the early days of DOS & Windows. I established my early IT career around the PC and it has given me good job security over the years. So why switch? Well, there are a lot of reasons but here were the major ones for me......

1. Windows & Linux suck!

I was fed up with Microsoft's poor desktop OS releases. I tried running Vista two different times on my old laptop and eventually ended up switching back to XP because of application & hardware compatibility issues. Windows XP is nearly 8 yrs old now; how sad is that? Windows 7 looks promising but too little too late for me. Linux just didn't cut it for me either. I tried Ubuntu and a couple others but this was even more challenging. I did a dual boot scenario to try it out and always found myself back in my XP installation mostly because of hardware compatibility issues. I don't have a heavy Linux background so trying to recompile drivers, etc. was just too much and I didn't care enough to learn.